"Nothing Happened"

I kept diaries off and on when I was a kid. Sometimes I'd have trouble thinking of something to write about. Sometimes, the day was just boring. And sometimes I'd miss several days, and I would be stuck with blank pages with the dates printed at the top. On these days I would simply write "Nothing happened."

Over the last two weeks I broke my New Year's Resolution and didn't write a blog post. So if you're wondering about last week, don't worry. Nothing happened.

For the past two and a half weeks I've been house sitting for the third time since January. This time it was for Lyndsey's family. That's part of the reason I didn't blog. Since all my pain issues started, I've had trouble finding a comfortable place to use my laptop. With all the furniture in Lyndsey's house, I couldn't find a spot comfortable enough to use my computer for long periods of time. And blogging takes time.

I did take some pictures. Here are:



Mercy,




Kelly




and Lady.

I also took this picture one evening of the view from their deck. I wish it turned out a little better:





I included my latest knitting project, which I somehow managed not to blog despite all the progress I've made. Remember the sweater I was dreaming of that I eventually decided would be an Adult Surprise Jacket?





I present the Epic Adult Surprise Jacket. I'm already at the armpits.





You can see pictures of the evolution of the jacket here. Between the four stitches per inch gauge and the six inches of ease, I'm a little worried that it's going to be too bulky. I think it will be ok, since I am aiming for more of a coat than a jacket.

Later on I'll list more details, including the different yarns I'm using. I'm trying very hard to choose yarn that keeps the gauge consistent.

For now, I'll leave you with two things in honor of International Yarnbombing Day. First, a sighting from the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar on Saturday. I made asked Katie, Aaron and Aaron's brother Jacob to pose in front of the pipe with me.





The yarn is very soft. I wonder what they used. It didn't seem to be acrylic, but I didn't have a lot of time to examine it.

Finally, I have more coverage of A Knitted Wonderland. This time it's a short movie is by Sarah E. Gonzalez.

The Trees are Naked! (and a Baby Surprise Jacket update)

All good things much come to an end, and on Friday, March 25, A Knitted Wonderland* ended. That evening Mom and I took down our tree sweater and Dad came to help us carry everything and take pictures.



We had just gotten started when my friend Stephanie saw us while she was walking through the plaza. She works downtown and walks past the Blanton Museum almost everyday. She walks a lot. Recently she walked a marathon. I don't know where she gets the energy.



Anyway, Stephanie stopped to talk, help us take the seam out and take a picture or two. I had started at the bottom of the seam, Mom started at the top and Stephanie jumped in in the middle. It went pretty quickly.



While we were working, we saw one of UT's famous Albino Squirrels. Several people, including Dad, took pictures of it. In fact, Dad took more pictures of the squirrel than he did of the Capitol.



We were one of the last groups to take our tree sweater down. We had a couple of people stop to ask questions and take pictures of our tree. I know at least one group came specifically to see our trees, but they didn't know that that we would already be taking down the tree sweaters. I saw one guy stop and take a picture of Flat Stanley with our tree, which was awesome. I wish I asked him to send me a copy of the picture.



I had a hard time deciding what to do with our sweater. The group in charge collected sweaters from anyone who didn't want to keep them. Half were going back to Magda Sayeg to be unraveled and used for future projects and half were going Emancipet to be unraveled and used to knit dog sweaters. I had considered holding on to ours and using it for a wall hanging. Katie had expressed some interest in keeping it, and she wasn't there to weigh in. It would have been an easy decision if they weren't going to be unraveled.

Finally, with some gentle nudging from Mom and Stephanie, I put it in the Emancipet box. They use old towels and blankets for the animals to snuggle with. I hope if they have too much yarn they'll keep mine intact and give it to a pet. Or maybe I'll see a dog around town wearing my former tree sweater. Maybe they'll keep the flower intact and use it to embellish the sweater.

At any rate, that's one less piece of clutter in my life, and Katie didn't mind that we donated it. And there will always be lots of other chances to make wall hangings. Wall hangings that fit my wall better and don't curl.

All my pictures from "A Knitted Wonderland" are here.


Baby Surprise Jacket Update


My Baby Surprise Jacket grew pretty quickly. Since the last update, I knit the center stitches only for rows 80-99. In rows 100 and 101, I picked up the rest of the stitches, including stitches along the gap you can see in the picture above. The problem with picking up stitches along the gap is that a ridge is created. Because you pick up one side on an odd row and one side on an even row, the ridge is on the outside on one side and the inside on the other side. (Say that last sentence 10 times fast.)



I cast off on row 114. I'm not sure exactly when I did the button holes and how I spaced them out. I lost track of that somewhere along the way.


This is the finished knitting piece before the shoulder seams. I asked Dad to try to fold it in to a sweater to see if he could figure out how. (Elizabeth Zimmerman actually suggests this in her book.)  He did pretty well. He got half the sweater right, but couldn't quite get the other sleeve to do the same thing.


 It took me a while to figure out the best way to do the shoulder seams. I used this tutorial on Pamudom's blog. I think the Yarn Harlot uses the same technique, but I had trouble with her tutorial because it has pictures only. I guess I'm a verbal learner. The one ridge (two rows) to one stitch ratio worked well.



A couple of nights ago I worked on placing the buttons by placing bobby pins where the buttons would be. This gave me a chance to make adjustments. I plan to finish sewing on the buttons tonight.


All my Baby Surprise Jacket pictures are here.



* - Mom, Katie and I volunteered to knit a tree sweater for "A Knitted Wonderland." If you're tuning in late and want to find out more about it, I recommend reading all my tree sweater blog entries.

"A Knitted Wonderland" Part 2 - FO: Tree Sweater

Here is our finished product. Tree 34 with it's sweater and its team, Katie, Aaron, Mom and me.


To recap, this is our tree sweater for A Knitted Wonderland. I recommend reading all my tree sweater blog entries if you missed them the first time. That way you can understand the overall project and see how we got here.

We used the assigned yarns, I Love This Yarn in Orange and Turquoise, Red Heart Kids in Pink and Lion Brand Vanna's Choice in Olive. I used US Size 7 needles for my portion. I don't know what size hook Katie and Mom used for their portions.


I had two sections with cables. I used a the large middle cable from the Braided Cable Scarf by Miriam Felton in the center, and put two simple cables on either side.


Katie used half double crochet for her portion.


Mom used single crochet on her portion, and Aaron helped us sew the whole thing up.

In this picture you can see the button and the crochet flower I added. To make the flower, I used the Little Flowers with Leaves pattern by Mimi Alelis. I wish I had added a few more flowers around the top. I think it would have added interest without being too distracting.


The day after installation day was the official project debut at Explore UT. Katie and Aaron had to work and Mom didn't want to fight the traffic. We were all pretty tired, and Explore UT is a massive event. But I wanted to see my tree in action badly enough to pay for parking and deal with the crowds.

I followed the arrows (like the one above) and caught the last part of Magda Sayeg's talk. I even helped answer an audience member's question about how long it took to make the tree sweaters. (Basically, I said it took me a month to make half of our tree, but it's hard to break that down into hours.)


After the talk I spent some time outside watching our tree to see if we had any tree huggers. I saw a few people take pictures with it, including the woman above. She took a picture of two little girls posing with our tree. This woman took a picture too. And that's just what I saw while I was sitting on a bench.


Some group was filling rubber gloves with helium and handing them out like balloons. They were all over the place. I saw one kid accidentally let go of his glove/balloon under our tree. It ended up stuck in the branches. The boy tried to knock at the balloon by tossing his water bottle at it before he gave up.

It's amazing the sense of ownership that developed after we put the sweater on the tree. I wasn't too worried about the glove/balloon, but I felt like it was my responsibility to do something because it was in my tree.

I wonder if it's still there. It seems like it would have lost helium and fallen out of the tree by now. Or eventually someone in charge of maintaining the campus would have seen it and gotten it out. There's no way I could reach that with my ladder. (Not that I had it with me during Explore UT.)


On Friday, March 18 it all comes down, and that makes me sad. But my family and I got to be part of something really cool. I'm glad I saw the link on Facebook, otherwise I would have missed the whole thing.

There are links about this project all over the Internet. I'll leave you with a link to all of my pictures and some coverage from The Daily Texan.

A Knitted Wonderland from The Daily Texan on Vimeo.

"A Knitted Wonderland" Part 1 - The Installation

Last Friday was installation day for A Knitted Wonderland, and I think I've spent more time uploading pictures to Flickr than I did sewing up the sweater. I have so many pictures, I've decided to share them over two blog entries.


In case you're tuning in late, "A Knitted Wonderland" is the latest project by Magda Sayeg, who is known for her yarn bombing work. In January she invited knitters all over the city to help her cover the 99 trees in front of the Blanton Museum. I've written more about it in greater detail in previous entries.

Mom, Katie, Aaron and I arrived in the afternoon not long after the installation officially began. I packed the leftover yarn, some carefully selected knitting notions, safety pins, water, an old sheet to sit on, sunscreen (that we didn't need) and a ladder.

I couldn't wait to get started when I saw the very first people sewing up their tree sweaters. I went to the front desk to get our tree sweater and signed in at the table. All four of us had to sign waivers, one for using ladders and one allowing people to take our pictures. Apparently someone is filming the process for South by Southwest. They had drinks and cookies, although they went fast.


Mom was the one that suggested safety pins, and that was a good idea. I was thinking we'd baste the sweater, but pinning it was easier. We were told to leave some negative ease, so it was pretty tight. We were worried at first. I knew we'd figure something out. You can see the big gaps here.

But once we started sewing, it started coming together.


We started at the bottom and worked our way up. We could get away with being a little short on top, but not at the bottom. It ended up being about the right length. I found that sewing was easier if we moved the safety pins to close the gaps as we seamed. That way we didn't have to pull together so much fabric at once.


I used the Mattress Stitch on the knitting section, and the stitch was close to invisible. I showed Katie and Aaron how to do the mattress stitch, and they both caught on pretty quickly. (I think Mom already knew. I learned it from The Knitters Book of Finishing Techniques a while back.) I think Aaron did a big chunk of the seam in this picture. We took turns sewing, so I've lost track of who did what.

As you can see, we just whip stitched the crocheted sections. We didn't know any awesome techniques for seaming crochet.


Getting the seam straight was easier because we pinned the tree sweater first. You can see Mom straightening out the tree sweater here.

Despite all our measurements, the tree is kind of unpredictable with all it's knots and bumps. There's one area in particular where my cable looks pregnant. But that's part of the fun, and knitting is forgiving.

There was one team* that managed to get everything almost perfect. I wish the picture I took wasn't so blurry. They made a little "skirt" at the bottom and left a hole for an especially large knot. They may have been the only team to use all ribbing, which is smart. Ribbing will stretch as much or as little as you need it to. I was impressed. We weren't nearly that precise.

Off and on we all took breaks and went to run around and see the other trees. I ran into Alicia from the Austin Meetup Group sewing the tree sweater for her team. I also saw Sandra Singh and helped her find a tree 55. She took our picture and put it on her blog.


I have all my pictures here. I'm going to share some of my favorites, like the one above. This team added sleeves to their tree "sweater."


This tree has a different stitch pattern for every color. We debated doing something similar, but I don't think we could have gotten it this uniform.


I really like this one. This group managed to do a lot of colorwork while following the guidelines.

I also saw stripes within stripes, people with matching accessories and a snake. I wish I could have taken a picture of every single tree.


I was worried that we wouldn't finish in time, but we got to the top faster than I expected. For the record, I did do some work from the ladder. I couldn't reach up this high for very long because of the pain from the pinched nerve, but I wanted to say I did it. (Mom did most of the work from the ladder.) I was really worried that I wouldn't be able to do this because of the pain. Of course, frequent breaks, three people to help sew and carry everything and a Flector Patch helped.


At dusk, we were finished, and we had time to spare. Installation was blast. I talked to so many people. Two men visiting from New York asked us a bunch of questions about the whole project, and several knitters complimented my cables. We had a great tree ready for Saturday.

And Saturday is a story for another entry.


* - I'm assuming these were teams. I know a few people knit entire trees all by themselves, but most people worked in groups.

Tomorrow is Tree Day!

Tomorrow is the installation day for A Knitted Wonderland , and I'm both excited and nervous about sewing up our tree sweater.


I blogged about the project about a month ago when we were still putting it together. A couple of weeks ago we finished our sweater and dropped it off at the Blanton Museum. But not before we took lots of pictures.


As planned, I knit two 21-inch pieces, Katie crocheted one and Mom crocheted one. This should cover seven feet of tree.


I was the one who sewed the whole thing together. Overall, I think I did a good job, especially when you account for having to sew the knitting and crochet together and the small differences in length and tension. I don't think there is a name for the sewing technique I used.

I have pictures of the other two seams as well. There's another fairly neat seam, and there is a messier seam where my cast on was too loose.


I also added a button and a crocheted button like I mentioned before. They are sewed at the top of the tree sweater, so they shouldn't be too distracting. For the flower, I used the Little Flowers with Leaves pattern by Mimi Alelis. I'm pretty sure the button was once on a pair of my pants, since it has "Venezia" embossed on it.


I managed to mess up Mom's piece. Apparently I sewed it "wrong side out." I'm adding quotation marks to that phrase because I had no idea that single crochet worked in rows had a wrong side. If you look closely, the rows line up into nice pairs. Mom made a point of changing colors between those pairs to avoid breaking them up. Since those pairs of rows are staggered, the pairs are broken up on the other side. On this picture you see the right sided folded over onto the wrong side.

If you can't see the difference, I don't blame you. It took a while for me to wrap my head around it. Basically, my Mom is a perfectionist.


All three of us will be out at the Blanton tomorrow putting this thing up. If you have any tips, let me know. I'm not sure whether to start at the top or the bottom of this thing. We're planning to sew it up, but I may bring a crochet hook just in case. (They've officially said no to zip ties.)

I've never sewn anything together while balancing on a ladder before, and I'm still hurting. I don't know if we're all planning to sew, or if one person is going to sew while everyone else helps hold things in place and steady the ladder. We haven't gotten that far yet.


The installation is officially "open" on Saturday, March 5 as part of Explore UT. The Austin American Statesman had a special section for the event in the paper today, and it included a blurb about "A Knitted Wonderland."

So come for the knitting, stay for... just about anything else you can imagine. Seriously. There's a really long list of activities for Saturday. Go check it out.

Parting Shot
When I wrote about my Centipede Scarf, I forgot to include my favorite picture in my favorite pose. I guess it's better late than never. Enjoy.

WIP: Tree Sweater

You may have read about A Knitted Wonderland in the Austin American Statesman on Monday. I found out about it on Facebook in January, but I'm just now getting around to blogging about it.

"A Knitted Wonderland" is a project by Magda Sayeg, who you may know from her Knitta, Please work and/or her installation on Lamar Boulevard. Heather Sutherland of the Knotty Knitters Club is helping organize the event.

The idea is to cover the 99 trees in front of The Blanton Museum of Art with "tree sweaters." Everyone has to use I Love This Yarn in Orange and Turquoise, Red Heart Kids in Pink and Lion Brand Vanna's Choice in Olive, and everyone has to make horizontal stripes.

And I'm working on tree number 34.


I almost didn't make the meeting for volunteer knitters because I found out about it the night before, and I wasn't able to drive at that point. Fortunately, Katie has a parking permit that allows her to park a few blocks away from the Blanton. At the last minute, she agreed to take me and be part of the project. She even ran to grab a tree for us since she can move a lot faster than I can these days, and there were more knitters than trees. (Also, I finally met Noelle in person after years of talking to her online. I was able to lag behind and talk to her while Katie was in line.)

After getting our assignment, we took pictures with our tree. Unfortunately, both Katie and I had our eyes closed. Then we took some measurements before heading out. Our tree is about seven feet tall.


Here is an early picture of our work. The crochet is Katie's, and mine is the knitting. We had some bumps in the road getting started. At first we were both passing our knitting back and forth. Each of us was going to use a different stitch. (That's why there's the beginning of some basket weave at the bottom of the knitting.) Finally, we decided to sew together four pieces and make a Frankensteiny creation. Katie is more comfortable with crochet, and this way she can crochet and I can knit.

Originally, I was going to make two pieces, and Katie was going to make two pieces. However, Katie got busy once the new semester started, so we got Mom to work on one of the pieces.


These are my finished sections of the tree sweater. I got through them pretty quickly. You can see all four colors here.

I'm not sure why these particular colors were chosen. For a while all the yarn was pretty much sold out in Austin. The "I Love This Yarn" was especially hard to find, since it's only sold at Hobby Lobby. Everyone received a skein of the pink when they got their tree assignment, and Mom snagged the Vanna's Choice the next day, so we started with those two colors.



The knitters in charge are trying to allow everyone to be creative with their tree while maintaining a cohesive vision. At the meeting there were lots of questions about style. They don't want lots of visual holes, so crochet needs to be half double crochet or smaller. They recommended no needles smaller than US Size 13. Chevrons are ok. Other stitch patterns are ok.

I asked about embellishments like knitted or crocheted flowers or buttons. They said they didn't want too many. Then they kept responding to everyone else's questions by saying "that's better than flowers or buttons." Katie and I would look at each other every time they mentioned it. After all that, I think I need to include one button and one flower. I'll probably put it at the very top of the tree.

The embellishment thing was no big deal to me because I had cables in mind before I left the meeting. When I got home I decided to use the middle cable from the Braided Cable Scarf by Miriam Felton, and flanked it with two simple, symmetrical cables.

FYI - The "cross 2 over 2 right/purl bg" and "cross 2 over 2 left/purl bg" in Miriam Felton's pattern tripped me up. Both refer to knitting the "middle" stitch off the cable needle. Felton is referring to the stitch farthest to left of the cable needle (as you are facing your knitting.) I messaged her directly on Ravelry. This was her response:

"It’s the center stitch of the whole cable, not the center stitch of the ones on the cable needle. Effectively the cable looks like this before you cross it: ||-|| where the - is the purl stitch in the center of the cable and the | are knit stitches. You cross the knit stitches over each other, but the purl will remain in the same place. You just have to move it to the cable needle first so it doesn’t get tangled in the knit stitches."

This is Katie's portion. She tried something different for the first few rows, then she settled on half double crochet. She's done some more work since this was taken.

When she first started it was wider than she had calculated, so she decreased rather than unravel everything. Sewing up this tree will cover a lot of sins. Considering that plastic zip ties were mentioned at the meeting (but discouraged), I don't think they'll notice a little fudging on the seams.
I worked on the piece at the very base, so I started wide, and got more narrow to account for the change in circumference. I ended up decreasing too much and had to increase to compensate. So I did the same thing Katie did.


Mom chose crochet over knitting so it would go faster. She's using single crochet. Here's her piece as of yesterday.

"A Knitted Wonderland" will debut during Explore UT on Saturday, March 5, and it will be up until Saturday, March 19. Go check it out.