So! I seem to have lost an entire month. And no offense, February, but you're a month I think I could afford to lose.

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.

The sweater has been received and now I can unveil it's squishy, cabled goodness.

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?

...this is the mitten you would make.

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.

I know you're not supposed to blog when you're angry, but here I am, ANGRY. I just finished a knit that I've been working on for quite awhile. It's all cabled and it's really quite beautiful, but something was off with the cable - it didn't match the picture. I just posted the finished details on Ravelry and learned that errata for the pattern came out AFTER I started the sweater (and the book has been in print for quite awhile). I am an angry little beaver.

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?)

I've spent the past few days fussing with my new best friend - a beautiful, shiny, brand new HP Pavillion, completely with 20" screen. It was a combination Christmas/birthday gift (18 days!) from my parents. I adore it. It's fast and the CPU doesn't sound like it's going to take flight at any minute. It will make working from home even more of a pleasure than it already is. Also, I am completely enamored with Windows 7.

I have still found time to plug away at some knitting, mostly some wee knitting that really needs to get done before the wee recipient becomes not-so-wee. While I fiddle with cables upon cables, let's take a peek at the last of my commission knitting.

Kirsten gave me very specific instructions when she asked for this scarf/mitten combo. "The scarf should be long, but not too long. Make the mittens plain. And everything in white and very, very soft."

Huh. This took a bit of thinking - what will the recipient like, what will Kirsten like, and what do I actually want to knit? I came up with this:

This is Grumperina's Shifting Sands pattern. I knit mine with worsted instead of sport weight. Encore made the cut - soft, but not too delicate to stand up to being zipped inside a coat (or caught in a zipper). I loved making this scarf and would gladly knit the pattern again and again. I think it only took me five or so days to finish it - I cast off while waiting for Justin to return with the car.

As for length...well, I'm not really sure how long it turned out. I used a full two skeins of Encore and stopped because I ran out of yarn. I think it goes around the neck a few times but certainly isn't floor-length.

The mittens were more of a difficult knit. I needed soft yarn, really soft, something delicious but not overly expsensive. After about an hour at the yarn shop (I hadn't purchased yarn in so long that it was like I forgot how to do it) and a very patient shopping-buddy, I settled on Berroco's Inca Gold. KNITTERS OF THE WORLD: If you ever have a chance to knit with Inca Gold, DO IT. It was buttery soft, nicely plied, and held up to repeated ripping. I want a sweater out of it. Hell, I want an entire wardrobe of it, right down to footie pajamas.

I'd been wanting to make Elizabeth Zimmerman's Mitered Mittens for awhile, so I gave it a go. These instructions were certainly pithy, as promised, but also only a paragraph long. A small paragraph. There was a lot of thinking involved.

Not that they were hard. Quite the opposite. But you have to make decisions, like where you're going to snip a thread and insert a thumb. I put in the first thumb late one night while watching Goodfellas; the other appeared on my parents' couch four days before Christmas.

In EZ's original pattern, you knit the mitten straight. No thumb gusset, no waste yarn, nothing. Then you put on the mitten, decide where the thumb is going to start, and cut a stitch. You ravel a few stitches on either side, pick up those free stitches, and start knitting a little tube. It's a very simple method of thumb-making, especially if you're doing these on the road or in a place where you can't be bothered to count, but the thumb itself ends up making the rest of the mitten a little off-kilter when worn.

You only notice it on the palms, but see how the thumb skews the straight line of decreases? It's a little weird, and despite my efforts to change, I'm a very symmetry-oriented person (I have to pet the dog on both sides of her head or else I just feel unfinished.). I'm definitely going to make these again - for myself, out of Silk Garden Lite - but I'm going to do Kathryn Ivy's thumb gusset mod. (When I searched Ravelry for examples of these mittens, most of them had this mod - hardly anyone had done the afterthought thumb.) I'm glad I did the afterthought thumb because it was something new and a little scary, but in the past few weeks, cutting my knitting has lost its thrill. We'll have to talk about that later.