Posie Gets Cozy

A Meringue Scarf

I ran into this gorgeous photo on-line yesterday while looking to make a frothy, laceweight scarf. This is the Alpine Frost Scarf  from the Interweave Crochet Winter 2008 issue. It's crocheted, and designed by the talented Amy O'Neill Houck. I ordered the back issue of the magazine, but was too impatient to wait for it to come, so I kept looking on-line for something that felt like this. Eventually I stumbled upon the cuddly Claudia Scarf from Rebecca at  A Little Slice of Life. Heavier, but still: deliciousness. While there, I also saw the beautiful Winterberry Warmer with its three perfectly rustic buttons and I went right to my shelf and got the special little glass-topped tin of three fancy buttons that my friend Shelly brought back from France for me a few years ago. Yes, that was it: I wanted to capture the feeling of those buttons in my scarf. So I thought: a flourish of cashmere, delicate and frothy, but still soft and warm.

I was remembering the cream-colored cashmere I had seen the other day at our very lovely new LYS, Happy Knits. So I put my shoes on, headed down there, and instead wound up with Malabrigo Lace Baby Merino (in #63 Natural). It's sooooo soft and light you can barely feel it — 470 yards in 50 grams (or not even two ounces) of yarn! But it still has a lovely matte sort of texture, and definitely looks like wool, which is what keeps it all from being too precious or, worse, shiny-fussy. This is the lightest weight yarn I have ever worked with — my first laceweight anything, actually. It feels like something a field mouse would spin into a warm little nest for herself. A confection. A wool meringue.

Funny how things are inspired by and connected to other things, then almost unavoidably change as you go along. With a B hook, the Claudia pattern, and some peppermint tea, I settled into the sofa and set to work, thinking that I really shouldn't be keeping this for myself, with Christmas coming and all. But I may not be able to give it up. (And to those who asked about my coy crochet from last week, that is definitely a present for a special person, so more details on that to come.)

Coy Crochet

I feel a lot better about everything after yesterday. I hit the ground running and . . . am almost completely done with all of my Christmas shopping.

I'll just give you a minute to picture yourself bopping me in the nose.

I know, I've grossed even myself out with this blatant display of organization, foresight, and self-satisfaction. But I can highly recommend it. The stores were so empty that at one point I had all three employees at P______'s cheerfully fussing over packaging my presents for me. Everyone was so friendly and helpful. I stuck to my budget. There were no lines and no hassles. Perhaps this is more a reflection of the state of our economy than it is on Christmas shopping on a Thursday afternoon in mid-November, but still: I like to think we were all genuinely having a good time out there!

Because I do love Christmas shopping. I always have. Every year on Christmas Eve day I'd go with my dad to North Riverside to SERVICE MERCHANDISE (anyone remember this awesome place? It just popped into my head and I haven't thought about it in years — my dad totally loved that store) or the Oak Park mall (which used to be a pedestrian mall but is now just downtown Oak Park). He'd buy his presents for my mom and a special present for each of us girls then. That's when there was still a Kroch's & Brentano's and a Marshall Fields downtown. We'd stop at Cozy Corner for lunch, which was like one of those traditional hamburger/club-sandwich/tuna-salad restaurants. Monte-cristo/coffee-in-a-scratched-white-mug/sixty-year-old waitress-in-a-half-apron restaurants. And then when we got home he'd send me upstairs to wrap everything, even my own present. (Classic.) But I miss buying presents for my dad. And I really miss getting presents from him, because shopping was something he only did on that one day a year, and I knew he looked forward to it, and there was something rare and special about getting something that he had picked out just for me. The green horse statue. The Lapis Lazuli necklace with the gold butterfly. The blue heart-shaped earring dish. The Pavlova perfume. I still have all of those things, given to me decades ago.

This year I am going to (coyly) make just a few special presents by hand. Not too many, though. That would not be in keeping with the New Non-psycho Alicia.

Works in Progress

(Crochet hook case made by my dear friend Megan, though she is no longer making them.)

1. Midnight blue corduroy skirt with pockets and running stitches FINISHED

2. Olive-green weird corduroy skirt with pockets and running stitches

3. Rust colored corduroy skirt with you guessed it

4. Pink and purple striped socks

5. Peach, brown, and cream Fair Isle socks

6. Blue, brown, and cream Fair Isle socks (no relation)

7. Blue Fair Isle sweater

8. Pink Fair Isle sweater

9. Crocheted smocked baby dress

10. Stripey wristwarmers (smaller) FINISHED

11. Three Autumnhouse pillows (like Summerhouse Pillows but for winter) SCRAPPED

12. Christmas present for someone related to me that reads this blog FINISHED

13. Christmas present for someone else related to me that reads this blog FINISHED

14. Christmas present for someone else related to me that doesn't read this blog but who is getting the same thing as the other two so I still can't say FINISHED

15. Other family Christmas presents I haven't decided on yet SCRAPPED

16. Andy's Christmas present

17. Book

Too much. Something's gotta give. These are not all for Christmas — it's just a list of everything that I have started. But still.

The other night Andy came upstairs and said, "Violet's in your yarn bowl.

Me [pausing]: "My what?"

He [enunciating]: "Your yarn bowl. Go down and see."

So I went down there.

Oh. Violet's in my yarn bowl.

Stripey Wristwarmers

Thank you so very kindly for all of your lovely comments on our forest walk. I love walking it twice like that. These stripey wristwarmers inspired by Lucy's would have been perfect for the walk, but I didn't start them until Sunday. I finished them on Monday and gave them to my mom today — they were too long for me, after all, but just what she wanted, apparently. Awesome! I thought I wanted them long but they weren't really tight enough to stay up. I chained more stitches at the start than Lucy had, 'cause I was thinking I wanted them to go a lot higher (and so needed to be wider), and then I decreased a few times to taper them toward the wrist, but I think overall I compensated too much because they didn't stay up and got too baggy. I am now making a new, shorter pair for myself, and going with 35 stitches, as Lucy did. Why didn't I just listen to Lucy in the first place, right? I know. But now my mama has a nice pair of wristwarmers, too, so it's all good.

Do you know how to make half-double crocheted ribbing? This is a very good video on how to do it! You crochet lots of short rows, then pick up new stitches along the side edge (which is now the top edge of the ribbing). Use a smaller hook than the yarn calls for. In fact, a lot of the yarn I used in these wristwarmers was Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino, and although I frequently use an F hook with that, I am using a C (2.5mm) hook on this second pair. (First pair I used a D, and I think I want them even denser this time.) I don't know how people are getting good photos of themselves in gloves! I couldn't do it, no matter how I tried. (Granted, I didn't try all that hard — after three tries I was done. But they were totally blurry.)

Did you see that show about apples (and other plants that have made themselves important to us) last night? Wasn't that cool? Our apple-tree plans are on hold until spring, it turns out — since our nursery doesn't even have any dwarf apple trees in stock right now anyway! Ha!

And then things got a lot, lot lazier.

"Hi."

Forecast: Cold and Rainy

All morning, the rain has been pelting the windows, making our already-dark, north-facing little house almost as dark as night. I wove around the place, turning on little lamps in several corners, justifying the extra use of electricity by deciding that if it helps keep me off the funny farm with a severe case of seasonal affective disorder, it'll still be cheaper and less of a drain on the planet's resources. I love fall, but I find the beginning of the rainy season in the Northwest really challenging some years. If the rain hits — as it seems to be doing this moring — just as the leaves on the trees are looking their most beautiful, it frequently knocks them off the trees and to the ground in one fell swoop. Within a day or two, people have raked them up and carted many of them off, lest they turn into heaping piles of slimy, slick, slug-housing sub-divisions. And then that's sort of it. Sigh. Rain is forecast for every day this week.

We did get in a glorious walk in the woods on Saturday, before the rain started. I took over a hundred photos, so I will work on those today and share them later this week. On Sunday, we had planned to get our apple tree, but I just couldn't seem to budge from the sofa, where I was starting a pair of stripey crocheted fingerless gloves like the amazing Lucy's. Thank you ever so much for all the awesome apple-tree advice — our plans are moved to next weekend, which will give me a little more time to decide. I love the taste of Gala apples, and am also leaning toward a Red Fuji, and am also now thinking, because of your comments, that maybe we'll just go for a full-size tree instead of a dwarf. I like the look of espaliered trees, but we don't really have the right kind of wall for that right now. Our walls are in use, and one of them isn't even technically ours, so that idea might have to wait.

When I returned to the sofa after lighting the lamps this morning, Missy V. had made herself quite at home on my pile of yarn. There are four or five skeins smashed underneath her, too. Probably a good thing: In the past few weeks I was too busy to get some stuff done (update book list, change banner, upload new PDFs, answer email, etc.), and then after that I was just too lazy. And then I started the painting so I was too obsessed. And now that the rain has started I am too . . . lazy again. I just want to sit in front of the fireplace and crochet, though it's hard to do that when your cat is lying on top of most of your yarn.

She looks so cozy. But I'll do something else. I'll do it for you, Violet Paulson.

8:12 a.m.

Evidence of coffee.

Sometimes I leave it unmade. Sometimes I need to know that it's been made.

My first attempt at fair isle. I think it's pretty good.

New nightie.

Guest room.

Will be in use tomorrow.

Er, like I said, I was excited.

I'm kind of embarrassed to say that I only started this last night when I got home at 8:30 p.m., and I've been doing it all day. It's ten to five.

I would stay and chat, but I gotta keep incessantly stuffing little blobs of wool through a big piece of burlap. I can't stop.

My spouse noticed the crazed look in my eye (he knows me), and is now in the kitchen making Bolognese sauce so that there's something to eat at some point today.

Vintage Crochet

I'm so pleased to be a part of this beautiful book, Vintage Crochet: 30 Gorgeous Designs for Home * Garden * Fashion* Gifts. My friend Susan Cropper, the owner of Loop, a beautiful yarn store in London, here has collected designs from some of my favorite crochet designers (including my friends fellow Pacific Northwesterners Kristeen Griffin-Grimes and Leigh Radford), and I am honored to be included.

I "met" Susan over the phone, two years ago now when she called to order my crochet patterns to carry in her shop, and she has been an enthusiastic and generous supporter of my work. In the first conversation we had, she asked if I would design a grown-up version of the Cecily baby cardigan, and so it is here in the book now, named Millie, done in Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran and decorated with Liberty cotton-lawn ties. This is the photo from the book, taken by Kristin Perers. I love the way she has styled and photographed everything. Isn't this photo so pretty? I love it. Everything in the book has this very calm, hazy mellowness about it.

I also designed another baby cardigan for the book, a little matinee coat we called the Maisie Cardigan, inspired by the angelic hellebore flower. This one is made from Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino. I haven't seen anyone make this one up yet, but now that I have finally gotten on board with Ravelry.com (have you heard of Ravelry yet? oh my stars!) I can't wait to see what people do with it there. (More on Ravelry soon; in the meantime, if you are a knitter or crocheter, please go on over and sign up to receive an invitation to join. Don't be put off by the enormous number of people waiting; I think mine came in just a couple of weeks, and I know those guys are working as fast as they can to include everyone in this incredible community. Take the tour and see what I'm talking about. Very cool.)

Also, for all of the people who were wanting to make a ripple blanket like the ones Jane and I made last year (and a lot of other people made and are still making!), there is a pattern in Vintage Crochet for you to use — the Chevron Blanket by Bee Clinch will make you very happy. She gives you yardage for a few colors and some good notes. Other patterns that I love are Juju's dog coat, Kate's Breakfast Set tea cozy by Kate Samphier, and the Rickrack Kerchief by Juju Vail.

There are two editions of the book; the one with the blanket on the cover (above) uses American abbreviations, and the one with the girl on the front uses British. The covers and abbreviations are different, but the patterns are the same in each edition. Also, be sure to check the errata page on the Loop web site — the Millie Cardigan has a couple of changes (seriously sorry!), and so do a few other patterns. (And please note, I will be keeping errata on my published patterns and books here on my web site next to their listings so please check there if you're ever frustrated by something that just doesn't look right, and let me know if you find something that hasn't been caught yet.)

Polly Beret

If you have your own mannequin head (you don't?), you are frequently inspired to think about hats, for obvious reasons. Whenever I see someone wearing a beret, it always makes me wonder where they're going. Field trip to the Art Institute? Pennywhistle lessons? Ice-cream social? Beret-wearers have a certain insouciance that I admire.

I've been wanting to make a simple crocheted beret for a while and this one that I made over the weekend is pretty much exactly what I was going for. Needless to say, that's a miracle. The yarn is Suri Merino in this woodsy, heathery green. They say it's a worsted weight but it seemed a little lighter than that to me? Probably just me. Anyway, it's beautiful yarn. Nevertheless, I'm remaking it in DK as I fuss with the pattern (and thank you to the people who have already written and offered to test this — I'll finish the pattern today or this weekend and pass it along to you) because I am just loving the cashmere-blend DKs out there right now and can't stop using them. Thank you, manufacturers, for making more of these for us! Good on ya.

Coooold out again! Snow, I will still take you, if you'd oblige, especially for the weekend. It's not supposed to snow, according to the forecast, but if you see a girl wearing this beret pretending to catch snowflakes on her mittens while walking the dog, that's just me.