I had started it at some point, appropriately, in February. Frank was due in mid-March, and although I’d been planning a sweater, some sweater for a while, I only got finished with the knitting around the due date. There’s a real problem with making stuff for a baby you haven’t seen: babies, as EZ points out, vary, yet I was obsessed with trying to somehow make a lot of things that could fit him right away, and to tell the truth, I was pretty successful. But there was a lot of fingernail-biting, and this sweater was probably the most difficult blind planning I did.

The first thing was to try to guess how many stitches to cast on in DK instead of the worsted of the original pattern, and then how to size the whole thing down to fit a newborn rather than an ambiguously large infant. Of course, Frank turned out to be unambiguously large, but I had no way of knowing this at the time.

I ended up looking at many, many different baby sweater patterns to get an idea about average newborn waist, neck, and arm circumferences, not to mention top-to-armhole and armhole-to-waist. I ended up picking an 18″ chest, a shot in the dark. A further profound difficulty I had in changing the pattern was whether to use the percentages from EZ’s Seamless Yoke Sweater, or try to keep the proportions of the FebruaryBabySweater itself, even though they might have been just a compromise to the lace pattern. I decided in the end that since babies have different proportions from people, I would use the proportions from the baby sweater even if it was more of a headache. Needless to say, all this required some math, the results of which you may find here in my notes.

A few days after my due date, after I’d sewn some baby pants, made a few pillow covers, put together a labor skirt which really did come in handy, I finally sewed on the buttons. I had the time: babies don’t look at the calendar as we do. The buttons, particularly nice, are from an old J.Crew sweater that was dead (the rest of the sweater actually became some of those baby pants); moreover, the placket from that sweater became a placket on this one, so that there would be less curling and none of those annoying gaps you get when you try to button two weak edges together. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to sew the armholes without making it look weird, even though I must have done this when I made my Owl sweater, which is essentially another EZ percentage yoke. But of course Frank does not mind, and apparently even tried to eat the appealing buttons minutes after the sweater was first put on.

The yarn is Queensland Collection Rustic Tweed, an especially beautiful DK (though it claims to be worsted, it isn’t really); not only is the light green beautifully varied with little yellowy brown highlights, it also has tan and black tweedy bits. The Rustic Tweed is one of the most successful several-color-tweeds I’ve seen; the other shades have similarly brilliant combinations. I got it at Fibre Space, my current favorite yarn store in Alexandria, VA; favorite largely as they seem to feel the same way about tweed that I do. I went there a few times in the waiting days to get special Frank-outfitting yarn, including the Fibre Company’s Terra that you see on his birth socks and birth hat.

Here he is, moments old, fresh from being weighed, two weeks and two days over the 19th-century-science-inspired due date. You can see that the sweater does indeed roughly fit him, which I considered a real triumph, as much as I was registering triumph at that time. As he was 9 lbs 7 oz of weight and 21 inches of length, however, I ultimately got lucky that he had the size to fill out the sweater enough. Plenty of other newborns would have been rather lost in the folds. (Here I would otherwise talk about his hat shown in the picture, which truly fit him exactly, but since it got lost by HB at an outdoor croquet match a few weeks after the birth, I’m too sad to really go into it.) But it fit, and he became the midwives’ hero not only for his impressive size but his manifold woolens.

Now, it fit him even better about 3 weeks into his life, as you see above and here below, when he was around 11 lb 3 oz. If you really wanted a newborn sweater, I’d go a little smaller, but then if you wanted it to fit later, 18″ might well be ideal. Much depends on the weather the baby will turn out to experience at a certain time.

Frank is pretty skeptical of ex-womb life in general, as one might expect from his tardy behavior, although a chiller baby you’d be hard pressed to find. But at least in the shifting cold/hot/cold/damp weather of the District of Columbia, his nice sweater has gotten used several times in several important cold-baby moments. And thus a combination of calculation and luck in both instances produced a baby-sized sweater and a sweater-sized baby.

He wears pants. A lot of pants.

These are not even all the pants he owns.

We often go places and see other babies who are dressed to the nines, fitted out with collared shirts, hoodies, special tiny khakis, possibly name brand baby sneakers. Poor Frank has to put up with second-hand onesies and the fact that sometimes I forget to put on his socks, or pack a sleeper when it’s daytime, or realize too late we don’t even own some vital baby item. This makes me feel a little guilty, since the clothes one wears as a baby are a direct sign of the amount of love one’s parent has for one, or so the other mother/baby pairs seem to imply. But then I take heart when I remember his pants.

We’re using cloth diapers, for the most part (the kind known as prefolds, if you care); this requires many accoutrements, shown above, but pants are the most vital part. One can buy (as fancy as you wish) plastic PUL pants with (as fancy as you wish) cotton outer layers, but of course it’s cheaper to make your own covers, or soakers (this is a literal description of their function). I’ve used two different methods, knitted and sewn. It might seem counterintuitive to put wool pants on someone in the summer, but as I’ve discovered when wearing wool socks during that season, wool keeps feet cool and moves the sweat away from your skin; a convenient property to make use of in relation to baby pee.

I probably will try different patterns eventually, for even the free patterns are legion, but currently I’ve continued to make these. For fitting reasonably well, for staying on, and for looking nifty, I can certainly recommend them. The sewn ones are quicker to make, and this is important, because one can never really make as many pairs as one needs for a growing baby it seems; but the knitted ones are perhaps the more efficient at pee containment, although this may be due to the thin fabric I used for the sewn ones. We’ve needed pairs and pairs and pairs; he’s already outgrown the newborn size in both styles, and the size smalls I’ve stolen time to make are frighteningly snug.

The sewn variety are from this nice lady’s pattern; the fabric is old-man-sweater from Goodwill, run through the washing machine to provide some minor felting. They really do go quickly: I made about five pairs in one afternoon. As you may observe, I had a good time mixing and matching the sleeve and waistband ribbing from the original sweater to make amusing variations in the hip and waist bands. It’s a little tricky to ease in the narrow circumference of the hip bands, but not terribly so; I figured it gave me a lot of good set-in-sleeve practice. Nor is old-man-sweater a difficult fabric to sew; a ball point needle was the only change necessary. I was quite pleased at how easy they were to make in the end, a surprise for me as I had never attempted to actually sew from a downloaded pattern printed on 8×11.5″ before.

The knitted sort, these from a Curly-Purly pattern, look a little less dapper to my eye, due to the bulkier fabric, but perhaps are slightly better at pee containment. Most soaker patterns use worsted weight, and this is not simply catering to lazy knitters; the bulk and the loft of the worsted soak things up more than tightly spun four-ply would do, one presumes. This particular pattern is full of twists and turns: you’re always going to want to have short rows so that there’s more room for the bottom in the back, and I like the way the ribbing goes, but it’s a pain to carry around three sizes of needles, her method of making the waist smaller, and as you can see, it’s not perfectly successful at keeping the waist small through multiple wearings. They’ve never fallen off, but perhaps there’s a pattern out there that just has fewer stitches at the top than at the bottom. It also requires a knowledge on your part of grafting and sewn bind-off, which puts it out of the range of the knitters related to me who might help out and make a pair. Watch out for the leg bands–be sure to make them tight (don’t pick up too many stitches) to keep the poo in.

The temptation to dress up your kid following your highest aspirations or wildest whimsy is of course always present; the absolute tyrranny one possesses over the choice of clothes on a newborn can easily go to your head. Frank’s pants suit Frank; they’re not covered in cartoon characters or an imitation of a three-piece suit; sometimes they look a little hipster to me, sometimes a little sad-orphan, but they’re now inevitably and no doubt permanently part of Frank’s baby-character, and I’m proud I made them. And to the connoisseur of the handmade, at least, they make him look a little more loved.

I have three pairs from a few years ago which have gotten sadder and sadder, fuzz, felted, limpness, holes; I still put them on because it never fails to be a delight to wear wool on the feet, but it is not a delight to view them. The socks, I should say; according to the midwife, I have some of the prettiest pregnant feet she’s seen. (I can still see them, and they’re not swollen in the slightest.) Very proud.

The pattern is Oolong, and the yarn Louet Gems Fingering in 6012 Goldenrod. Not many people have made this pattern, it seems, which is a shame–it’s a really beautiful design. The textures of the two lace patterns fit remarkably well together, and the transition between them seems slightly odd when knitting but works perfectly on the foot. I had enough yarn to put an extra repeat of the first lace pattern on the cuff, and enough again to add another repeat of the second one on the foot to fit my size 9 feet. I have about 20 yards left over? I even knit fairly loosely on the 1s, since I’m trying to conserve finger energy against possible swelling or aches. So far, so good.

With my orange-red shoes from the infamous Clothes Box of Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis. Alas for a better photo–one may turn up from the shower Rebekah gave me last Saturday, where I wore the socks and the shoes together with much personal satisfaction.

I love these socks I’ve made so much–the perfect combination of what I like to make, something very needed and practical, but also extremely good looking. When I have five such pairs, this gap in my wardrobe will be filled, until this round wears out in turn; with five pairs, I hope to spread the wear around. Yellow, green, navy, — brown, red?

So I resurrected a hat I cast on last winter, and had put by in frustration. I had long aspired to this beautiful pattern, before it was published and before I knew how to knit the two colors. The frustration came from the yarn I had decided would make do, Vermont Organic Company O-Wool 2-ply. It was relatively inexpensive, if hardy rather than soft, and I already owned it.

So I tried to get gauge a few times. It didn’t work out. I was also losing faith in numbers, graphs, counting, and the two colors after trying to knit this other thing in alpaca. Thus it went away.

Then this January, it became wintry here in earnest, and the one hat didn’t work, and I left another in Sister’s car, and I decided this O-Wool would be what gauge it wanted; and after three days of staying only indoors, my current best wearable hat was born. I realized after it was done that I’d ended up knitting it in colors that were more traditional than modern in the idiom of Norwegian, but it looks reasonably modern in the context of city gray. Plus, the slight largeness of the finished hat, combined with the double layer of yarn, means that my ears are covered, which is really for the best.

Ah yes, the jacket does not fit well buttoned, does it? Advanced case of baby.

It turns out that across the Americas, there’s this funny vegetable growing that kind of looks like a pear with a scary face on the bottom. In fact, it forms a staple in Costa Rica. But it has as many names as it has locales, e.g. vegetable pear, prickly pear, chayote squash, and in south Louisiana, miriliton, which is what I knew it by originally. My grandmother had a recipe she used to pickle them, and my mother occasionally breaks the recipe out. My dad and I are perhaps the bigger fans: both of us consider them superior to dill pickles, perhaps most of all because of their excellence in roast beef sandwiches. Mom claims to like the pickled onions best, but how can this be true? The pickles are very crisp, and have a sharp, strong, clean taste. Sometimes I cut them very small and use them in salads, leaving out most of the vinegar I would have put in the dressing. They work very well in salads with strawberries and goat cheese. It is also remarkably satisfying to give something you’ve canned as a gift. The best is when your upstairs neighbor also cans, and you can trade little mason jars.

Of things I have made, this is among the easier.  No stewing required, just overnight soaking. (Full recipe at the bottom.) You can get them at your local bodega, or slightly larger grocery store. Whole Foods will have them too.

First you peel the things,

But watch out, because they can make your skin itself peel. I put the picture behind the link in case you don’t want to see my skin coming off. I should probably wear gloves next time. I’ve said this before.

Cut out the cores, which have a thicker texture, and chop them into your favorite pickle shape (I prefer long thin stips, as being the easiest to stay put in sandwiches). Slice up some onion and celery, as much as you want to have of pickled onion and celery, which is ultimately not that much, and put all of it together in water to soak overnight in the fridge.

The next day you drain them, dry them, and boil the jars and lids for a few minutes.

Then you put a red chili pepper in each jar, and then stuff as many pieces of miriliton, onion, and celery into the jars as possible. This last is quite difficult, because they always shrink, and sometimes you get a jar with so few pickles in it you feel a little gypped. So pack tightly. Here I’m using some purchased half-pint mason jars, which are good for gifts, since sometimes the recipient of homemade non-cucumber pickles looks like they may or may not have the courage to try them. The larger jars are old regular pickle jars, pasta sauce jars, which have been washed, washed, and washed again, and boiled a little extra to get their former smells out of them. (This is just me, because I am picky.) These we keep, or give to known m.pickle-lovers.

Now the pickling liquid: vinegar, salt, and sugar/honey, which you boil all together till the salt and sugar are dissolved. I try to use more honey, since I prefer the taste and Hb is an anti-refinement/processing Nazi these days. Now, the original recipe calls for white vinegar, and this is what I usually use, but this time I branched out and added a little fancy sherry vinegar to some, a little white wine to others. You know, it just didn’t taste as good. It tasted more sweet, and I’ve never been fond of sweet pickles. No, white vinegar sounds crazy, but it totally works. I also tend to use far, far more of it than the recipe calls for, so you might want an extra quart or two around.

Lastly, you pour the hot liquid into the jars and close them up, and the lids seal themselves perfectly, on account of the heat.

They’re ready to eat pretty much after a day. With roast beef! Or just straight from the jar.

Here’s the recipe all at once as it comes to me from my mother via hers:

Mama’s Mirliton Pickles

Sterilize jars and lids in boiling water for five minutes.

Peel and slice 6 mirliton, 2 onions, and 3 stalks celery.  Cover and soak overnight in cold water in refrigerator.  Drain off liquid, then pat vegetables dry with paper towels.

Boil one quart white vinegar and 1 extra cup with 1/2 cup sugar and 1/4th cup salt. Remove from heat.

Pack jars with mirliton, celery, onion slices and one red hot pepper.  Pour hot vinegar mixture to the fill line and place lids on top. Do not process.  Cooling will create a vacuum and the lid will seal by itself!

*Ok, actually I did three years ago, and I had forgot about it, because it was such a failure. Cherry jelly failed to thicken. Something went wrong. Maybe next time.

In the winter, there’s always a pile of more or less guilty handmade hats, chilling by the door. I pick the least evil and run out. Then the next day I try to make another hat, often (for some reason) at cocktail parties which can be boring (when everyone’s a lawyer). So the routine is to make more hats, some better, some worse. Most just not quite right. And none that I really have wanted to take day after day into the cold, confident in the knowledge that I won’t look goofy.

Two of my more recent attempts were noteworthy, though not The Right Hat; I’ve been experimenting with a few beret-like things:

I really wanted a shaped bramble-stitch hat, kind of Russian-y, so I tried this one Debbie Bliss Alpaca Silk aran, a very shiny black. But even though I tried two different crowns, purled for the decreases, I never got quite the look I wanted. Too tight in the body? Crown too small? Hmm. It was five inches from the brim before decreases, but with this pattern, this makes it still a little short to fit over all my hair. Perhaps one day I’ll try again with some more of this yarn; it’s still hanging in there in terms of sheen, although it is getting rather fuzzy.

Then there’s my seriously floppy purple cashmere hat, Jade Sapphire 4-ply; in this, the never ending season of the floppy beret, it certainly competes, with six inches before decreases. Why doesn’t it look as cool as some store-bought ones I see on the Metro? Maybe I don’t have quite the head for the flop. Also I’m always afraid it’s going to fall off.

Certainly I’m finicky. And perhaps more than finicky–bad at being satisfied? Bad at letting the material win, as it always will?

Well, this time I used material I’d already set in order myself, yarn spun from a solitary 2 oz. batt, purchased long ago from Barneswallow Farms, my favorite Maryland Sheep & Wool vendor. They have no website, alas, but I visit them every year to get Lincoln Cross breed wool, a very shiny, strong, light wool that is not at all expensive, but very hard to find. It’s my favorite thing to knit once I’ve spun it. I had just enough, I thought, to make a hat, if I added stripes of the mustardy Karabella SuperYak I’d used to make Rebekah’s cozy. The colors look really brilliant together, this nice gray blue, mildly fuzzy, with the very dry (and thicker) SuperYak.

I spun the wool at the lowest ratio on my Louet–very light, airy (and the batts are very well prepared, easy to make airy things from); though because of the quality of the wool, strong enough not to fall apart, even when very loose indeed. I had a little tiny bit left tied in a bow, but I think the cat stole it. Then I knit it even more loosely, 3.5 stitches per inch. The gauge swatch looked much better on the purl side–perhaps because of the small halo of fuzz?–so I turned it inside-out once I’d finished. Down to five inches before decreases this time.

Here’s the thing: I actually let myself go and just made up the stripes as I went. Very unlike the habits of knitting I’ve fallen into over the last year, where I have to think everything into the ground before touching needles. And in this instance, it worked–surprisingly well. (Though you can tell I was too lazy to look up how to make the jogs invisible.) The hat looks good, even though hats modeled in August tend to remind me vaguely of shower caps. My yarn is beautiful, and it was really satisfying to knit what I’d spun the day before. Even started it at a cocktail party. Well, a dinner party. (That served Chef Boyardee.) (It really wasn’t so boring.) Will it be the hat I pick up? Time will tell.

She is hard to please, so I hope the packaging will sway her. Our floors in Louisiana are fairly cold too.

I was initially attracted to this particular pattern for slippers because of the shape: they seemed remarkably well thought out, much more elegant than your typical knitted slipper, which seem bulky, baggy, fine for comfort but hardly good looking. Indeed, I had not considered knitting slippers to be a useful thing to do, but the pictures of this pattern, at any rate, convinced me to give it a go.

The pattern is the Pleated Ballet Flats of cocoknits, the yarn only one ball of Karabella Aurora 8. The knitting of these went extraordinarily quickly, perhaps an hour and a half per shoe, despite knitting the soles as a strip of garter stitch, and despite the crazy process of pleating, which involves two extra dpns in addition to the main two needles. (I am proud to say that being on a bus to New York did not impede my nascent pleating ability. Knitted pleats are in fact easier than sewn ones.) Now A. and L., my compatriots at the yarn store, were concerned about the pattern’s worth, efficacy, etc., and rightly so. It costs six dollars to download, which is on the high side for a pdf, not to mention for a pattern, not to mention for a slipper pattern. But I was willing to believe that it could be worth paying for the very involved shaping, not to mention the pleats.

(Balletomanes will no doubt note the failure of my toe to really point.)

Thus these were an experiment in pattern trusting. Starting to knit them, I wanted to make sure that the whole thing stayed on, and that the heel in particular stayed on, and was prepared to modify, perhaps even sew in elastic if worst came to worst. I love how the side of the shoe curves lower at the arch, just like actual pretty shoes, but it did seem possible this was hardly a practical shape for a slipper. So I made one large decision to knit them not in aran but in worsted, a very slightly smaller yarn, but keep the needle size the same. I think this succeeded–the brief wearing I allowed myself proved them determined to stay on, but not constrictively tight or anything. A spur of the moment modification, which was actually pretty important for the final shape of these, was two extra decreases at the top of the sole to make the toe more pointy–I like this a lot. One thing I look for in a shoe is its ability to make my feet feel dainty, or to walk daintily at any rate, and this I think I want to hold on to even in a slipper. The pointed toe–not the dreaded-by-J. extra long toe of office fame, but a decently pointed one–helps.

So, I’m pleased with these slippers. I want some for my own. Black, perhaps?

Fortunately, I was on my way to work. At work there is both yarn and a computer to find free patterns on, and by the time I left, I had one mitten down. (That’s what bulky yarn will do for you.) The second went even quicker. (Pattern and yarn.) HB made fun of the nature of bulky-knitted-fabric at first, which does lead to larger gaps between larger stitches. In the end, however, he even condescended to wear one briefly in a remarkably non-heated stone building. (But then he was too embarrassed to be sharing a double-Michael-Jackson moment so he gave it back.)

Here’s my jacket, the pride of H&M. I think it may be a little over-designed–large fold-up collar, and belled/gathered sleeves, and belt loops (the belt I think must still be at the store, alas), and waist shaping. But it has a certain charm; I’ve always wanted a tweed jacket this color. It reminds me of the Gillian Lewis Italian armor look from her PR show. It actually looks especially good when you put your hands in the pockets, which is rare in a jacket.

Another photo of blues–my sandwich bread, sort of a riff on The Joy of Cooking’s pita recipie. (I split the dough into two parts, and bake each for 22 minutes in the convection oven at 350.) Now, the thing about clothes is that once you make them, you’re finished. They stick around. This is not the case with bread, alas. I’m always surprised when I have to make it again. So I think I took a picture to try to hold on to the moment. But I want to ask about bread recipies–anyone know a good book? I’m sort of in a slump; homemade bread is good, but I want it to be remarkable bread as well. Perhaps then I can return to the glory days of two full non-sandwich loaves a week.

Christmas knitting will soon return, although I may try to copy a friend’s store-bought fingerless gloves that have a mitten top to pull over your fingers–perfect for class.

Amusing Update: I saw my jacket’s fraternal twin on the metro. It was the same fabric, which I infer from seeing the same fault in the bolt–one ridge of right-slanting herringbone was a quarter inch too big. It had the same collar, a little less waist shaping, more boxy shoulders, and a huge black leather zipper slanting across the front, instead of my three fabric-covered buttons. And straight sleeves. It looked like she had paid more money for it, but got a less cool coat.

Amusing Update II: Ok, now I just saw my same H&M jacket walking toward me on campus. Why did Tim Gunn have to go a recommend shopping at this store to everyone? But it looks better without the belt.

There was a period where you couldn’t walk here without stepping on volumes of Heidegger, but I finally finished that huge paper, with some help from Robert Frost. If the man’s going to talk about Germans and poetry, I figured exegesis of “The Gift Outright” was fair game. But this done, I’m starting to play around with Christmas knitting. I’ve always had big plans and few realizations. But the new Holiday Vogue Bobbled Tam has changed this. I’m making two. Soon there will be pictures of the magenta one. My requests for domestic photography are received with more and more coldness, alas.

I finally took this off of my spinning wheel:

It’s been there for most of the summer; I just can’t be happy with anything I do on that Louet anymore. Well, soon, I will get my Lendrum. Perhaps.

A new purchase: Ikea fabric, destined to be curtains for the study, when I can work myself back up to the boringness of rectangle sewing. I hemmed the beige living room ones last weekend, and by the end, I hardly cared if my lines were straight or not, anything to be finished. No doubt this charming flat gray will make things easier. Am I the only one tired of gray heather?

First fair-isle ever. A proof of the principle that the more complicated the project, the richer the satisfaction.

I admit it, I ripped a few times. But it was worth it–after a while, I got a rhythm, two strands in the left hand, and it worked. (Even worked on it at the Smithsonian Castle, here–some September weather that pleased.)

Why determinate negation? When you do something because you think you can’t–and completing it negates the negation.