So much knitting, so few words...

While I am still pretty much feeling crappy and the part of my brain that does things like write and create verbal and written constructs has taken a prolonged A(bsence)WOL, about the only things I am up to doing are knitting and listening to audiobooks.

And so, apart from a whirlwind (and snowy) trip to Tulelake (thank you, Jim, Karen, Ginger and Sidney!!) to roust some of the winter cobwebs and look at hawks, eagles, owls, arctic birds, and lots and lots of icy snowy fields, I've been spending most of my time knitting and listening.

Here are a few photos to catch you up...


Some February 2008 photos taken around Tulelake and the Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge, and the roads north of the refuge:

Iced canals



Nearing sunset...


This is the most snow we have seen in the three winters we have been going to Tulelake...


Tundra swans flying over the yard as we were getting packed up to come home...


Shot through the windshield heading southwest on Highway 97....


What the heck are these plants? I have several - very alien looking...*


A lone female bufflehead...



Rangers estimated that there were over 400,000 swans wintering in the Tulelake and Lower Klamath refuges this year. I think we saw almost all of them, the following being only a small slice of the massive flocks...


A couple of Canada geese who found one of the few snow-free areas to forage...


Here there be eagles. We saw ~60 of them roosting in a line of trees bordering one of the exit roads out of Lower Klamath...



Ah, the knitting stuff! A pair of black armwarmers (KnitPicks' Sierra, in 'Coal') I knit up in a cable-and-broken-rib pattern; I knit this both at the same time on 2 circular needles):


Because it's hard to see the detail, I photographed them using the Document setting on my camera - it washed out the color, and makes it easier to see what's going on.


Here's Mike in the red cabled Mondial Gold scarf I finished, like the armwarmers, just in time for the trip:



This was Ginger's first road trip. She handled it very well. Okay, so being cabled to the back helped restrict her range, but she she still managed to snuggle with her mom:



While Sidney didn't have the back seat all to himself this time, he really didn't suffer as much as the look on his face here:


I finished another pair of Socks for Soldiers, this time using on of the new Army-approved colors, KnitPicks Swish DK, in Moss:


One of the ways to make sure our sock legs will fit the generally muscular military calves is to slip the socks over a 2 litre bottle. I happened to have a bottle on hand, so:


I really do buy yarn from other places, but I sure to love KnitPicks! The following is the cuff to their Girl's Best Friend Anklet sock pattern which for some reason caught my eye and made my fingers itch to knit. The decorative cuff was fun to knit, so I've already ordered yarn in a different color to make another pair. I hope the eventual recipients enjoy wearing them as much as I enjoy making them!


And, that's it for now. See? Knitting, not so much the words...

* My friend Karen (the brain and heart behind the SonomaBlanket Project I've previously written about) identified these alien stalks as great mullein (Verbascum thapsus), and kindly pointed me towards a couple of sources, AltNature and Wikipedia. I have no recollection of plants like these lining some of the canals from when I was up in Tulelake during the summers of 1990 and 1991, but I was more focused on birds at that point, that and trying to stay out of the stinging nettle that continues to maintain a strong presence up there. Thanks, Karen!

Dang! It's coooooold!

And so, my thoughts turn to gloves. And more scarves.

First, I knit an alpaca scarf for my aunt. The pattern stitch is a variation on another pattern stitch I've used. Just by adding a single stitch, it gets a whole new look! And, it is fairly mindless knitting, in terms of having only to remember one row. Of course, the first night I was playing with it, I had to undo it as often as I did it, because I'd goof somewhere along the row and couldn't parse it out. That'll teach me to try something new when I'm too tired and in too much pain and am just staying up to try to force myself awake until my regular bedtime.

So, anyway, here it is, in KnitPick's Elegance.


That's a white sheet I have draped on Mike and his lounge area, to give me a backdrop against which I can photograph scarves without them being draped around him. Here's a close-up of the scarf:


Below is the scarf I knit without the extra stitch in the pattern repeat (Elann's Baby Cashmere):

Here it is, held up to the light. The scarf color it darkened too much, but you can really see the lacy pattern this way:


So, Hanukkah scarf done, I went to work on one in the same pattern stitch for myself. The yarn I'm using is much finer (fingering rather than worsted), so it looks a bit different:


Now, gloves. One of the things that has occurred as a result of having long-term untreated tickborne infections is that my autonomic nervous system has gotten a bit wonky in various ways. One of them is my body not reacting appropriately to external temperatures. Example: I am sitting here in sweat pants, Polar fleece socks, sheepskin lined ankle-high slippers, a long-sleeved turtleneck shirt under a polar fleece long-sleeved high neck pullover, and my fingerless gloves. The doorbell just rang, announcing the postman's arrival to pick up some outgoing packages. He was dressed in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. One of us is clearly not dressed appropriately for the environment. That would be me. And these would be my fingerless gloves, knit 7-8 years ago, out of a now discontinued yarn, Superlana.


I used to knit a lot of mitten sets for the local women's shelter, but haven't in a long time. I started knitting a pair of gloves in the same yarn as a pair of socks I recently knit, in Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock yarn, in purple and hot pink stripes. The pattern I'm using is a two-needle one, and for some reason it did not occur to me to work the thumb and fingers in the round on double points. Here's the right hand glove, with the finished thumb and index finger:



The yarn is thinner than the Mondial Gold I'm using for the new red scarf, and not as springy as the Mondial yarn, and, well, as much as I enjoyed knitting the socks in DPs in the round, I'm not enjoying making the gloves as much.

So, I thought I'd start another pair of gloves. No, mittens. Gloves. Mittens. Mittens are easier (no fingers) but I really like having my index fingers free to operate independently. So, a compromise: Mittens with separate pockets for the thumbs and index fingers. I'd bought a couple of skeins of Inca Alpaca on sale some months ago, but didn't know what to do with them, as they weren't enough for a scarf, and I'm really not a big hat wearer. So they were recruited into making my new glovtens. Here's an in-progress photo, with a too-long index and too-long thumb. Despite using a schematic of my hand as a guide to how long and wide to make things, I managed to space out when knitting the two digits, and made them too long. So, after the photo, I unraveled them and finished them off at the appropriate length.

Mind you, this was after realizing, at 1230 hrs earlier in the morning, I went to try on the gloveten with the nearly finished index finger, and belatedly realized that I had knit it in where the pinkie finger would be, not next to the thumb. So, that had to be frogged back to the hand, and worked again, this time on the correct set of stitches. ::sigh::


So, finally, last night, I finished the new index finger and the pocket for the remaining fingers. Now all that needs be done is sew up the cuff's side seam and all the ends! Oh, and make its mate. The color of the yarn is a sort of heathered light denim color, the color in the above photo.


I'm also making a loopy fringed scarf for Mikey, but enough is enough already - I'll post that once I'm done with it and photograph the two of them together.

Gloveten Update: When I started wearing them in the fall of 2006, they started...growing. I finally threw them in the washer and dryer, felting them a bit. They are now nicely snug and very warm. In the mood to work on another pair of fingerless gloves (my original pair are getting very ratty and and holey as they get mangled when I wear them to bed after a day of wrestling with scaley lizard skin and lethal claws), I came across this pattern for Glittens!

At last mopth's knitting guild meeting, I mentioned having felted my glovetens. One of the members said she used to knit such things for her father, a hunter. They are thus, in some circles, called shooting gloves. And, speaking of variations on a theme, here's an absurd pair for a smoker (I mean, really, shouldn't they just stop smoking???).