I agreed with Courtney's stance - Barbie definitely didn't influence how I viewed women. Her hair was all staticky and she was always losing her shoes. I aspired to neither of those things. Courtney brought up the idea that girls actually work through the concepts of what it means to be a women by playing with their Barbie dolls - giving them careers, dramas, and basically acting out what they perceive to be femaleness.

My Barbies went to the pool. Always. They had no careers, they had no dramas. They went to the pool, I braided their hair, and then the dog chewed on their feet. But I wasn't one of those kids who wanted to grow up and be a princess or anything glamorous. I wanted to be a dog. (On the way to the lecture, I was wondering what my defining characteristic is. I think I just found it.) I'm not sure how I worked out my ideas of women, but I don't think it was with my Pound Puppies. My mother will surely chime in that I talked to myself - out loud and frequently - and made up stories for no one in particular. It has made for an interesting view of the world.

Anyway, I always wonder about the different types of feminists. Some people are Feminists with a capital F, like I'm a Knitter with a capital K. There are active feminists, militant feminists, quiet feminists. I fit into the I-love-being-a-woman feminist group. I'm thankful that woman in the generations before mine did the fighting and the struggling. I only have room in my life to be militant about a select few things (good bread, nice yarn, and naps.) I love doing all the things women were once supposed to do but now can do as a luxury - knitting, weaving, baking, growing my own vegetables. Reclaiming handcrafts and housework, to me, are the best way to express my own feminist beliefs. What are yours?

In the meantime, I watched The Squid and the Whale, Every Little Step, and several episodes of my favorite Bravo shows (I include Project Runway in that because, I'm sorry, it will never be a Lifetime program unless one of the designers goes insane and starts stalking another designer). There's been reading and crossword puzzles (both bed activities), as well as lots of crocheting. Cathy taunted me with beautiful yarn until I signed up for the 2010 potholder swap. I'm on the final front - just the backs left to do after this. I'm very pleased with my yarn selection, and the whole thing has actually been rather fun. I haven't crocheted in a long, long time. It was my gateway craft, and like most gateway crafts, it got left behind for its more versatile cousin, knitting. I hope to finish all my potholders this week and get them in the mail before the deadline. Going to the post office is the hardest part.

Bear with me while I share the background of this teeny-tiny, yet life-encompassing, project.

My sister-in-law collects American Girl dolls. Some of the dolls, including my beloved Samantha, are being retired, or "archived." Kirsten, the girl from Sweden, was archived at the end of 2009. When her archival was announced, her clothes and accessories were immediately out-of-stock, only to show up on eBay at exorbitant prices. Lindsay wanted to get a few things to round out her collection of Kirsten paraphenalia, including this sweater:

I was asked around Thanksgiving if I coud recreate this sweater. Of course! I'm sure there's a pattern! No problem!

Problem 1: No pattern.

I did find something similar, but it was a pullover, not a cardigan. I bought the pattern, decided I didn't like it and decided to do my own thing.

Problem 2: I have never knit doll clothes before.

Hello, smallest sleeves on Earth. There was no way I was knitting this at fingering-weight gauge - I was at about a dk or so. I didn't get as many pattern repeats on there as I would have liked, and, unfortunately, the star didn't fit at the top (which, by that point, I was perfectly fine with).

Problem 3: How will I know if it fits? I didn't want to do all this work and not have it fit the doll.

My Samantha doll is living the good life in Iowa right now, tucked into a pink plastic doll case with all  her clothes hanging nicely on little pink hangers. Luckly, I have a wonderful friend with two daughters who aren't completely attached to their dolls, so Samantha and Elizabeth came to live with me for a bit.

I decided to knit the cardigan completely in the round and then steek. I've never done that before, but what better way to learn on a little sweater? Everything went pretty well even though I used a silk/wool blend (Valley Yarns Northhampton) and didn't reinforce my steeks. I lost a few more columns of stitches than I originally intended, but that was a-ok.

Pre-steeking, with iPod nano for scale.

There were at least 20 yarn ends to weave in. Gahhhhhhh. It was a hot mess.

Post-steeking (the inside view).I monkeyed around with the sleeves quite a bit, mostly because I kept messing up my color pattern. Luckily, it only takes a half hour or so to undo the damage and restart the sleeve correctly.

All finished!Compared to the rest of the sweater, the button bands and collar were easy-peasy. I found the buttons at Jo-Ann (they have a great button selection lately), and I put little shirt buttons on the back of the button band to stabilize each silver button on the front.

Samantha works it.After all that hoo-ha, I'm really pleased with how it turned out. Lindsay loved it, Gracie got to spend a lot of time with the dolls (and now wants a dolly of her own), and I learned a lot. But, honestly, these doll clothes are just as much work as adult clothes except you don't have the luxury (luxury!) of plain stockinette separating all the shaping and joining. There's a lot to be said for plain stockinette.

Actually, I was pretty much in the trenches with February, doing some hand-to-needle-to-fabric combat with all manner of secret things. The secrets! I love them! They make blogging awfully hard.

These were not secret, but as I am also very lazy about taking pictures (and, apparently, mailing things to my parents), these socks are kind of late.

Socks for Chuck B. I started them on Christmas Eve, realized they were too big and started again. I think they're still a little long in the foot for him, but he likes them. Likes them so much he picked up the phone to call me himself. They're made of deep-stash Twisted Sisters' Jazz, and I have quite a bit of yarn left over. If he ever grows a third leg, we're in business.

I'm not sure how much longer he will need me to knit socks for him, as my mom has turned into a one-woman sock machine. Seriously, she's knit five pairs in three months. She is an animal and I'm a little afraid of her sock knitting prowess. I actually only have three pairs of socks on the needles at the moment, and I feel those three pairs will be on the needles for some time to come. My sock mojo is flagging, perhaps because I'm really working hard to using up my sock yarn stash, and I'm getting to stuff I absolutely adore and don't want to knit.

Tomorrow, I will show you something I swore at for thirty days straight. Thirty days! For something six-inches tall! But Gracie likes it, so it can't be all that bad.

I generally don't mind knitting things for other people. Sometimes I even love it. But the past few projects have all required yarn outside of my stash, and I am so stash-focused that it's actually kind of painful to purchase new yarn. (Let's just all reflect for a moment about how I have not purchased yarn for myself since last April. When you think of how much yarn I used to buy, well...simply put, I am a hero. To myself.) Really, it all comes down to a yen for some selfish knitting.

I signed up to do the Harlot's Knitting Olympics. Four years ago, we were moving into our house during the Olympics and I decided I was going to knit Baby Norgi. It's now in a Dumpster somewhere, but I did learn a lot when I actually got around to working on it two years later. I have time to knit something really good this year. I'm planning on the Wood Hollow Vest, a relatively new pattern that I am smitten with. True, I don't really wear vests, but it would be a nice addition to my admittedly sad wardrobe. And there are no sleeves to knit. I have some delicious Elsbeth Lavold Silky Wool marinating in the stash for just this occasion.

I will swatch today (a good Olympian always trains), but then I will be diligently focusing on finishing up those two languishing projects. I need to get them off the couch and out of my mind. I have a few movies to watch, and I can feel a Harry Potter marathon coming on. I could use Herimone's knitting needles right about now.

Or not.

Remember the summer of 2008? When I did a little fundraiser for the Red Cross and gave away knitted objects as prizes? This is the last one. I'm embarrassed that it took me so long, but I really had trouble finding a pattern I liked. Emily wanted a sweater for her little boy, Jackson. Jackson is a manly little baby and could seriously be a child model. He is just gorgeous.

I found the pattern in Zoe Moeller's Adorable Knits for Tots. I started in August and finished just last weekend. To my utter horror, there was pattern errata listed AFTER I started the sweater, which sparked my tantrum last week. More about that in a minute. For now, bask in the glow of this darling little sweater.

Is it not the wee-est, most darling little sweater? Despite its size (2 years), it took a lot of work. There are 10 cable crosses in almost every row, and the sides and the bulk of the sleeves are seed stitch. I used Berroco Pure Merino (on closeout from Webs!), which was really, really nice to work with. It consists of several plies, and the yarn kept unravelling while I was seaming, but that was really the only problem.

So let's talk errata.

See the large center cable? That's where the errata lies. The cable is apparently supposed to be symmetrical, but the pattern is written so that there are two left twists followed by a right twist. A close-up:

You would think I would have thought this odd. And I did. But there were no good pictures of the sweater in the book (which I borrowed from the library), and it was only when I was knitting the second sleeve that I realized something was off. Way off. I assumed that the pattern and picture were different but never thought about the presence of errata. It wouldn't have mattered - I'd been working on the thing for months and was almost done. After I finished, I checked out some other versions on Ravelry and noticed that most of them looked like the picture in the book. ERRATA!

I ran down the stairs, yelling that I was going to cut someone, and then proceeded to lecture Justin about the perils of publishing a knitting book too quickly. My high horse and I eventually tired and went to bed in a snit.

The upside is that the sweater is still just as adorable as can be, and hopefully Jackson's mom is too charmed by the little man-ness of it to notice any asymmetry. Right?

These are the Bella mittens, based on the long mittens Bella wears in the first Twilight movie. If you're not into breathing heavily around Edward, you can also wrangle your dog with them:

Someone has the snow crazies.

Now, don't go around thinking that I'm finishing things left and right around here. These mittens were done at the end of November, and I was just too lazy to gift them in a timely manner. So while I was putting off a trip to the post office, I made this hat:

This is the Star Crossed hat, another free pattern I found on Ravelry. It is a slouchy hat, and I actually looked pretty good in it. But alas, these knits were not for me. I finally got off my butt last week and sent them to Kate, who has a very, very early morning commute on the el. Just thinking about her commute makes me want to hide under the covers. But I think these will keep her toasty warm, even if she's just teaching pilates, not running away from vampires.

Both the hat and mittens were made out of Malabrigo in the Paris Night colorway. The hat was worsted weight; the mittens, chunky. You will also notice that even though they are the same colorway, they're nowhere near each other in actual color. That was kind of a fun surprise.

I have less than half a skein of the worsted yet and I'm not quite sure what to do with it. I was hoping to make myself a hat, but I'm about 10 oz. too short, and my enormous head would not do well with a small hat. So back to the drawing board. It needs to be something worn close to the skin - Malabrigo truly is delightfully soft.

Believe me, I still love the sweater, and I promise to show you pictures once it gets to its intended recipient. But nothing makes me more mad than poorly written knitting patterns with no technical editing. And this change to the pattern? Occurs every eighth row. I just spent six hours sewing this thing together - there is no way I'm tinking down to lose a cable.

Agh!

Anyway, I want to show you this hat.

Last year, my sister-in-law told me she wanted a flapper hat. Around the same time, Twist Collective came out with Dietrich. A match made in heaven! This was intended to be a Christmas gift, but, well, felting and I have a long, sordid history of hating each other. I knit knit knit (after I quilted, quilted, quilted) up until 11:58 on December 23. Then I spent two hours trying to felt this stupid thing in my in-law's washing machine. Their washing machine is like the Rolls Royce of washing machines and is very gentle even in the "heavy dirt" load. The hat wasn't having it. Justin and I gave up and went to bed around 2 a.m., after I had rummaged about in the kitchen for a bowl on which to shape the hat. I'm afraid my sister-in-law may have stumbled out of the living room and into the kitchen only to see me with a bowl on my head.

The hat had shrunk a little, but it was definitely Mushmouth territory. Embarrassed, I had to give it to her unfinished, then immediately took it back and brought it home for another six cycles in the washer. Once it dried, I attempted to attach the ribbon with glue, but that just wasn't working. I turned to my current flame, the sewing machine.

The felted wool actually went through the machine very smoothly. I'll think we're still in our honeymoon phase after all the sewing I've done recently. Then I hand-stitched the button on, and tada! Not-so-instant hat.

(Sorry for the lack of makeup and, uh, Justin's sweatshirt. Last week was a little rough.)

I'm really pleased with how the hat turned out. I made the largest size, and I probably could have gotten away with the next size down. Also, the hat sits really low over your face, so if you were inclined to leave out a few rows of stockinette, you'd still have plenty of length.

All right, I've calmed down. All of this hat-talk has made me realize what I like less than errata - felting. (Dude, just talk me OUT of it next time, okay?)

Fact: When I got my first set of crochet hooks, back when I was 14 or so, it came with a Tunisian hook. I had no idea what it was, but I've kept it through all of my moves over the years. You never know when you'll need a long crochet hook with a knitting-needle stopper.

I found a good video on YouTube here. It's really very intuitive and once I watched the videos, I just picked up some yarn and did it. It does feel strange to crochet again - my right hand and arm were trembling while I tried to make my muscles remember the steps. I'm going to do some squares for Ron's Blanket swap, which need to be sent in a few weeks. This will be my fourth round of participation - maybe I'll have enough squares for an actual blanket!

28 things to do while I'm 28

1. Finish the wedding quilt.

2. Finish the triangle quilt.

3. Ride bikes with Justin.

4. Sew the grey and pink fleece coat.

5. Design and knit my Weasley sweater.

6. Make Elizabeth Zimmerman's modified yoke/raglan/whatever sweater.

7. Sew another skirt. Maybe two.

8. Finish all 3 lingering UFOs

9. Knit a sweater for Justin.

10. Knit 20% of my yarn stash, including any new additions.

11. Spin 30% of my fiber stash, including any new additions.

12. Read all of the Anne of Green Gables books.

13. Take a cooking class.

14. Read the Chronicles of Narnia books.

15. Beat Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on Gamecube.

16. Train Gracie to be a therapy dog.

17. Repaint the concession wall in the bedroom

18. Spin and knit a sweater.

19. Create a series (at least three pieces) of art quilts.

20. Finish the first draft of my story.

21. Complete the first cross stitch I ever started (8th grade?).

22. Complete and submit the first level of the Master Knitter's program.

23. Get new furniture for the family room.

23a. Do not kill Justin in the process of above.

24. Construct some sort of anti-squirrel contraption in the vegetable garden.

25. Take a long weekend vacation with Justin.

26. Learn Tunision crochet

27. Learn to embroider

28. Re-open my Etsy store