Finish It Friday ~ Very Belated Christmas Vest

Last fall I got it in my head to make a Fair Isle vest for C for Christmas. I bought the yarn for the vest I had in mind—a self-striping green—and went in search of a pattern. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a pattern that met my mental image—knit in the round, with worsted weight yarn, with an abstract repeating pattern. So I took a pattern for a striped vest, added a fair isle pattern from a cowl (plus one stitch for the vest) and voila!

Or maybe not quite voila, but a lot of labor later…

This pattern required a lot of knitting techniques that were new to me, including kirchener stitching, tubular bind-offs, and a few short rows of working on the back of the patterned knitting, carrying the yarn across the front. I did not like that at all (which kind of made the next and most scary new tecnique a little easier to swallow, since it allowed me to knit most of the vest in the round. The scariest new thing I learned was a steek (actually three steeks), which, for the uninitiated, is a part of your knitting that you make with the intention of cutting it later. With scissors. The idea is you knit your whole project in a tube, then cut, in this case, the arm holes and neck V. It is a little magical, but also terrifying. When I first heard about steeks a long, long time ago when my local yarn store was offering a class in it, I thought it was barbaric. Now that I've done one myself, I still think it's barbaric. 

I chose to machine-sew the reinforcement stitches for my steeks. I didn't know enough when I knitted them to alternate colors, and just knitted right through with green, carrying the orange across the back. I figured machine stitching would be my best bet for anchoring those floating little bits of yarn. It worked pretty alright, though I did end up with a few loose threads I had to weave in afterward.

Then I did the cutting. Oh, my heart. I had a moment when I thought I'd cut through the shoulder stitches and almost had a stroke. I don't think I can handle this level of stress from my leisure activities.

But then, ta-da! your weird scrunched tube opens up like a flower into an actual knitted garment.

Needless to say, I didn't get it done in time for Christmas, just finishing it up this week. Every time I approached a new and challenging aspect of the pattern, I had to set the whole thing aside and let it marinate for a while before I could tackle it. Somehow C managed to stay in the dark—even when I was clearly adding ribbing to a vest and weaving in ends on the vest—until I layed it out to block it. He was pretty psyched by the whole thing, even if it was four and a half months late.

Notes about the yarn and pattern(s) on Ravelry.

Book Stack ~ April 2020

My 2020 book challenge—to read 50 books from the stack by my bed (and other unread volumes already in the house). Previous months here: January, February, March.



One good thing about a stay-at-home order: it makes for lots of time to read. Still, I only checked two books off the stack (1 and 2), because I ordered books online (3 and 8), borrowed books from other members of the household (4-6), and reread a book I've read before (7).

1. Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl. This is one I picked up off a book swap table last year, about a barn owl raised by a young woman. It's a fascinating look into the psychology of this intelligent and charming bird.

2. My favorite guilty pleasure is 1960s romantic suspense novels, and Mary Stewart is the master. I acquired this tattered old copy of This Rough Magic some time ago at a library book sale, and it was the perfect diversion from reality—a spine-tingling romp through murder, smuggling, and romance in Corfu. There's also a heroic dolphin.

3. I'd been wanting to read Amy Stewart's Kopp Sisters novels for a while and finally ordered what I thought were the first three from an online used book purveyor. Unfortunately I missed the second volume and had to take a break after the first, Girl Waits with Gun, about three sisters living on their own on a farm in rural New Jersey who have a run-in with a local miscreant. It's full of interesting historical details, and the fascinating thing is that it's based on true events.

4, 5, and 6. When M was younger, my mom used to send him the Flavia de Luce mysteries by Allen Bradley. I'd been meaning to give them a try for a while, but only just last month got around to it and plowed through them, reading one every couple of days. Before reading these books, I would have told you I'm not a big fan of child narrators of adult novels, but I stand corrected. Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce is a delight—smart, spunky, saucy. Her fascination with poisons and poisoning is endearing, although when she mixes up persistent toxic chemicals (like trichloroethylene to dry-clean a coat she got covered in graveyard dirt) in the chemistry lab next door to her bedroom, I get anxious for her health. I finished the last two we own (fourth and fifth volumes) in the first couple of days of May, and I thought I'd be saturated with the goings-on in Bishops-Lacey at that point, but a big bombshell drops at the end of the fifth book, so I might need to order the next five ASAP.

7. Over 2017, 2018, and into 2019, I read almost all of the Barbara Michaels/Elizabeth Peters oeuvre (70-odd books in all; oh to be one-tenth that prolific!), but there was one book I hadn't gotten to yet, Other Worlds, an unusual volume, in which some famous spritualists and skeptics from different times and places (including Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, as well as, one suspects, the author herself) gather together to solve—or at least swap theories about—two famous historic ghost stories. A great reminder that the truth of a story often depends on the teller or listener's point of view.

8. Finally, I read an actually recent book, Desert Cabal, by Amy Irvine, in which she carries on a one-sided converstaion with the late Edward Abbey about the desert, wilderness protection, and some of Abbey's less savory qualities like sexism and xenephobia. Having been a big Abbey reader in my younger years, I found it engaging, refreshing, and a little depressing, considering the current state of public lands protection (or lack thereof) under the political craziness of our current time.

What books are you escaping into these days?