Blackbird requests something close up for Show and Tell this week.
I am collecting Rowan wools for the Kaffe Fassett knitalong over at Blithe Dance — a slow and tentative process as I’m on a budget and it takes a lot of colors for that Toothed Stripe Waistcoat I’ve got my eye on. I did discover that Yorkshire Tweed 4-Ply doubled knits up to the same gauge as Yorkshire Tweed DK, so I’ve got more of a selection to choose from now. This latest one is "Gust"….
Well, lots of drama on the ice last night in Torino — an apparently disastrous fall by this couple, Zhang Dan and Zhang Hao of China, when she crashed onto the ice and hobbled off, only to come back on again a few minutes later, bloody but unbowed, and finish their long program. I confess that I had tears in my eyes, watching her get up and go back on. Very courageous.
The Russian pair, Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin, had survived a rather spectacular fall themselves, when in August last year he had lost control during a lift and dropped her so hard that she suffered a severe concussion — my heart went out to him, as NBC showed the clips of him skating over to her as she lay unconscious on the ice, and him talking later about losing his confidence, and the months-long struggle to regain it.
The Russians eventually won the gold medal last night, with Zhang and Zhang surprising pretty much everyone and getting the silver (ruffling a few Russian feathers in the process).
For myself, I was leaning towards this pair, Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo of China, who came in third, who seemed to have a nice rapport with each other (despite the completely unmatched costumes)
(Photos from Torino 2006, with more stories to be found there as well.)
There is a handy little guide to pairs skating here, from the BBC, bless ’em.
As for me, I turned the heel of the first sock on Sunday night, and to my surprise did the whole foot yesterday!
The colors are lovely indeed, rich and ever-changing. I had prepared myself for the fact that I might have to rip out the toe and adjust the fit, as I’ve heard so many knitters talk about, but this was perfect the very first time. I am so pleased with it that I just had to make a new button —
for those who are knitting an Ann Budd pattern for the Knitting Olympics, or, gosh, who just admire the woman!
My first sock might not get high marks for execution (to carry on the Olympic metaphor) — I put sewing thread in the heel as suggested, but had a tendency to hold it looser than the wool, so it pooches out here and there, and I completely forgot it at the toe, and my grafting is a bit, well, humorous at the end. But I am still very pleased with it. I can see why sock knitting fascinates so many people!
I’m a little embarrassed at the average everydayness, the sock-ness, of the project I chose for these Knitting Olympics. These socks are nothing that requires the kind of preparation and fortitude that some do, Estonian shawls, Fair Isles, complicated Norwegian cardigans, and so on. I’ve been knitting for a long time, but have always passed on socks, "too complicated" and "too fiddly" I guess (which is funny, really, when you consider that usually I love complicated and fiddly things, I’m a library cataloger through and through, after all) — and so, inspired by the Yarn Harlot’s confidence in all of us knitters, this is my project, albeit a modest one. In a way, Stephanie is Bjørn Dæhlie and I’m Philip Boit, the Kenyan cross-country skiier who never really had a serious chance of medalling in ’98 but plugged away anyway, and made it to the finish line long after everyone else, with Dæhlie there to greet him with open arms, for the love of their sport.
Sorry, sorry, forgot where I was for a moment — "Let the Games begin!"
I cast on yesterday afternoon — needed some time to myself with this Old Norwegian cast-on, which still looks a bit wonky, but I knitted on the sock proper during the Opening Ceremonies. I’m liking the colors a lot — a lovely mix of teal green, almost-navy, periwinkle, and deep rose-pink, with the different combinations where the colors blur. These are my first socks! I’m using Ann Budd’s sock shaping, with a K3, P1 rib.
Here is one of my favorite recipes for scones, this one from Shepherds Tea Rooms in Chichester —
Shepherds’ World-Famous Scones
3 cups/450g self-rising flour
1/2 cup/100g sugar
1/2 cup/50g chilled butter, cut into bits
1 1/2 cups/225g dried apricots, chopped
3/4 cup/150ml milk, plus extra for glazing
Preheat the oven to 350° F/175° C.
In a bowl, sift the flour and sugar together. Add the butter, and blend with your fingers or a pastry blender until it resembles coarse meal. Stir in the dried apricots.
Add the milk, a little at a time, and stir until the mixture forms a soft but not sticky dough. Add a little more milk, if necessary. On a lightly-floured surface, roll out the dough about 1 1/2 inches/4cm thick. With a 2-inch/5cm cookie or biscuit cutter, stamp out rounds. Gently roll the scraps together, and repeat until all of the dough is shaped.
Transfer the rounds to a baking sheet lined with parchment paper (butter the baking sheet if you don’t have any parchment), brush the tops with milk, and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until lightly golden and the bottoms sound hollow when tapped.
Makes about 12 scones.
Here we are, all geared up for the Knitting Olympics to start this evening! Oh, yes, and the real Olympics, too —
(Photo from Torino 2006.)
I must say, I’m looking forward to both. I’ve been an armchair athlete ever since the glory days of "Wide World of Sports", and enjoy watching a wide variety of the winter games, although I confess a partiality to figure skating.
In the spirit of pin-trading, the Knitting Olympics folks are making and exchanging blog buttons right and left, and here are some that I’ve collected —
This one is from Jessica at Rose-Kim Knits, who is obviously "proud supplier of blog buttons to the United States Knitting Olympic Team",
and this one is from Sarah (who helpfully adds, "it actually means ‘The Olympic Contests/ Games of Those Who Knit’ or ‘Those Who Make Loops With Rope’", for those of us with little Latin and less Greek).
For those of us Welsh in blood and/or spirit, there is Team Wales ("teem cuhmrih" or "cuhmree"),
and this one, lest we take ourselves too seriously (as if!), is Team Tea from Elizabeth at KittyCafe.
And my own little contribution, in honor of the unexpectedly large number of Jeannes entered —
Show and Tell Friday is moving to Thursdays — today, it’s our favorite lamp.
This one (please ignore the crummy paint job left by painters who didn’t bother to remove light fixtures before they painted) came from my grandparents’ house,
so I can date it to 1947. I remember many happy sleepovers, lying on the floor in Grandma’s room and looking up at this lamp before I fell asleep. When my mother had to sell the house, I asked for this. One of the first things we did when we moved to our own house, which had been stripped of all the 1929 doorknobs and light fixtures by a previous tenant in a fit of pique, was install this lamp in the bedroom. It has a certain elegance to it, like a wedding cake with its ring of "piped" dots around the rim and swags of glass and pendants, but it isn’t fussy. I love the simple grace of it, and it makes me happy to see it in my own house.
These are as yet only lamps to be —
but they are very pretty. We bought them at Wah Tung in Admiralty, just before we came home from Hong Kong. Haven’t had a chance to get the fixtures to convert them from the candlesticks they started out as, but I’m looking forward to the finished lamps! I love the color of the ripe peaches and the dark branches against the taupe background, and the little golden-orange bats (the Chinese words for "bat" and "happiness" are both pronounced "fu"), and the way that they are apparently similar but actually just a little bit different from each other.
Thanks to a few well-scheduled TV programs, I finished the knitting for the Baby Sweater on Saturday — watched "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone" that night, and a few days earlier an episode of "Secrets of the Dead" called "Titanic‘s Ghosts". Despite the lurid title and opening sequences, this was actually a serious documentary about using DNA testing to identify survivors of the Titanic disaster. I’ve always been fascinated by archaeology, which manages to be both romantic and scientific at the same time — recreating past lives, researching history, and using analytical techniques to gather and record information. This one was fascinating for its use of genealogical research techniques to identify and locate surviving relatives, the still-amazing way that DNA evidence can be used to identify blood relationships between the living and the long-dead, and the photographs and personal stories that made us identify sometimes nearly unbearably closely with the people on the Titanic and their families. (Imagine having one seat on a lifeboat available, and looking at your five children there on the deck.)
Anyway, this was an easy-peasy knit. I used less than two and a half balls of the Merinogold, so it takes almost as little wool as it does time.
I also loved that the Gull pattern fit perfectly into the shaping that Elizabeth devised, with the repeats ending just at the places where you divide for the sleeves (and adding on 7 fits another repeat in just as perfectly). I actually added eight stitches, instead of seven, on the sleeves, because the lace pattern made a rather wonky edge and I wanted to firm that up to make seaming easier; I just knitted the first and last stitch of every row.
The sleeve shaping gave me a bit of pause, and I had to think about it for some minutes until it made sense. It is essentially a T, with the crossbar to be seamed along the underarm and the downward stroke becoming the sleeve seam. This is how it goes together —
That extra K stitch on each side of the sleeve seam came in very handy, as the seam turned out almost invisible. I am, I confess, rather lazy when it comes to finishing (Reason #47 to Love Shawls: There are no seams), so I faithfully followed a little tutorial on seaming by Theresa Stenersen — good practice for the Swing Jacket coming up.
These white pearly buttons were the only shanked ones I had in the button jar, so they are merely prodded into place for the photo. Obviously I am starting to get into swing-jacket mode — I thought this jacket would look as pretty with three buttons as with the six of the original, and it does.
"Result: a beguiling baby sweater with only two seams to sew"!
I’ve added a list of the Swing Jacket knitalong participants to the sidebar, with their blog title if they have one, and referring back here if they don’t (as TypePad apparently requires a URL for this kind of list). If I’ve missed you, please let me know — if you want me to add you, please let me know!
"TypePad is currently unavailable for maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience."
Now, while this doesn’t approach one of the classics of this genre — "We were literally glued to our seats for the whole movie!" — it still manages to ring a little alarm down at the Grammar Police station.
So TypePad is unavailable for maintenance, eh? Then why is it down?!
Knitting, reading, other stuff.
