Raspberry and Tomato

I'm a little stuck with the book right at the moment so instead you get a knitting post from me!  (Cue the band).  Some my stuck is that the last three weeks have been nuts.  Piglet had the end of his cross country season during tech week for Birdie's play, Midsummer Night's Dream.*  

The show was wonderful! Absolutely hilarious. I worked on altering costumes again this year and I was sewing right down to the last minute because Helena's costume ended up needing a last-minute alteration and zipper replacement.  

The spring musical looks to be a sartorial challenge, so I imagine Feb and March will be All Costume Alterations, All the Time.

After the Shakespeare madness, the kids were off school a bunch of days for various and sundry, and now we are in the slide toward Thanksgiving. Piglet made the high school basketball team and has started practices, which are pretty intense.  His game schedule starts in December and is like whoa.  It all feels a bit fast, and I wonder how anyone manages to write a novel during November.

Which is not to say I've gotten nothing written.  I've actually gotten a lot done.  But the story feels slightly stalled right at this minute.  So I'm letting it stew for a day or two before getting back at it.  In the meantime, I'm reading around it, and researching.  Which is fun!  I made an interesting thematic discovery this week that means a little bit of reworking, but I've got to think about how to best play it out.  Meantime, I always have a little book and pen with me in case a scene or dialogue pops in my head.  It's Listening To Music From Another Room time.**

I finished this sweater way back in May, just as the weather warmed up enough that I couldn't wear it.  I blocked it but didn't even weave in the ends until last month.  It is the White Lizard pattern and I enjoyed working on it.  It was just enough of a challenge to be interesting, but not so much so that I felt like I was losing my mind every other line (unlike the piece I'm working on right now...more on that in a future post).

Nothing to say about the pattern that I didn't write in my ravelry notes.  The yarn is a German one I bought on sale 18 months ago and I've no complaints about it.  I would use it again, for sure.  

The garden is almost done for the season; I'm still picking tomatoes from the one super productive plant, but we are getting close to frost, so I think it is just a matter of days before that is all done.  The pics represent only a fraction of the tomatoes I've picked off that plant.  This is probably three or four weeks' worth and I started picking in August.

The squirrels have been an absolute nuisance in the back this year and NOTHING deters them, being the hardy urban creatures they are.  I got a sonic thing with flashing lights and nada.  Doesn't even slow them down.  

Tried coffee, that worked for a day, but then they acclimated. Tried putting the coffee pods from our espresso machine, which worked for a day, but they acclimated. Tried Irish Spring soap, nothing. 

I did get packets of some kind of natural deterrent from amazon that seem to have done something. It deters them more than anything else, but not 100%. I'll take what I can get, since they seem determined to dig up all my plants back there.

In my garden plot, I got three more watermelons in September! They grew after I picked in August and assumed the vine was done. While not as tasty at the August ones, they were fine enough.

I need to plant spring bulbs, but there's not a screaming rush at the moment.  I did something to my shoulder this week and while the chiropractor was able to do some good yesterday, I'm still uncomfortable, so I should hold off on heavy work for a bit.  Maybe next week. 

On the off chance you are looking for family-friendly viewing, may I recommend the Netflix reboot of Lost in Space?  It is so good!  (And pretty squeaky clean by today's standards).  There are three seasons that form one coherent narrative arc.  I've been rewatching it with my kids and we are all enjoying it.  The production values are very high, the acting and writing wonderful.  I love the family dynamic at the heart of the show.  Highly recommend.

Right, so that's me!  

~

*I don't generally post pics of other people's kids, but these were already shared on our school's social media page, so I feel comfortable sharing them here.

**This may just be my own process, but I find there comes a point where the characters are living enough in my head that scenes and dialogue come to me in random moments.  The experience is like eavesdropping; you just listen to see what they have to say and put it down as fast as you can!  I don't always use everything I write down, but it is always helpful.

Talking Tuesday: Marcus Aurelius' Meditations

Book 4:49~

"Be like a rocky promontory against which the restless surf continuously pounds; it stands fast while the churning sea is lulled to sleep at its feet. I hear you say, "How unlucky that this should happen to me!" Not at all! Say instead, "How lucky I am that I am not broken by what has happened and am not afraid of what is about to happen. The same blow might have struck any one, but not many would have absorbed it without capitulation and complaint."

~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Hicks and Hicks translation, 2002

NB: I have a different translation from 1962 at home, but I prefer the Hicks' rendering of this passage; it is more poetic than the one I have.

It's Alive!

Popping in here briefly to say, I'm still here, just drowning in life with three teenagers and a tween.  My life preserver at the moment is my writing and associated reading, but that means I have little time to write here.  I have some projects from the spring to share, now the weather is turning, but that will have to wait.  I had a great season with both gardens and am sliding into the fall with them, thinking about what I will do with them in the cooler weather.  Again, will post more about that later!

Eh--Seavaiger, but then, Mr. Rochester

I hesitate to show this project because it was so frustrating to me and I don't love the end result. I may end up giving it to one of my girls or frogging it all together.  That's what I get for stash-busting. 

This is Kate Davies' Seavaiger pattern, and while the first release of it did not garner my enthusiasm, a second cropped sample convinced me to buy the pattern. Samples matter, people. I was trying to figure out how to use up a couple of stashed balls of Palette yarn that coordinated and decided to give this one a go.

Everything was fairly straight forward until the body divide.  You knit straight in the round for however many inches you want (I ended up with 7" for this cropped version and think that is about right; Kate's cropped one is 5" and the full length one is 11"), then you start shaping the dolman with increases on the sides.  After that you divide for front and back and that is where the trouble began.  I decided to slip the edge stitches to get a neater edge to cast on the sleeves, but that produced a fairly firm edge, particularly on the side that I was carrying the yarn color changes on.  Mistake #1.  

The pattern has you knit 5" then start short rows.  Mistake #2, although I should have caught this one at the time.  5" on each side gives you less than 10" circumference in the sleeve, and even if the dolman is close to your elbow, 10" is pretty small.  My biceps are less than 11" at the fullest now and the sleeves are almost too snug.  I ended up closer to 6" because I lost track of it, but even that is just this side of snug.  

Then are the short rows, of which you are supposed to do 15 each side (!) before the neckline.  I noticed many people complained the neckline was too tight and high, so I did this with some trepidation.  Mistake #3.  First attempt was ridiculous.  I tried reducing the number of short rows to 11 in back and 9 in front with some neck decreases, which helped slightly, but not nearly enough.  Attempt #3 was what I ended up with (I have what ended up working as a mod in my Ravelry notes, but the short version is knit 3 short rows, then start neck decreases along with short rows until you have no more stitches).  

Mistake #4 was with the sleeve cast on, as you simply cannot pick up and knit 72 stitches in 10-12" of space at this gauge.  I had approximately 52 rows to work with, and cast on 52 stitches.  I knit one row, then increased enough stitches to get to 74 and then worked the sleeve decreases every 8 rows until I got to 52, then knit another few inches before the ribbing.  

The sleeve joins ended up asymmetrical for some reason and the left sleeve join looks slightly odd as some of the stripes sort of end in no-man's land.  Not really sure how that happened since I did the short rows the same on both sides.  

I'm trying hard to reserve judgement because I know I'm not in a wonderful headspace right now. It is Bright Week and I'm still exhausted from Holy Week and Pascha. My dad restarted chemo at the beginning of Holy Week because his cancer has returned and my FIL has had a series of unending crises the past couple of weeks that are just stressful. Oh, and my husband's cousin died quite suddenly at the start of Holy Week. And the dryer died (but has been resurrected thanks to a good repairman plus an electrician friend at church).  And don't get me started on the raging teenage hormones in the house.  Times four. Never rains but floods, amiright?

On the plus side, we finally got a garden plot in our community garden after being on the wait list for YEARS and even lucked out with a double plot that has a mature strawberry patch and other perennials! 

It is 10'x20', so a goodly size.  I put in a bunch of mulch this week and it looks a lot better with most of the thistle and other weeds gone.  The irises and the rose bush are blooming and the two peonies are about to bloom.  The spring flowers were done by the time we got the plot, but I'm excited to have lots of daffodils for next year, as we all know my feelings about the dafs.

It needed a lot of weeding and other heavy work, but I'm thrilled with the space and the opportunity to experiment with growing food that needs full sun, as the back patio light situation isn't ideal.  

I'm on a deep dive down the rabbit hole with Toby Stephens' work so am working my way through Black Sails and thoroughly enjoying his Captain Flint.  The show is conceived as a kind of prequel to Treasure Island.  I have some complaints about the show more generally (way too much unnecessary swearing, particularly by female characters, among other things) but the writing and character development is great and the production values are superb.  

In other period work, Stephens' Mr. Rochester might just be my favorite; I had thought Michael Fassbender's was the definitive performance for me, but the 2006 BBC version is even better.  Private Lives is next in the queue.

I read Dune for the first time in April and enjoyed it, although I don't think I'll be reading the other books in the series. I've been working my way through the Saxon Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell for a few years; I finished book six (of 13) in early April and have the next one teed up on my nightstand. I'm currently working on Kairos, a translation of a German fiction book set in East Germany in the 1980s. It was long listed for an international prize and while the beginning was promising, I'm a bit bogged down in the middle. The author frustratingly doesn't use grammar conventions with dialogue and it is often hard to tell who is speaking. I also started A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, which is a tough read at times, but very compelling. I keep hoping that the filmed stage version with James Norton in the main role will be released for streaming.

Right then, that's me.  I should probably take a nap or something.

Gruggle and March of the Turtles

Just popping in here briefly to assure you that reports of my demise are greatly overstated.  What can I say, it's Lent? Holy Week next week, so the end is in sight.  Meantime, enjoy a photo of some flowers in my garden:

And also to share a quick accessory that I made late in the fall: Kate Davies' Gruggle.  

I wanted to like this pattern, but the truth is that I didn't enjoy knitting it, at. all.  It was so boring after a while that I struggled to finish it.  It is a nice size and very warm for being fingering weight, but I've also struggled to find ways to wear it.  Don't know if it is the color or the style.  

My main mod was to increase needle size at every break in the pattern to create a funnel shape and I'm glad I did.  I wish it was slightly wider at the bottom than it is, but fingering weight on size 7 needles was already pushing it for fabric density and tension. 

I'm still poking away at Kate's Cowal pattern--similar, but somehow less boring?--and that pattern has you go up on needles at some point too.

And in ongoing sweater modifications Because Juliana is Freezing All The Time, I added turtlenecks to my Not A Bláithín sweater and my Rustbelt Mackworth, and I'm super happy with them now! I love the weight of those sweaters for winter (stranded knitting is so warm!) but did not love how cold I felt in them because my neck was bare.  The Mackworth neckline was always too wide on me in any case.  It was the work of a few hours and now I have two extremely useful sweaters after letting them mostly languish this winter.  I had lengthened the hem and cuffs about 1/2" in the early fall, but it was such a minor change it wasn't worth noting here.

And yes, I know.  I need to address the elephant in the room at some point: the weight loss.  I've lost about 60 pounds in the past year and am still finding my way with how I feel in my body.  Short answer: very strange.  But hey, at least my hair isn't coming out clumps any longer.  Small mercies.

When the shoe doesn't fit...

 ...well, we just won't go there (anyone familiar with the original Grimm's Tales will know why).  I wanted to show a few things today that are modifications to existing makes.  

The first is my Poet sweater, that bane of my knitting existence.  I wore it a TON last winter, but the wide neckline always bugged me.  I had snugged it up with some yarn, but it really didn't stay, and even with that fix was still slightly too wide for my shoulders.  When I tried the sweater on in the fall, it was so big it was ridiculous.  I had a moment of panic: did I really spend all that time on a lace work sweater only to shrink out of it so much as to make it unwearable?  I put it away to ponder.  

Sometime in January I decided I was going to try to redo the neckline and add some short rows to raise the back neck, as that also sat a bit funny on me.  I pulled out the ribbing, put everything on size 5 needles and got knitting!  I did the short rows first in plain stockinette; in retrospect, I should have done that on size 6 needles, but I'm not going to try and change it now.  

For the neckline, I picked up half the number of stitches required and then knit the neckline as before, which seemed to pull it in enough!  The fit through the shoulders and upper back is much better now, and it was such a quick fix.  I need to remind myself to just do these things.  (I lengthened the body and cuffs of my Lightweight Pullover and Mackworth sweaters in the fall, also fairly quick fixes).  

I've definitely been happy with the fix and have worn the sweater a few times since.

And my Kazahana.  This was from the early fall, and the crew neckline was not helpful to me once the cold weather really set in.  For a worsted weight sweater, I felt cold in it, and because I probably should have knit a size down, it just sat funny on my shoulders.  

I decided to try adding a turtleneck and see if that would make for a better match of yarn weight and make.  I picked up stitches around the existing neckline on size 7 needles and knit twisted rib until I thought the fold was high enough to cover my neck without flopping around my ears.  

I did sew it down on the inside for a neat finish and like the result very much.  Objectively it isn't that cold right now, but man, I feel it, so this sweater came off needles and went right onto my body.  

I'm trying to figure out what to do with my Dark Moss sweater (if anything).  There are still some fit issues through the shoulders that bug me, and it is slightly shorter than I would like.  It is hard to find the right length for me right now.  Call it a Goldilocks issue.  But the sweater is still plenty wearable (although I really do need to make the sleeves longer).  The main issue is just past the divide for sleeves, so it would mean frogging back quite a lot; after reknitting that yoke three or four times, I'm just not sure I want to do it again.  Part of me wants to just make it again in a different yarn weight and size.  Decisions, decisions.

Off to Tech Week!  

Hyannis Port in the Mid-Atlantic

I figure I better get this sweater posted sharpish since the weather is definitely turning toward spring.  It's not warm yet, but the highs and lows are moving out of deep winter temps and I'm slowly taking away some of my daytime winter layers.  (The trick I've discovered this winter is to start with silk long underwear--not synthetic!--and then a merino wool base layer over that, then my outer clothes, usually a sweater and wool skirt with wool tights, or a sweater with jeans, although truthfully, the jeans aren't as warm as a wool skirt and wool tights.  But I digress.  As usual).

The yarn for this sweater is Brooklyn Tweed Shelter, which is a yarn I've been wanting to try but found the price a little steep. I had a gift certificate to a local yarn store, however, and bought a couple of skeins of the Button Jar colorway, which is a lovely olive-y green with flecks of bright turquoise and yellow. My intention was a small accessory, but once I got it home, I knew I wanted a whole sweater, so I just girded myself and bought enough for a sweater.

The yarn is reasonably nice to knit with on the caveat that I pulled about a cereal bowl's worth of vegetation out of the yarn, which was pretty annoying at times.  The yarn doesn't have a particularly rustic feel but the vegetation, man.  Something else.  It's warm, but not as warm as I would have expected given the worsted weight and the relative density of the fabric I made.

I knew I wanted to make a turtleneck, because along with feeling cold most of the time these days, I find I'm colder in a crew neck.  I hunted around for a pattern that had a turtleneck and some kind of texture that wouldn't drive me bananas to knit (or take the yardage up into the stratosphere) and found the Hyannis Port pullover by Cecily Glowik.  I've made at least one of her patterns before, so I thought it would be okay.  

A couple of pattern notes.  The order of operations on this thing is a little silly.  She has you cast on 102 stitches at the neck, do all the sweater, then go back and cast on the 102 stitches around the neck for the turtleneck.  I wanted a tubular edge on the turtleneck, so I cast on 102 stitches, did the ribbing for however long the pattern says, and then started the pattern for the shoulders.  I also know from my Lightweight Pullover that some short row shaping at the back neck would be helpful, so I added that before beginning the raglan increases.  I also picked up a few more stitches under the arm and added additional decreases to account for it.  The rest of the pattern is fairly straight forward although it assumes a lot about construction, so not great for a beginner.  I probably could have stood to make this a size down, but I'm still figuring out what size to knit myself now.

Two criticisms (aside from the order of work) is that she has you do all the ribbing on the same size needle as the body; I think I would have preferred a slightly snugger turtleneck on a size 6 needle, and perhaps a little less length.  The turtleneck is also very tall and ends up more like a cowl since it flops over, but it doesn't bug me enough to undo the neck and redo it.  (At least not yet.  We all know my capacity for frogging stuff that bugs me.  Stay tuned for a knitting alteration of an older make).   And I don't know why this is, but even though the central panel is perfectly straight, and looks straight IRL, it seems to widen at the bottom in the pictures.  

That said, while I don't think I'll be buying more Shelter, I'm glad to have worked with it, and I've worn this a few times since finishing it in early February and have been happy to have it.

Shakespeare Lovers, Rejoice!

For Antony and Cleopatra is available to watch at home!  I recently discovered that the National Theater in London has an At-Home rental option, so you can watch shows that were staged there over the past few years.  The filming is professionally done and with a live audience, so you feel like you are in the room with the production.

This production of Antony and Cleopatra was staged in 2018 with Ralph Fiennes in the title role of Antony and Sophie Okonedo as Cleopatra. Ralph Fiennes (pronounced Rafe) is a particular long-time favorite of mine; it is a joy to watch that man work. Also, I admire that he taught himself Russian and now speaks it well enough to have done two films in the language!

Antony and Cleopatra features electric performances by both actors, and the production is amazing.  The actors deliver the lines in a naturalistic way (much like the amazing Henry IV/V triology in the The Hollow Crown).  Once your ear accustoms to the rhythm, it is very easy to follow what is happening.  

The sets are clever, placed on a rotating wheel that allows for different central sets to rise from the floor, including a shallow pool with real water in it!  Fiennes has a particular passion for Shakespeare staged in modern dress, and this production does that very well. (I don't always love this approach with Shakespeare, because it can get campy or be distracting).  The costumes are wonderful!  There is surprising humor in the show, and unexpected moments (there is a collective gasp from the audience toward the end that I found affecting).  

Let me know what you think if you watch it!  I'm hip-deep in costume alterations/fittings for the Upper School musical at my kids' school, and this was the perfect accompaniment to my sewing.