Ingen skam å snu

I never thought I'd be so happy for Sunday to arrive! This week has been vinterferie (winter break) in E's preschool, and since neither KE nor I had time off from school and work, we've had to divide it up between us. As is often the case, it's much easier to parent when there's just one of us than when we're both here, as was the case Thursday and Saturday and today.

I recognize so much of my own idiosyncratic behavior in E, but one thing in particular strikes me as so very unlike me that I have to comment. We're both only children, and somehow I learned at a very early age how to entertain myself. I seriously can never remember being bored (except when my parents dragged me on dawdling birdwatching walks or made me wait a half an hour at a restaurant while they lingered over coffee). E on the other hand actively resists any form of play by himself, and the first thing he does when he wakes up is ask (well, okay, whine) "What should I do?" I find it kind of shocking that a 6-year-old needs to ask that. He never likes any of my suggestions, and acts bored right away if I launch into an activity with him. Unfortunately, these last few days it has just escalating from there, making it really hard to want to even interact with him. Not sure what to do about it, just need to kvetch a bit...

In knitting news I got over excited about knitting cables on Thursday and blew out my hands. I then took a long look at what I had knitted, and realized that the yarn really is perfect for Fulmar, and that I should just bite the bullet and knit that instead (especially since the plain cable pullover should really be in a drapier* yarn, like alpaca). I printed out the pattern, read it thoroughly, and was almost ready to cast on, but then I rather inexplicably chickened out. I decided to do something much simpler instead, while I work myself up for Fulmar. My excuse is that cables put even more pressure on my joints.

What I decided on was the Cowl Vest from the Purl Bee website. Of course I'm going to add arms, since my arms are bar none my least favorite body part. I've been wanting to try knitting set-in sleeves from the top down using short rows for a while, and this will be the perfect opportunity. What yarn, you ask? Well, I made a snap executive decision that I'm never going to finish the Bridgewater shawl that I started last summer. I have been a little stumped by one technical aspect, but what really made the decision for me was the fact that I just don't wear shawls. Ever. The idea of an elegant, drapy,** body-skimming top in a rich pewter gray really appeals. I think it would be good for dressy occasions paired with the right skirt or pants. I'll need to get just the right camisole to wear under it, but I think that I'll get a lot of use out of it.

So Bridgewater is history, and the lovely Classic Elite "Silky Alpaca Lace" is being put to good use instead of languishing. So far I'm only about two inches into it, so there's not much to show.

*It bothers me that this is not a word. I hear and use it all the time in the knitting world.
** !

Prosess-strikking

I think it's time to acknowledge that I really like knitting cables. They feel right to me in a way that lace knitting never quite does. I guess maybe because I'm always cold these days it just fundamentally doesn't make sense to me to add holes to a knitted fabric deliberately!

I finished the Laurel hat by Jared Flood. It ended up too big (no surprise, I have a pin head) but wearable. KE thinks it looks like a little old lady hat, so it doesn't have his approval, but I plan on wearing it anyway.

 This was taken while it was still blocking on a a dinner plate. As I feared, the single ply yarn isn't the best for showing off fancy cable work.

I finally decided what to do with all the fingering weight Shetland wool I bought in Denmark last summer. There is a pattern for a very basic cabled turtleneck in one of my ancient Vogue Knitting magazines. I've always loved it, but never given serious thought to knitting it. It occurred to me though that the yarn might just work for that pattern. I had originally bought it to make the really fancy Alice Starmore (whoops, I almost wrote "Starwars," which tells you something about the main thrust of discussions in our household these days!) pullover called Fulmar. The problem with that is that I want to modify it really substantially, and I just haven't quite worked up the nerve for that. I think this project is going to work out really well as a substitute:

  It's most definitely a "process" knitter's type of project. It's extremely repetitive and basically really OCD. For the back alone I had to cast on 250 stitches (reducing to 230 stitches after the ribbing). There are 28 cable columns, and the cables themselves come every sixth row.

I have to admit I find it mesmerizing! There's no telling how long it's going to take me, since it's fairly oversized and has this cable pattern over the entire front, back and both arms. I should add too that the color is much richer than in these washed out winter pictures...

På tverke

Whoa. I don't know what happened this week. I took a total nose dive in terms of how I feel about myself, my career, and my prospects. I guess it is only natural. We've been running on really low energy here at home because of the lingering cold that we all have. The place is a mess, which gets me down too. And then there has been a flurry of delicate ethical situations playing out at work, which I can't blog about, but which have been pretty demoralizing to deal with.

For some reason, I've been feeling all week that I really don't know anything at all about my field of expertise. I think it started with my class on Tuesday, when it was painfully obvious that I hadn't done enough research on the reception of the film I was lecturing on. Then I over-reacted to something on the collection of articles that I'm co-editing, and had to shoot out an apology to one of the co-editors. Then yesterday I had to give a presentation to a group of MA students on a theoretical issue that I've used in my research before, but am by no means an expert on. There too I felt that I wasn't well enough prepared, and I know at least some of the students knew more about the topic than I did.

On top of all this, I have a bunch of practical/personal issues that are weighing on me:

• I need to figure out what to do about filing U.S. income tax returns.
• I need to make time to go to my doctor's office.
• I need a haircut.
• I need to plan and book our trip to the US this summer.
• I need to get rid of the mounds of recycling that have been piling up in our kitchen over the winter (we don't have pick-up here, but the recycling center is really close). (ETA: yay, at least we took care of one thing on the list!)
• I need to get on top of an important and top secret festivity that will be happening in only a few weeks.
• I need to communicate with some people by email and am having trouble working up the nerve to do it.

Gah.

Since I'm not quite sure what sweater to start on next, I decided to try one of the small patterns in Jared Flood's Made in Brooklyn. I've had the booklet for quite a while, and there are many patterns in it that I'm eager to knit, but it just hasn't worked out until now (mostly because I'm trying to knit only from stash or from upcycled yarn). I'm about half way through:

Pattern: Laurel from Made in Brooklyn
Yarn: Marks & Kattens ekoull (a single-ply Aran weight) in color #1976
Needles: 16" circulars in size 2.5mm and 4.0mm (smaller than the pattern calls for, and that may have been a mistake...)

Not sure this is the best choice of yarn for the project. We'll just have to see. I'm hoping that any problems will be worked out in the blocking. It's a fun and relatively easy pattern, with lots of cables and bobbles.

Endelig!

I did it! I actually finished the Fanakofte that I started back in the middle of August. I'm kind of in shock because I didn't really have much faith that I would be able to pull it off. It really was just an exercise in patience, since nothing I did was particularly hard. Here's the final result:

Not too bad, really, despite the wavy button bands. The fit is actually much better than I expected, and I don't really mind the dropped shoulders, even though I thought I would. I don't think I'll wear it all that much, but I'm really happy to have it for those times I feel like masquerading as a Norwegian. You know, for the occasional "nissefest" (elf party) and the like.

Strikkekirugi

Usually I'm pretty good at translating back and forth between Norwegian and English on the fly, but every once and a while I come upon unknown words, or words that I just can't translate even though I know what they mean. One entire little semantic cluster that has me stumped right now has to do with the process of "grafting," which is what I'm doing to a sweater project right now. Grafting entails fusing together two initially separate parts. In English we use it to describe plant cultivation (grafting branches onto fruit trees, for example), surgery (replacing damaged skin with skin from somewhere else, for example), and in knitting, finding a way to attach two pieces of knitting together seamlessly. KE didn't know. He told me that if you're talking about trees it's called "poding," but that sounds wrong in a knitting context. So, without a good translation of "grafting" for my title, I'm just going to create my own new word, "strikkekirugi" or "knitting surgery." So there!

Back in August I happily set out to knit myself a classic Fana cardigan out of some reclaimed thrift store yarn. I raced through the project (it's an easy pattern) and quite quickly had two finished sleeves and a body, which I sewed machine seams into for the arm and center front steeks, and then cut. Only then (!) did I stop to look at it (!!), and I realized three rather demoralizing facts: 1) I did the checkerboard pattern  wrong on both arms, 2) I hate the look of starting with a white stripe instead of a blue one right after the checkerboard, and 3) the body is way too short for my preferences. The project got dumped into time out, and although I occasionally looked at it with displeasure over the past five months, I managed to ignore it until this weekend.

The fact that I finished my second sweater of the year last week means that I'm starting to think about what to do next. I really want to rush out and buy new yarn, but the sterner side of me says that I have to finish up my works-in-progress first. So, as a result I've been brooding over how to fix all the problems with the Fana cardigan, and finally on Saturday I psyched myself up enough to actually start on it. I'm so happy with the results so far!

Here's what the arms used to look like:

And here's the much improved new cuffs:

What I did was cut into the white stripe at the top of the checkerboard and unravel a row. I then discarded the cuff and picked up stitches at the bottom of the sleeve. I reknit the rest of the white row, added a blue row, and then reknit the checkerboard pattern correctly, finishing off with the same picque edging as before. You can tell that I knitted in the opposite direction because the "lice" (the little "v"s) in the first blue stripe are upside down. Despite this little glitch, I think this looks a million times better.

Inspired by my success with the arms, I then took on the much more onerous task of cutting into the body. I decided this time that I would graft the two pieces together, since there was nothing wrong with the original checkerboard, and also because I would by necessity (blasted steek!) be knitting back and forth rather than in the round, and that's a pain with two-color knitting.

Here's what it looked like after the first fatal snip (no going back) at the beginning of picking up stitches and unraveling the one row in between:

After I got approximate 270 stitches from the lower edge onto one circular needle, and the same number from the upper edge onto another circular needle, I started knitting up from the checkerboard, making sure to start with a blue stripe this time. I added about five stripes, and then started the long (and as yet unfinished) process of grafting all those stitches together with Kitchener stitch. Here's the beginning of that:

Notice the illustration from my trusty copy of Knitting in The Old Way in the background for guidance. I actually had to rip out what you see here because the lice weren't lining up. A few hours later (maybe not quite that long, but it sure felt like it) I ended up with this:

If you look at it really closely the graft is visible, but some of that will come out in the blocking, and as far as I'm concerned this is going to be perfectly wearable. So unbelievably, I might actually finish this garment! It will still need buttonhole bands (and boy, do I hate knitting buttonhole bands), buttons, and the sleeves sewn in, but none of that is even close to being as difficult as all this other work has been.

Who, me, a masochist?

Beslektet

I don't think I've yet mentioned that I'm taking another English course this term. I was super lucky to squeeze into a course on Multicultural American Literature. I totally love it, but what I really want to write about is just one book, Octavia E. Butler's Kindred from 1979. Although it's written for young adults (apparently) is is utterly gripping for adults too. It is the story of a contemporary African American woman who gets transported back and forth in time and space between the present (1976) in California and the past   (1819 and onward) on a slave plantation in Maryland where her ancestors lived.

If you haven't read it, you really should, especially (I have to add) if you're an American. I've never seen anything that does a better job of expressing the complexities and horror of our collective history regarding race and slavery. Wow. Just wow.

Family is on my mind right now for another reason: we're starting to plan a trip back to the US to visit family there. It will either be in April or June. Still working out the details. Can't wait!

The Placed Cable Aran pullover is finished blocking, and I wore it to work yesterday (and am wearing it again right now...).

 (Sorry for the distorted snapshot - I was leaning forward when the picture took itself...) I love it! I added at least six inches  to the length of the body. I also used the mattress stitch for the side seams and arm seams, which worked fabulously. I'm a convert to that technique. The end result is so tidy!

Now I'm at loose ends knitting-wise, finishing up a pair of socks for E while I wait for inspiration to hit. I have three four WIPs I could be working on, none of which is very appealing. What I really want to do is go out and buy new yarn, but I can't really do that.

Hektisk

This week felt so incredibly... "full," for lack of a better word. I felt like I was in high gear the whole time at work. It was a little unsettling and I'm not sure how long I can maintain this level of intensity.  I did feel that I did a good job where it mattered (feedback on contributor submissions for an article collection, lecture and discussion class, advising sessions, helping out colleagues), though I am having trouble getting the finishing touches on the Peer Gynt book completely finished. I really need to get that finished up on Monday. There's just too many other projects I need to turn my attention to.

This morning I spent a little bit of time working out my To-Do list for the spring semester. I realized that I was kind of floundering in relation to my research agenda. I typically have three documents tacked up on my bulletin board above my desk: 1) a list of my specific research/writing goals for the current term, 2) an outline of the book I'm working on long term (with page/word count goals and tallies), and 3) a cumulative list of all projects. On that list I  track the submission venue, when it's been submitted, when it's been revised, and when it's been published (right now there's an article on there that was originally drafted in 2003 that is still "forthcoming"!).

I find it super helpful to have these lists in view. It keeps me focused and realistic, and helps me plan my weeks. With luck, now that I have a new semester To-Do list and a new book-in-project outline I'll feel less frenetic. It was at least heartening that the book chapters I'll be writing contain lots of material that I've been working on in other contexts. It will be interesting to try to integrate all that disparate material into cohesive chapters.

With all this work frenzy, it feels like I've barely been at home, even though I have. I'm looking forward to a very slow weekend!