Knitting

Tomorrow being the longest night of the year, it seems fitting to share Virginia’s latest knitting project.

This kid’s sweater (a custom knit for a friend’s grandson) is about as cheery of a sweater as one can get. Complete with blue skies, green grass, a beaming sun and…

…a caterpillar. Knit with superwash yarn (Creative Focus Superwash from Nashua), it should prove to be both easy to care for and easy to wear.

Of course, cute kid in the sweater will be far away, so you’ll just have to imagine it on a toddler.

Longer days approach, bringing sunshine, warmth and the melting of all of this:

I’m ready.

As promised in an earlier post, I’m sharing with you two projects that Virginia has completed in the last little while (and, to make sure you didn’t think I was resorting to using this blog just to promote holiday shopping.)

First, is a cute cardigan that seemed to take no longer than a few days to complete. It’s a pattern by Sarah Hoadley from the Winter 2009 issue of Interweave Knits called Icelandic Star.

It’s made with four colors of Cascade 220, and only taking 5 skeins of the yarn to complete makes this a pretty affordable sweater to whip out (easy for me to say “whip out” since I didn’t actually do the work – we all know if that were the case I’d be talking about completing it for the next 6 months).

The next project is another sweater. This one, made for me, is from a suitably titled pattern called “Drifter.”

This one is made from a super soft, and warm Rowan yarn called Cocoon. It’s also a Rowan pattern (in Rowan 48) from designer Erika Knight.

I was kidding about the aptly named pattern. I’m much too much of a homebody. Not sure there are many drifters out there that would spend Friday nights sitting on the couch making a wee little owl or a fuzzy bear-a-knitting.

Wait long enough to finish a project, and you’ll more than likely have a few experiences to attach to it, to intertwine in the loops of fabric being created. I suppose that’s one of the cool things about knitting – you have moments that you find yourself working row after row, and soon you find yourself deep in the moment, contemplating the day – what’s for dinner, what’s rush hour traffic going to be like tomorrow, when should we take a vacation, or how long am I going to have cancer?

Yes, it took me that long to finish this sweater. I started it back in 2008 (I can’t even remember the month). Actually, for all I know, it could have been 2007. Virginia had several skeins of a lovely sport weight yarn (a wool blend of Romney, Border Leicester and Corriedale) from a small producer in Fort Madison, IA called Lamb Lane. She offered it to me as I was determining whether or not to make Kim Hargreaves’ Jarrett.

As with a lot of my knitting projects, I start and stop in fits. And, usually when I am knitting I find myself distracted, or as Virginia likes to call it, “Admiring my work.” So, things can take awhile.

The opportunity to really give the sweater a lot time came last year, but after a few rows in the hospital that first month, I found my situation a little too distracting for knitting. Still, thinking back on that act of bringing my knitting to the hospital speaks of a deep hope – that there would be an end to the ordeal (and, I would most likely desire having a cardigan to wear).

Still, it took even longer to finish the sweater. The second autumn and winter passed, and it wasn’t until our trip to the Pacific Northwest and a stop at the Button Emporium in Portland, that I found renewed motivation to finish the sweater – groovy leather buttons.

Now it’s done. Although, I’m not too happy with the elbow patches – I think I placed them a little high, so there’s a bit of adjustment that needs to happen – but, it’s wearable. It’ll probably be another year before those patches get moved, which makes me think that for those of you whipping out projects left and right, just remember the longer you let something “marinate” in the project basket, the more stories and experiences you’ll have to help hold it together. (Of course, you’ll also have fewer finished projects, a lot fewer in my case.)