Year 2, week 1. Nothing knitterly to show today. I now have the key to my office, and a pile of stuff to lug up to campus to help make it a cozy work space, including some older knitting WIPs that just might get some attention if they start living there…
Cryptic, yes. But these two images make me very happy.
Boh and I spent 4 days with college friends (and their growing family) in a lovely midwestern city on our way home. It was the perfect balance of work and play: the chance to participate in the excitement of family life — babies, toddlers, new homes — and to dig into the resources of a local archive as part of an ongoing research project. I hope I’ll be able to return soon to enjoy both the materials in this collection and the proximity of dear friends I see nowhere near often enough.
Boh and I returned home late Friday night, and Saturday morning I headed up to the farm to gather veggies (including cucumbers, zucchini, beets, carrots, kale, herbs, lettuce and an early greenhouse tomato!) and to pick a few flowers. I don’t know what these are, but I love them!
I picked some calendula too.
Thus concludes my road trip series — we’re all caught up now! There’ll be some knitting content around here soon, I promise.
Have you tried Judy’s Magic Cast On? The instructions in Wendy’s book (printed with Judy’s permission) make this purchase already worth the cost. Here I am, 4 repeats into my first-ever socks on two circulars!
I’m knitting the medium size to account for the stretchiness of the lace. I may also knit a slightly shorter foot to create a snug fit. I am absolutely thrilled with the way this colorway is knitting up, and I’m really enjoying knitting with 2 circulars! Victory all around, even if I am not able to finish these by the end of the month (and qualify for all of the incredible Socks From the Toe Up KAL June prizes). I don’t know why I didn’t try using 2 circulars earlier — it makes a lot of sense for a patterned sock — one needles has the pattern, and the other needle is the bottom of the sock, all in one place. Rather than become a hard-core advocate of one way to knit socks, I’m beginning to see the benefits of choosing needles that fit the pattern. I may even have another go at Magic Loop (which I liked and have used for sleeves and things, but found a bit fiddly) — my Twisted Tweed Socks (rav link) were giving me some trouble around the heel, but maybe I need to try a different way of knitting those when I bring them out of hibernation.
Here’s one more close-up of my Lacy Ribs Sock:
Here’s hoping I can stick to my goal of equal amounts knitting/spinning and reading. I’ve put in some serious time on these socks in the last 12-14 hours, so as soon as I hit publish, I’m going to curl up with a book on the Gilded Age.
I think I mentioned something about farm shares and strawberries yesterday. Want to see this week’s haul?
Red lettuce, harukei turnips, kale, chard, broccoli, oregano, rosemary, basil, mint, 2 qts strawberries, more komatsuna, mustard greens (!!), and a handful of calendula flowers to brighten my kitchen.
Time to get to work!
Just in case it was unclear, that is Boh’s bone. Let’s move on to my sweater:
I can already tell that this sleeve is going to move much faster. With the right sleeve, I was trying it on after every couple decrease rows (see my modifications in an earlier post) in order to find a sleeve circumference that worked for me. With the left sleeve, I know to work down to 44 st and then work even until the wrist, where I did a few more decrease rows and then the basketweave cuff. I’m not the only one around here who is excited about 28thirty!
Remember my Sunday Market Shawl? I dug it out this week because I had a few lectures to attend, and I am almost through the first ball of yarn.
I’ve been rather appalled at the disrespect for the person at the front of the room at the larger events and talks I’ve attended this year, and I certainly don’t want to be lumped into the category of undergrads who stay only long enough to write a response, or who text and facebook/watch movies through most of a talk, only to make lots of noise while leaving during the already harder-to-hear Q&A. I understand that sometimes people need to leave early, and if you’re thoughtful about it, there’s absolutely no problem. It is this consumption mentality, the idea that these opportunities are bought and sold and thus devoid of the need for basic courtesies, that has been driving me nuts lately.
ETA: There are lots of thoughtful, engaged, respectful undergrads here, and I do not mean to suggest that the behavior I’m responding to is universal. I’m ranting about the handful who seem to think that basic courtesies do not apply in university lecture halls. (Hey, you! You’re making your friends look bad!)
I write all this to say that I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to knit at a lecture, and I’ve settled on sitting further back in the room, bringing only mindless knitting, and making an effort to connect to the speaker through eye contact, to make it clear to him/her that my hands are not distracting me from the content. So far, this feels like a reasonable approach.
One last photo:
This guy is paying attention!
Hope you have a great weekend, and that spring weather makes an appearance wherever you are.
After a weekend of warmer weather, today’s forecast is for snow, rain and cold. That, combined with the ever-growing pile o’ library books taking over my apartment, makes me less than enthusiastic about the coming week.
I snapped a few pictures of Boh yesterday that convey this general emotion:
More knitting progress soon. I may attempt to coax myself out of my bleary-eyed state with a few rows of Ishbel. I am less than 10 rows from the lace section.
I hope your Monday brings you sunshine! It looks like Boh and I will have to wait until tomorrow.
It has been gently raining for the last several hours — maybe even all through the night, and I am sitting here with my first coffee cup of the day, listening to the different sounds of the drips on the driveway, the water hitting the branches of the pear tree by the window, the fat drops falling from the gutters in a different kind of rhythm, and I’m wishing that I didn’t have to go anywhere today.
We had a really nice weekend — a bit crazy busy in that both of our academic schedules had events and dinners and guests well into the weekend, but lovely in that we found time to hike in misty forests, pick our first bag of greens at the farm I joined, and discover a chili-cook off in the grocery store of a nearby town.
I failed to document these events with more than my mind’s eye, and I’ve been too busy to knit this week, so here are some snapshots of Monday morning.
Wednesday is the day I get to stay home. I have no obligations calling me to campus, but I tend to have the most important book of the week to read — often for a meeting Thursday morning one-on-one with my advisor. These are the books that tend to speak to me, and these meetings, while often incredibly challenging, leave me with a feeling of affirmation that this is what I want to be doing. That part feels good.
The actual process of reading a book for a Thursday meeting? Time consuming, because it needs to be read carefully (and should be, given that it is more relevant to my fields than most of what I read in my other classes). It is so easy to read 20 pages, only to realize that your mind was wandering, and you didn’t really catch what so-and-so was getting at in chapter 3. That does not quite cut it during Thursday meeting, so I’ve taken to using Wednesday to get other things done during the reading process in order to make sure I’m paying attention. All this to say that, despite the fact that I have no actual pictures of the reading process, I can show you lots of the things I got done yesterday, in between chapters:
Hung out with the dog:
Baked oatmeal-cranberry-walnut cookies, based on Deb’s recipe from earlier this week:
Worked more of the foot of the sock, in 5 or 6 row increments throughout the day:
After a particularly long chapter, I took this guy to the dog park:
What a ham. I also managed to do laundry, bake a loaf of bread, and have an ichat knitting date with a dear friend. I realize that this post makes grad school look like a piece of cake, but I stand by this particular approach to Wednesday: solid, focused reading, a chapter at a time, interspersed with productive tasks (laundry, errands, food prep) and fun (knitting, playing with dog) helps things to stick better, and means I don’t waste as much time losing focus/drifting off/etc. Note to self — do this more!
Apologies if the blog is getting a bit repetitive! These days I feel like my schedule looks a lot like this:
Read (a lot). Knit (a little). Repeat.
Time to pour another cup of coffee, read the epilogue, and make some thoughtful notes for my meeting.
Good and good-for-us food was enjoyed, some reading was accomplished, and a cozy clapotis got some serious wear:
Back to it. What if Boh actually helped with the reading, instead of just lounging NEAR my books?
Hoping to get some in some knitting on that BSJ later on this afternoon. (No SuperBowl watching occurring here…) Happy Sunday, all.
I’m in the homestretch: writing my last paper of my first semester of grad school. Oh, what’s that I’m wearing?
More knits in action: thanksgiving day mitts, clapotis and le slouch. It’s cold in my apartment! Also, someone has earned his socks, though he won’t get them til next week:
Fact: fresh bread makes paper writing ever-so-much more bearable.
Hope you’re well. I’ll be posting more knitting progress when I actually get to pick up my needes again — there is a looming pile of holiday knits waiting for me once I’m done writing…
and that was our day.
barefoot rooster 