The Sweater That Did Not Want to Be Made

Once upon a time, there were four balls of yarn, a lovely deep teal blue, a creamy off-white, a perky red, and a leafy green.  The four friends went along together one day until they came upon a meadow of blue and red flowers with green stems.  

The creamy white said to the others, "This looks like a good pattern for us, what do you say we yoke it?" The others agreed, and they arranged themselves on long sticks, ready to be yoked into the pretty flower meadow. The strands flew in and out and looped over quickly, forming the lovely pattern.

But it turned out that the shape of the meadow was wrong, so the yarns unwound themselves and prepared to be yoked again. In and out the strands flew, looping round and round until the meadow emerged again, but this time, there was a large lake below the meadow, and the lake's shores pushed up too far into the meadow.

There was also now a pond on the other side of the meadow with a strange shape to it.  So the yarns unwound themselves a third time and tried again, starting to feel tired as the meadow once again emerged.  This time, the lake's shores were far enough away, but the pond's shape was still wrong.  

The creamy off-white looked at the lake and thought perhaps it wasn't the best place for it to dwell.  The creamy yarn asked the others and the red and green agreed, and so off they went, leaving the teal blue yarn behind.  

The teal yarn sat by itself next to the lake and pondered its predicament.  It noticed a sky-blue ball of yarn lurking in the shadows. 

"Come frolic with me, and light the sky and the water!" said he. 

 

The sky-blue yarn ventured out of the darkness and into the light, where it proved to be a wonderful contrast to the teal blue of the lake.  

"Shall we weave together to make a pattern of the sky?" asked the sky-blue ball shyly.  "I believe it will be just as pleasing as the meadow was, perhaps more so."

"Yes, let's!  Those other yarns can find some other pattern to weave themselves into.  We can be sky and sea together," said the teal yarn with enthusiasm.

So they sat by the side of the lake and wove themselves together into a pattern of flowers and leaves, of sky and seas, ending with a small pond in the middle.  And the teal yarn said to the sky blue, "This is what we were meant to be."  The sky blue agreed and nestled happily into the floating strands.  

Unhappily, the teal yarn found that there were two tunnels next to the new pattern of sky and sea, and these tunnels were extremely narrow and long.  Too narrow to be going through with any comfort.  It vowed to make them larger, and so unwound itself from around the tunnels and looped round and round to create a larger space through which to move.  At the same time, the pond was enlarged and the edges narrowed so as to make an easy plunge into its shallow depths.  

Finally, the teal yarn was satisfied and nestled into the loops under the sea.  The sky-blue yarn mumbled a sleepy goodnight, and the teal yarn yawned wondered what fields his creamy off-white, red, and green yarny friends might weave next.   

"Goodnight, sweet sky."  

The End

***

Seriously, I knit this sweater three times over, easily.  (My ravelry notes are pretty extensive for it).  I started out to make a pullover version of Kate Davies' Bláithín, using the Stripes! sweater pattern for the body and sleeves, as the stitch counts/gauge were a close match, but it just didn't want to come together, either aesthetically or fit-wise.  

I ended up with something closer to the Lilias Day pullover, which I do like a great deal, and I know I'll get good wear out of it next winter.  I'm only slightly unhappy with the yoke fit--it wants to ride up and make a fold over my bust and I don't know why--but otherwise I like the look of it, and am happy to be able to wear it at least once this season.  

The shortest month

I realize I've been a bit AWOL over here.  January is so busy for us, and I spend most of February just trying to catch up.  Throw in some vitamin and mineral deficiencies that are hugely messing with my energy levels and it's slow days mostly.  I'm knitting, rewatching Discovery of Witches for the nth time (and re-reading the series....so.good), and generally trying to keep my head on straight.

Last week I did a special presentation on Stalin and the gulags to the 4th graders at my kids' school.  It was fun and nerve-wracking at the same time because getting the information down to their level was such a challenge.  Suffice to say I was massively over-prepared for 9 year olds, but that's okay.  I might be asked back to give a more advanced version of the talk to the 12th graders next year, and I'm looking forward to diving deep for that!

I made another plain vanilla flannel skirt last month (no pics yet), and have fabric for another heavy wool one, but lack motivation to sew right now.  So back to my needles it is!

Over and out.

Spring Evendoon

This is possibly an odd post for the end of May, but I wanted to show my completed Spring Evendoon before the weather makes it completely ridiculous to write about a wool sweater.  I finished it on May 13 and blocked it and photographed it the next day, when it was still chilly enough in the morning to get away with it.  The temps are supposed to drop to the 50s over the weekend (hooray!) so I might even get to wear it.  (Although my Cypress sweater is on the block now, so I might wear that instead!)

So, the Evendoon.  I cast this on immediately after finishing the Lilias Day in part because I was so disappointed that the Lilias wasn't going to work for me and I loved the palette so much.  (The friend I sent the sweater to is delighted with it).  This is a basic raglan knit, but the striping pattern keeps you on your toes, particularly during the raglan increases, as you have to keep track of two things at once.  It was also a LOT of ends to weave in as I knitted the sleeves flat and seamed (which I'm never doing again as I finally figured out a way of knitting small in the round that doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out).

 

I decided to stick to the same (stashed) palette and go for a striped version using Kate Davies Evendoon pattern.  (Her palette on the multi-stripe version is very similiar to mine)  This was another case of a sweater pattern I didn't notice when it came out but found very pleasing in a different colorway.  I originally combined the same two Jamieson and Smith yarns for the aqua stripe as I did on the Lilias Day, but it was coming out closer to worsted gauge, so I decided better too light than too heavy and tinked back to use a single strand of the J&S which does bloom nicely with wet blocking.  I like the bright palette very much!

 

 

I again went with the 3rd size, even though I usually make a 2 in Kate's sizing, because I wanted slightly more ease and was concerned about the fit.  The fit is spot on!  I did have to change the bottom slightly from the sample, as the extra two stripes made the body too long for my short torso, and I didn't like how the Jamieson and Smith knitted up in the ribbing on the bottom or neckline (I was also playing yarn chicken with the J&S, and wanted to be able to get the sleeves out).  I like how the cuffs, hem, and neckband all match and keep the stripe pattern. 

In book news, I've been reading Matthieu Pageau's book called The Language of Creation and having my mind generally blown about all the symbolism and fractal connections in the stories of the Bible.  More than that, it is a framework for interpreting and understanding the world.  (Jonathan Pageau said that when he was editing the book for his brother, every time he read the manuscript, he would get to about page 100 and start having seizures about the amazing insights and connections.  Page 100 nothing; I was having seizures on about page five.  Needless to say, it is not a book to rush through, but rather should be taken in small bites.) 

It all goes back to the garden, or as Paul Kingsnorth memorably put it: "we are all still trying to eat the apple."  (He's been killing it on his substack this month--it is well worth the subscription!  "Blanched Sun, Blinded Man" is a great introductory essay about the enchantment of the Machine we all find ourselves in.  I'm eager to read the rest of this series as it comes out).  Around the same time that I started Matthieu's book, I watched the largely panned film Noah, and found it to be much better than the critics said.  It fits well with the symbolic structure that the Pageau brothers talk about, and pulls from lots of traditional sources including the Apocrypha for additional details not included in the Pentateuch.

This week, I started reading a book I got for my birthday last summer called 1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink.  It is a book about how close we came to nuclear annihilation in 1983 because of a number of factors that collided that year.  I'm completely fascinated.  What I like about the author's approach is that he is clear-eyed about both sides of the story, painting neither a flattering nor unflattering picture of either Reagan or Andropov, and giving equal time to the concerns of both sides.  

I think it is easy for people of my generation or a bit older to lionize Reagan because of the perception of stability that he fostered--or at least a kind of clean polarity--but with time and distance comes some wisdom about the ways in which Reagan actually contributed rather heavily to the sort of political discourse in which we now find ourselves, and the instability of international relations more generally.  One wonders if a president with a longer attention span and better impulse control would have been a better choice at that time in history. 

A quirky documentary called The Man Who Saved the World came my way this week as well, and I highly recommend it.  It is about a little-known incident in the USSR where a Soviet colonel averted a major nuclear war in the late summer of 1983.  

(Incidentally, the film glosses over the disaster of the Korean airliner at the beginning of the film, with lots of heart-breaking footage of the aftermath, but the 1983 book gives a great deal more context and information about what happened, and while it was a terrible tragedy, there are a great many questionable things on the part of the captain and crew that led to that point.  Moral of the story: stay in the captain's seat and man your radio).

In between seizures over great stuff from Jonathan Pageau and his brother Matthieu, I am also rewatching The Americans, which is set in the early 1980s, and am drawn in anew, with different eyes to see this time.  

My brain is cookin'.  Hold on to your hats!