Author: Lorette

My name is Lorette. I learned to knit in 1999, and took up spinning in 2009. I'm a physician specializing in internal medicine, and live in the Pacific Northwest. Enjoy my blog!

Coming up for air

Or,

Finished Project

I really didn’t intend to disappear for a month. Like everyone else on the planet, it has been a crazy town couple of months. Work is nuts, but at least I have work. I’ve had zero social life, but at least I have a great place to live, and lots of online friends to commiserate with. And I don’t live alone, I have a terrific husband who has helped to keep me from losing my mind.

Here’s the thing that was finished:

Project Details:

  • Yarn: Acme Fibres Merino Superwash fingering
  • Pattern: Amalthea, from Anne Hanson
  • Needles: 3.25 mm
  • Started: July 15, 2020
  • Finished: November 21,2020
  • For: Baby Zane, my newest grandnephew
  • Modifications: None, other than the occasional screwup.
  • Project Rating: ***** for both pattern and yarn. Acme primarily sells undyed yarn, but the cream works beautifully for baby things.

One last photo, since I don’t finish something (or post) every day.

The pattern is easy to follow, no glitches that I ran across. While this isn’t a beginner project, if you have some experience with lace, it is a pretty easy pattern. The whole center is just garter stitch, and the lace edging is a simple repetitive lace pattern. The only part that challenged my brain a bit was the short row corners on the edging.

Marching band

I finally rounded the third corner on my deadline-knitting-baby-blanket. My husband just came up with the best explanation of short rows ever.

The body of this is a big square, knit out from the center. When you finish that, you turn the thing on it’s side and knit the edging back and forth all the way around. The corners are mitered so it ends up flat when you are done. There are various ways to do that, this pattern uses short rows to add more fabric at the corners.

I laid this out and was explaining this to John. He got up off the couch, and with an “ah-ha” look, said (and mimed) “it’s like you are at the inside corner of a marching band turning a 90 degree corner”.

Exactly.

New socks!

I finished these earlier today. The yarn is Three Irish Girls McClellan fingering, which is a wool/bamboo blend. It’s my usual basic sock recipe, knit on 2 mm needles.

Next up is more WYS (West Yorkshire Spinners) socks. I have a bunch of this yarn already stashed away, but saw this recently and couldn’t say no.

Aren’t those pretty fall colors? The yarn name is what got me, though. It’s Hope, as in, I Hope the pandemic settles down soon. And, I Hope (HOPE!) that next week’s election results in a landslide win for the Biden/Harris team.

The little bag is very cute as well.

You can buy your own Hope yarn here.

And now for something completely different…

First of all, thank you all for the sweet condolences on our loss of Lewey. A million things every day remind us of him, but in a lovely, happy way. We don’t know yet if there will be another pup in our future, it is just too early to decide that.

So here’s what’s new in the Knitting Doctor world.

I joined TKGA (the Knitting Guild of America) last week sort of on a whim. I’ve been curious about their Master Handknitting certification program for a long time, but figured I needed a block of time free to do all the work for that. My friend Dorothy completed this earlier this year, and it inspired me to look at this a little more seriously.

I am retiring as of February 1st next year, just a little over 3 months from now. I turn 65 next fall, and was planning on a late spring retirement, but moved it up recently for all sorts of reasons. So now I’ll have that big block of time, with no further excuses!

I decided to start smaller. TKGA has a number of terrific looking “correspondence courses” that are much less involved that the full certification process, the one I have signed up for is Basics, Basics, Basics. It is just what it sounds like. I have the first lesson in hand, as well as the yarn, and will get organized and start working on this in the coming months. After reading through the materials, as well as a bunch of things on their website, I’m already starting to look at my knitting more critically, which is the whole point. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to have my biggest hurdles with even tension and finishing techniques.

In the meantime, I have a baby blanket to finish.

The lace edge is knitted on around the garter stitch square, I’ve finished half of it. It’s a bazillion repeats, with short row sections around the corners, which is something new for me. I have been under the misinformation that the baby is due about a month before it really is, so I have a bit of a grace period. This should be a rule for family babies. Just tell me it’s due the first of November when it really isn’t, and I might finish the project before the kid gets his driver’s license.

That’s all I have. I hope your new week starts out well. I’ll leave you all with one last Lewey photo.

Lewey

Our sweet boy Lewey left us earlier this week. He was a few months away from being 14, so while it wasn’t exactly a surprise, it has been a tough week. He was such a sweet, funny boy. That photo is fairly recent, here are some older memories.

And that’s all I have to say about that. It’s still pretty sad around here without him.

I’m going to try to be better about posting, I’m blaming my lack of motivation on the mess that is 2020.

Plenty

It is that time of year again, when the patio tomatoes start to get ripe. We have a bumper crop; that is just some of them in that photo. We’ve been putting tomatoes in everything we eat, but it was time to face the fact that we aren’t going to eat all of those before they go bad. Not to mention the trays full that are still on the vines.

Today is roast tomato day. The larger ones will go into tomato sauce for the freezer, but a lot of these are getting roasted.

Those are the smaller and medium sized tomatoes, cut in half or quarters. I tossed them with olive oil and salt and pepper, then put fresh thyme on top and stuck them in the oven on low heat (300 on my oven, which tends to run cool). They’ll sit in there until they are collapsed and look like sun dried tomatoes.

These will go in stews and soups and such, much of the fall. I’m going to freeze some, though I’ve not done that before and don’t know how well they’ll keep that way.

The bigger ones will live for another day. I plan on making a rustic tomato sauce/purée which definitely WILL go into the freezer for fall and winter meals.

And supper will be this tonight.

That is a tomato tart with pesto and ricotta. That very one up there was dinner last week, it was so good that we’re making it again. It couldn’t be easier. Here is the recipe, it is from NY Times Cooking. This tastes sort of like the world’s best pizza, if you were asked to make pizza and didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to be made with a puff pastry crust. It is divine, and relatively healthy.*

Enough about tomatoes. I’m going to find a comfy spot to read and knit for the afternoon. It would be a gorgeous summer day if it weren’t for all the smoke from the fires out there. I stepped outside once this morning when the mail came, and almost couldn’t breathe. The fires in Washington have been awful, though nothing serious has come “we-gotta-get-out-of-here” close yet. And the wind has died down, which should help with fire control a lot. Stay safe if the fires are close to where you are.

*Relatively, considering it starts with puff pastry that likely has a bazillion pounds of butter in it.

A Dickensian weekend

I am reading Mariana, by Monica Dickens. This was republished a few years ago by Persephone Books. If you haven’t discovered Persephone, you should. It’s a London bookshop that specializes in republishing books by relatively unknown women authors from the 20th century. So far they have published 137 books. I have several on my bookshelves, and every so often treat myself to a new bunch of half a dozen or so.

I have a stack of these I haven’t read yet, so pulled this one off the shelf.

This is a delightful book, and after I read a bit, I went back and read the introduction. Monica Dickens turns out to be the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Her writing style is quite different than his, but equally enjoyable.

One thing led to another, and I pulled Bleak House off the shelf and added it to my “currently reading” pile. I believe the last time I read any Dickens (Charles, that is) was in the late seventies. I was in my second year of medical school, and decided for some insane reason to take a night class in Victorian literature. I guess studying pathology and pharmacology until all hours of the night wasn’t enough of a challenge. Probably my favorite book I read for that class was Middlemarch, and I don’t recall which Dickens we read.

We’ll see how long this lasts in the paperback version. The print is tiny, and it’s a pretty cheaply bound volume, so the pages are starting to come out. I might end up finding a Kindle version if it gets to the point of holding it together with a rubber band.

The Persephone books all have that same pale grey cover, with lovely endpapers (including a matching bookmark) in every book.

What are you all reading this week?

What happens in Bean Club…

…doesn’t necessarily stay in Bean Club. I’ve mentioned the Rancho Gordo bean club before. It’s a hot ticket item, and there is a perpetual waiting list to get a spot. With the pandemic, their regular store offerings also tend to sell out quickly. It’s a quarterly shipment of 6 pounds of beans (and occasional peas and lentils), along with fun stuff.

Of course you want to see it, right?

It also came with a jar of real Spanish paprika, and a fun gift:

It’s a bean passport! With stickers! And you guessed it, the Coronas are getting cooked today. Actually what’s cooking is a pound of Coronas from a prior shipment. These are huge runner beans, very creamy when cooked up. They are sort of perpetually sold out, but worth hoarding and eating.

Here’s what they look like compared to pintos.

I’m cooking those simply with some sliced onion, olive oil, and fresh herbs from the garden. I’m also cooking up a bunch of pintos to go into the refrigerator for later in the week.

I also buy a lot of beans from Purcell Mountain Farms. They have the Coronas in stock if you can’t wait!

RG also sends their branded tissue paper in the box with every shipment. Lewey isn’t sure about it, but he’s pretty cute in his tissue paper bandana!

Making progress!

Summer has finally arrived in the Pacific NW. It’s going to be close to 90 today, and warmer tomorrow. At least it will drop to the low 60’s at night. That’s a good thing, since we don’t have air conditioning.

I am making progress on my summer cardigan. Which is another good thing, since it is actually summer.

The back piece (on the bottom in that photo) is done, one of the front pieces is a few rows short of the armhole shaping. It’s mostly mindless except for that cable/lace border, which is pretty easy.

You might not be able to tell, but the edging on the front is an I-cord edge, which is pretty cool. I don’t think I’ve done one of these on a sweater before. It does pull in a bit, making a slight curve in the edge rather than being nice and straight. We’ll see if that blocks out. The yarn is mostly cotton with a bit of cashmere, so who knows. I can live with it either way.

I’m off to find a relatively cool corner to knit.

Hitchhiker, redux

And it’s a finished thing!

Project Details:

  • Pattern: Hitchhiker, by Martina Behm. This is the third of these that I’ve knit, and not the last. It’s a perfect pattern for those sock yarns that wouldn’t necessarily knit up into good socks. This color would have been fine for socks, but it is 100% merino. I will knit plain merino socks, but it doesn’t wear as well as sock yarn that has some nylon in it. I have plenty of that in the stash, so I try to use the plain wool stuff for other things.
  • Yarn: Wollmeise Pure, 100% merino. The color is Flower Power. I love this yarn, her colors are bright, and the yardage is very generous (575 yards).
  • Needles: 3.25 mm. I used plastic straight needles from my precious plastic needle stash.
  • Started: November 4, 2019
  • Finished: August 12, 2020
  • Modifications: None.
  • Pattern/Yarn rating: ***** for both. I love this pattern. It is fun, great for wildly colored yarn, and doesn’t take much brain power. The Wollmeise is just perfect. I have a bunch more of this in the stash for those “little neck things” that I’m growing to love.

575 yards out of stash. I started keeping track of this about 18 months ago. In that time, I’ve gotten a total of 15,625 yards out of stash. Some of that was stuff that went to Goodwill or my knitting group, but the bulk of it has been knitted up. It sometimes seems like I don’t ever finish anything, but I guess I actually do.

Knit, knit, knit

I’m at THAT point in the sock. You know, the one where you try it on, it’s about an inch short of where you need to start the toe. You knit, knit, knit, try it on. It’s still an inch short of where I need to start the toe.

I am thoroughly enjoying my week off, staying at home. Don’t get me wrong, I love to travel, but hanging out with John, enjoying all the spaces and comforts we have at home has been great. It’s giving me a little taste of what retirement will be like.

Flat Ena is still visiting us. I don’t really remember when she is supposed to go home, but it’s not like we have to actually take her to the airport or anything. She has been the best visitor, quiet, doesn’t eat much, certainly doesn’t leave junk hanging around all over the house.

Today she got to go to the dentist with me.

This was a routine cleaning for me, which I scheduled six months ago. I thought about canceling it, but I have a history of bad teeth and dental problems, so keeping up is important. The dental practice that I go to is very on top of things, have adapted their clinic flow for the Covid-19 issues quite well. I’m glad I didn’t cancel, I felt very comfortable about being there. I have only been out of the house a couple of times (other than work) since March, so even going to the dentist was sort of an adventure.

Last but not least, a hint of things to come. I may have finished something.

Stay tuned!

Baycation!

I’m home on vacation this week. John’s sister Ena is supposed to be here this week, but the pandemic had other plans. I’ve had the vacation time blocked out for quite a while, and can’t turn it back in, so drat, I have to stay home. John and I find ourselves saying about every other day that this isn’t a bad place to be quarantined.

So that’s my plan up there. Reading, knitting, maybe a little spinning, and definitely some deck time. We’ve had a really cool and windy summer so far, but this week is supposed to be in the 80’s, so that works for me. If Ena was here she’d likely freeze to death. She lives in Georgia, and it has been getting down into the low 50’s here in the evening.

John’s son (who is a graphic designer) made a “flat Ena” so she could enjoy the vacation virtually. Here are a couple of photos.

She’s already had loads of fun!

That’s the sock in progress. I’m hoping to get more done on that today.

Last but not least, a friend gifted us with a big bowl of Gravenstein apples, so I am making this.

It is still in the oven, but it is starting to smell awfully good. We might just have that for supper tonight! And there will be plenty, since Ena doesn’t eat much!

Pine Needle Socks

I finally finished these this morning. I should get hazard pay for these. I had an eye doctor’s appointment this morning, so finished these with dilated eyes. John did casually ask if this was a good idea or not, but I ignored him. And there they are.

The yarn is Mountain Colors Weaver’s Wool Quarters. This makes nice winter weight socks. It is listed as worsted weight, but this knits up on size 2.75 mm sock needles at 7.5 stitches/inch. This particular wool is not superwash, so if you are thinking about buying, be aware of that. The company does have specific sock yarn that won’t felt in the washer as well.

These were started with 60 stitches, I used my usual generic white bread sock pattern.

And now I can knit some socks for me!