Bella Knitting

Are You Superstitious?

Laura

I ‘m not superstition and it is a good thing too! The NY Giants were playing the Green Bay Packers today. I am originally from NY and was raised by a father who is a fanatical NY Giant fan. My friends still have season tickets and only forgive me for also routing for the Chicago Bears because there was no NFL game day ticket when I lived there.  When faced with Bears football or nothing what is a girl to do?

Bella knitting has a line of projects for sports fans.  I have been working on a hat in NY Giants colors but since I finished it I started on a sweater for babies and kids.  It seems that sports fans are as fanatic about their teams as we are about our knitting (and for some of us it’s both) so what a great combination.

I needed good colors and a recognizable logo for the project I had in mind and so with  complete lack for foresight I started my Green Bay Packer's sweater earlier this week.  I laughed at stories of how the Green Bay fans were covering up street signs with New York links. Rolled my eyes when I heard they had stopped playing Seinfeld since it was based in NYC. Oh, pleeeease, I am so not superstitious. 

And so we proved today that knitting can not jinx a football game 2,000 miles away in sub-zero temperatures! But I will still make sure I am not knitting any new England Patriots stuff on February 3rd!!

I'm getting this ready for Stitches. I'll let you know more about it as soon as I read though all my chicken scratch design notes. If you have eagle eyes you might notice that 3-needle i-cord join I was playing with along the raglan sleeve!

p.s. New web site up in T minus 48 hours! :)

Design Elements

Laura

My Favorite Weekend

I’m not sure how many of you are hunkered down in front of your TV’s with two day’s worth of knitting prepared like I am all because it’s one of the best weekends of the year . . .  Yes, it is finally NFL Wild Card weekend!

It’s the best football ever; two days, four games, eight playoff quality teams and always the unexpected. TiVo has only improved the experience – allowing me to pause the game (briefly) when family reality intrudes. “Mom, do you think we can have breakfast today?” was the pre-game question since the shows here on the west coast start at a somewhat unreasonable time of 9 am. I called back “There are waffles in the freezer” without breaking the rhythm in my row and mentally patt edmyself on the back for being a good mother and teaching the kids to be independent.

Don’t worry, the beer and chips didn’t come out until the second game in the evening. That’s why I can’t blame my truly obvious color change error on the drink. When I watch football I like to pull out my sports fan scarf. Usually knit with Karabella Aurora 8, but since I am a self-indulgent knitter (it's the best way to be) and my team’s (Stanford) colors happen to be available I am knitting with Karabella Margrite. The 20% cashmere blend makes my fingers smile.

It’s the perfect project to work on while watching TV; simple but not boring, with consistent color changes that don’t require much attention –> 4 rows of red then 2 rows of white. The operative word being “much”. Not only did I knit 4 rows of white early on in the first quarter, I didn’t even notice until much later.

So what to do? Ripping out a stitch with so many yarn overs is a tedious affair with questionable success (see our Life Line post for a bit of “do as I say not as I do”). This is why some so-called errors are really just opportunities. I like to call these little mental bloopers “design elements”. All I need to do is add the same wide white stripe at the other end and it will look like it was done on purpose.

You guys will be the only ones to know and I know you won’t tell!

The Theory of Time

Laura

par.ent.hood n.   a period of renewed learning

You’ll often hear parents talk about how much they learn from their little ones. As the kids get older the opportunities to learn only increase. Their school work pulls long dormant memories from the back of our brains (a squared + b squared = c squared) or helps us remember we were dozing off during particular sections of the classroom curriculum (similes, metaphors and hyperboles).  As parents we can either avoid homework like the plague (tempting) or embrace this opportunity to learn with enthusiasm (education is wasted on youth and all that).

Thanks to my daughter’s 8th grade science project (due Monday), I can now state with confidence that Einstein did not know it all!  The Theory of Relativity (which I am thrilled I can now explain) simply states that ‘speed’ is not absolute, it can only be relative to something else. For example, when Zorro rides his horse down a moving train to save the day how fast is he going? He is riding at 5 mph (relative to the train), however, since the train in also moving he is going 30 mph (relative to the Earth), but (here we go) since the Earth is orbiting around the sun he is going 65,030 mph (relative to the sun). Ta da, you are now armed to impress your friends and family.

Einstein then jumped into several theories regarding time and the speed of light which are much easier to understand if you've spent hours watching Star Trek. The whole “nothing can go faster than the speed of light (except Captain Kirk) and time slows down as you approach the speed of light” thing is all fine as far as it goes but Einstein missed some practical applications so I’ll just add them for him:

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•    The faster one knits the slower time goes.

•    As one approaches the end of the project, time can reverse altogether.

•    Time slows to an even greater extent when knitting long i-cords and finishing.

The proof is in the pictures of this baby boy sweater I am designing (it is just so hard to get boy stuff that's not too fussy). One side is done!  The other, in spite of my intense focus, has been almost done for much too long. I guess I must be approaching the speed of light.

Links to the Past

Laura

I have a soft spot in my heart for novelty yarns. No, I don’t knit with them (OK, OK, I don’t knit with them anymore. My pile of FOs do include projects that bling, blink or purr), it’s because novelty yarns had a profound impact on our craft; successfully luring many new knitters into the fold. Hopefully some of them (you?) stuck around. Fortunately, my weakness tends towards yarns that I can blissfully fondle so any eyelash used in my scarves were a light accent  - a touch of mascara vs. a full set of false eyelashes so to speak … but I digress.

Back then (all of five years ago) the yarn shop was filled with newbie knitters, all entering the store with an amazed but slightly dazed look in their eyes and one common thought in their heads; “I want to knit a scarf just like my friend Mary’s.” Some in the store found it annoying to sell garter stitch scarf after garter stitch scarf of brightly-colored sparkly, furry or squiggly yarn. Not me. That’s because I loved talking to the knitters, doing my little part to suck them into the black hole that is knitting obsession. So many of them had a similar story to my own, “I learned how to knit as a girl but haven’t knit in 20 (30, or even 40) years.” I quietly congratulated myself on the wisdom that lead me back to knitting a full decade before these I-want-that-too knitters but mentally scooted over to make sure there was plenty of room on the bandwagon for them too.

I was reminded, as we watched the kids and their cousins play and adapt to their new Christmas presents how quickly these women also relearned their childhood knitting skills. It didn’t seem to matter how I taught them to hold the needles and yarn in their hands. When they picked up their own soon-to-be-first-scarf they reverted to the way their mother or grandmother had taught them so many years ago.

And so I will battle with my I-so-do-not-want-to-knit daughter this vacation to teach her to knit, just so she has something to fall back in twenty, thirty or forty years from now when I will gracefully refrain from saying “I told you so!”

Holiday Travel

Laura

Although we may complain that holiday’s are too commercial, in our hearts we recognize they are really about family – why else would we all spend so many hours fighting traffic or security lines at the airport trying to get to our loved ones?

Those of us with kids are inextricably linked with millions of other families to the school calendar. As soon as that bell rings we will be hectically juggling schedules, secreting gifts into luggage (don’t forget the Christmas stockings), and arranging for pet feedings with a goal of getting everyone and everything piled into an overstuffed car so we can actually pull out of the driveway in time to ride over the hill to grandma’s house for a bit of Christmas Eve cheer and get those kids snuggled into beds so Santa knows where to find them.

In our case, the drive from San Francisco to San Diego (no hope of snow there) can take anywhere from seven to nine hours. That means seven or more hours of uninterrupted butt-in-seat time, a.k.a. knitting time. Long boring roads? No problem. Traffic jams? So what! They just mean more guilt free knitting time. After all, what else could I be doing?

This gives me something to add to my long list of pre-holiday travel to do’s. No bulky projects or complex tables to read (guaranteed to bring on car sickness). Last minute gifts are my usual project of choice but I have joined in on the ‘no knit gifts’ concept so I think I’ll just pick something that interests me – how fun. Maybe I’ll finish up my winter hat so I can tell you about it or play with some new ideas I have for that Venezia wool/silk that’s just so yummy to fondle.

Car knitting. Check. √

The Perfect Table

Laura

My family loves the new game table we got. It gives us a nice spot to play some of our favorite games, like Clue, without worrying about clearing it all away so we can eat.  We’d even developed some pre-dinner speed rules to help us get the game going when needed. Forget all that dice rolling – just pop into any adjacent room when it’s your turn and make guess such as, “I think Mrs. White stabbed the victim in the library with her knitting needles.” We encourage a bit of creative story telling with our guesses and the kids know I always replace the knife with a knitting needle.  I’m picturing one of those old aluminum needles, a size 10 or 11 US;  nice and long, pointy, with enough stiffness to get the job done!

Even more important than the table’s convenient size, lovely finish or game readiness is it’s ability to hold my ball winder without it wobbling or falling off. This is not a small thing. It is the only table in my entire house that can perform such an important service for me. All the other tables and desks simply refused to play along (too thick, rounded edge, shallow lip) forcing me to go to unreasonable lengths to create a stable surface on which to wind a ball of yarn.

Even better, the table is the perfect size for this fabulous swift I bought at Stitches last year. There’s not much time to look around when you have your own booth but I had passed on it the year before (a much regretted attempt to stick to my budget after a bit of yarn splurging) and refused to leave without one this time.

Here I've stacked up two fabulous skeins of Cascade Venezia wool and silk. It is simply yummy to the touch and I think this lovely blue and soft white will be fabulous together. I can’t wait to get started.  The yarn hasn’t told me what it wants to be yet, but I’ll happily wind it and swatch it and thus be that much closer to the answer.

The "Big Game"

Laura

As I have mentioned before, there's an entire list of pros and cons when it comes to moving your family around the country. Missing family and friends is obviously the biggie con but we do love getting to know the attractions and traditions of new states, cities and even just neighborhoods since not every move has been a big one.

Out here in the San Francisco Bay area the big rivalry in college football is between Stanford and UC California at Berkley and yes, they call it “The Big Game”.  I love the long tradition, 110 years this last weekend, that both school have high academic standards even for their football teams, and that the whole area gets completely caught up in the hoopla. Since we have adopted Stanford as our hometown team, got season tickets, and have been enjoying some fabulous tail gating this season I thought it was about time that I knit a Stanford scarf that my daughter and I could fight over.  We didn't score tickets for The Big Game and so we planned our day around the watching the game at home. While most football fans plan for food and drink, I pulled out some brand new balls of yarn to start my (Get that Jaclyn?  It's mommy's scarf!) new scarf. I just love a new project even if it’s simple. We've been knitting the Peasant Lace Sports scarf with 2 rows of each color; this time I want to try 4 rows of a primary color and just 2 of the contrast. There are a lot of times when one of a team's colors are not as strong or likable as the other and in this case I was hoping for less of a candy cane look.

It’s not much to look at yet but that was because the game was just so darn exciting. The perfect rivalry game. I kept jumping up and down and not knitting. Stanford won for the first time in 6 years and now I have until opening day next year to finish the scarf. Does it count as a UFO if it has a planned finish date?

Optimistic Knitting

Laura

Am I a glass-half-full kind of gal or simply delusional? I pondered that question multiple times while knitting my impromptu ski hat.

I kind of disregarded all rational knitting guidelines in my eagerness to get yarn in hand and stitches flowing. I had the basic concept sketched on the back of one my daughters algebra papers (it seemed appropriate) and knew I wanted a true winter hat, super warm and dense, so my gauge would be tighter than recommended. Four stitches per inch sounded reasonable, so I dropped a needle size and knit a super small stockinette flat swatch again disregarding the fact I would be knitting in the round with cables. All in all it would be hard to think of additional ways to guarantee a screwed up a project.

The first test to my optimism came as I stuck to my plan for the decreases at the top of the hat. I knew just how I wanted the cables to flow together, so I methodically decreased various parts of the cable design with confidence that the end result would also somewhat resemble the shape of my head. The slight similarity to the top of a volcano didn’t trouble me at first, I was sure my newly planned bind off methodology would flatten out beautifully when worn.

The next bit of questionable thinking came as I fell into a common knitting trap … can I finish this piece or project without starting a new ball of yarn? I was so close, I could visualize that nice 6” tail waiting for me at the end of my last stitch but in my heart of hearts I knew I wouldn’t make it especially with an i-cord bind off.  I even declared out loud to my kids, “Mommy’s going to be pretty mad at herself in a few minutes!” but on I went with the tedium of the i-cord bind off only to miss by a mile.

I could have also used my daughter’s help with the stitch calculations; "if x equals the circumference of the head and y equals the percent of gauge reduction due to cabling what are the number of stitches required for the hat to actually fit on mommy’s head?"

So here’s a picture of my Mt. Vesuvius hat on it’s way to being frogged. Do I consider this project a failure? Absolutely not!  It was the perfect prototype. Now I know not only my gauge and cable issues but remembered that I knit looser in the round (duh), have a better idea for the types of decreases I want to use and have even more nifty ideas for the i-cord bind off. I’m off to frog with a smile on my face. Really.

What about you? Are you optimistic or not in touch with reality? How long will you go before crying uncle and what's your worst "I should have known better" story?

p.s. My poor snowman nutcracker looks a bit scary from this angle. It's hard to get into the holiday spirit in California after all those years in cold weather climates. Mowing the lawn before you put out the lights is still a bit bizarre to us!

Comfort Knitting

Laura

There is something about comfort food that is so, well comforting. Our whole family has been sick, really sick, since the middle of September. It’s a long non-blog worthy story but involves an old house and toxic mold. Anyway, we have found as we banded together that it was the little things that made us smile; that extra hug, a warm towel from the dryer, and the quintessential chicken soup, warm chocolate chip cookies for the kids, and for me hot oatmeal with raisins and a touch of brown sugar melting on top.

So when I was blessed with my first clear head yesterday, I knew I wanted to knit with something soft and comforting. Nothing too small, my eyes are not quite focusing yet; something quick so I could feel the satisfaction of knitting again after ten long weeks without (not that I was counting or anything). I found the perfect yarn for my purposes, Cascade Venezia. It’s super soft merino and silk is warm and cozy in my hands and it’s nice and chunky at a 3.5 stitches per inch.

With the holidays approaching our thoughts have turned toward the ski season. So I’m designing a hat that reminds me of those fabulous pictures taken the day after a big storm. You know, the ones with majestic mountain slopes, bright blue skies, loads of fresh snow and a single set of ski tracks swishing back and forth through the fluffy white powder. I also decided to try a few of Sarah’s absolutely fabulous tutorials so I started with a provisional cable cast on and will finish up later with an i-cord bind off. I’ve got a few tricks in mind for the top of the hat too. Let’s see how it goes - I'm kind of winging it.

So now I have my comfort knitting, a cup of hot tea, my two Velcro dogs warming my toes and cyber friends to share it all with. It’s a nice day.

The Mailman is your friend

Laura

As soon as I saw these new tips from Knit Picks I knew I had to have them. While I love the convenience of the changeable tips I really love nice wooden needles. I've got a few pairs of rosewood needles I pick up and fondle every once in a while, so I placed my order the minute the e-mail from Knit Picks plopped into my inbox. I just got them yesterday afternoon. I’ll have to check, but it was at least ten days since I ordered.

Here are my first impressions . . .

• The connection is exactly the same at the original Options and there is also a nice seamless edge between the cap and wooden tip.
• The finish is super smooth and satiny. It feels like multiple layers of varnish have been applied.
• The multi-color had me baffled at first but I can appreciate fun and funky and wonder how they did it.
• They are very pointy. I like that but wonder if they would split my bamboo yarn.

Knitting with them (all of three minutes after I opened the package) is quite nice. The feel of the wood in my hands is lovely. While not as fast as metal needles, these aren't slow, either. I am knitting some Pima Tencel and it's got just a bit of drag. The most noticeable difference is how very light the needles are compared to the metal tips. Much lighter, I'm surprised every time I pick them up again. I’m off to search for a project to knit with them….