Cookies and Pansies

My cookies it has been a long time since I've updated! Can you tell I started another semester at school? I also got a new job as a tutor for a local community college in their Math and Read/Writing Tutoring Centers.

This is my last semester of my Bachelor's degree. It has been a long journey, but I am very excited to be so near done with the degree. I will be getting my credential after this semester, so I won't be quite done with school.

A few days ago one of my classmates told me they think I'll be a great music teacher. I think I will be too, but it is nice to hear that someone else thinks so too.

In knitting news, none of my yarn and needles were cooperating last month. I really want to make Road to Golden, a pullover sweater with a stranded colorwork pattern. I swatched for a couple of days, knit and reknit, but none of the combinations I came up with would work. Then I tried to make a Musica fingerless glove, but the two yarns which were the same brand were different sizes and looked icky. I told my needles and wool that they were being very bad, got out some cotton and a crochet hook and crocheted some coasters.

These are to replace the cardboard pieces Terri and I 

had been using as coasters. These are much better.

I also finished sewing on the snaps to my Cable for Jeans sweater. Someone else had used snaps instead of buttons, and I thought it was a nifty idea. It took a while to get the hang of it, but eventually I got it. I used the Knitmore Girls button tutorial videos to sew on the grosgrain ribbon. The videos are a bit wobbly and lengthy, but they are great learning tools. I am going to use their method for sewing on buttons from now on. The best part about having the snaps sewed on is that I can actually wear it. Even though I live in Southern California, I am a pansy and the mornings seem very cold for me and the sweater keeps me perfectly warm.

I have some socks in the works, two are patterns of Cookie A. I'm sure I'll be letting you know how that goes!

Sweater Debut

Bye bye September!

Things I remember from you:

- The week before my birthday, which Terri declared my birthday week and for which I got a present every day. Me, lucky? Yes.

- My birthday. Dinner, friends, karaoke with wigs. Yes, wigs.

- School. Teaching clarinet students. Scary and terrifying and exciting.

- The hottest temperatures in a long time. Probably to make up for the surprisingly mild summer we had. All the hot of summer came packed late in September on two days.

But I knew that hot weather would pass and now October wishes to declare that it is rightfully here with some colder winds and spitting rain.

It hasn't really rained here in a long time. The kind of rain that makes really good puddles and washes your car for you. Most of the rain has been the sprinkly-make-your-car-even-dirtier kind of rain. Which is the kind of rain October has started with today.

Bring it on October! Because I have a sweater made for you and your weather. It's cable band around my shoulders and snug nubbly sleeves are ready to keep your cold away.

Today I debuted my Cable for Jeans sweater of the previous post... even though I haven't sewn on the snaps yet. No matter though, because it really isn't cold enough to need it closed all the time, and a safety pin in just the right spot did most of the work.

It was snuggly and delicious. Like drinking a cup of hot chocolate everywhere I went; walking along, tasting the sweet warmth.

A Fitting Sweater

As luck would have it, last year a nearby yarn store happened to be having their annual sale on my birthday weekend. And my father happened to go to dinner at a restaurant next door the night before the sale started and saw them getting everything ready. In previous years I have sent my father to a yarn store and told him to pick out anything he thought I might like and that would be my birthday present. It worked out quite well because he has an artist's eye and picks out things I like and would not have normally looked at myself. Seeing that this yarn store was going to have a sale and that my birthday was coming up around the bend he did the smart thing and got me a gift certificate.

To this day I think it is one of the best yarn related gifts I have ever gotten. This particular store carries some luscious things which are rarely in my budget. Last year, however, armed with a gift certificate and a sale, I was free to really shop. I saw a bag of 10 balls of Rowan Scottish Aran Tweed in a deep blue tweedy jeans color and quietly put it in my little hand basket. (And by quietly I mean I snatched it out of the bin and might have let out a squee of delight to the puzzlement of the other shoppers.) Periodically while shopping I would take it out of my basket, stare at all the pretty and think about its possibilities. What would I make out of it? A sweater for sure, but which one? Since a Rowan yarn sweater was now actually in a price bracket that was reasonable instead of astronomical, the bag became one of the things I purchased that day.

But what sweater to make? A little research on Ravelry revealed that the yarn produced nice cables. I found a pullover that I really liked in one of my Interweave magazines called the Dovetail Pullover by Kathy Zimmerman. I wanted the sweater to have cables, but not too many cables as I live in Southern California and the yarn is 100% wool. Even though I did quite the search, I think I knew in my heart all along that I really wanted to turn this yarn into The Truffle.

The problem with The Truffle pattern is that it wasn't a pattern, it was a tutorial. The person who wrote it was essentially copying a sweater she saw in a store and wanted to preserve the rights of the person who originally designed the sweater, which I can respect. This is the link I have to the tutorial, but there is currently nothing on the blog. It reminds me of how important it is to save articles from the Internet that you want to refer back to because you never know when they might disappear.

I talked with some knitting friends online about which sweater to make. Should I go for the one with a pattern or the one with a tutorial that will involve lots of doing of the maths and be much harder and that I was afraid I would never finish? A friend rightly pointed out that if I chose the Dovetail I would always be looking over my shoulder and wondering about that other sweater. I would forever wonder what that other sweater would have been like. And it is likely that I would regret not even giving The Truffle a try.

And so I did the math. I made seven swatches for this sweater. I measured myself and a sweater that I liked that fit me. I made target measurements. I did more maths. And it worked. It worked! It fits like it really was tailored for me.

Since the blog is no longer up to tell you about the construction, here are the basics. The yoke is knit first using short rows to make a circle while staying in the cable pattern. Then the bottom of the sweater is cast on, knit in rib and then switched to the body cable pattern. One of the reasons I liked this sweater for this yarn is that the back is entirely seed stitch, so not as hot as if it had been cabled as well. I added waist shaping. The back and front sides are shaped to fit the yoke curve. Basic sleeves are also knit in seed stitch. I used the Knitter's Handy Guide to Sweater Patterns as a reference here and for the armhole decreases on the body. A small collar is knit by picking up stitches around the top of the yoke. Stitches are then picked up along the length of the front opening to make the ribbed button band. I blocked and then added on snaps.

Things I learned from this sweater:

• Swatching really works.
• I can knit a sweater in three months.
• Measuring and knitting on gauge actually results in measurements that fit.
• Sleeve caps and armholes can be fudged a bit and still look great.
• This is the use for learning math in school that is actually applicable in my life.
• I can design a cable if I want to.
• I'm really awesome! My knitting has come a long, long way.