But then this is a scarf that looks best wrapped a few times around the neck anyway.
I don't particularly like making or wearing big needle knits, but there's no denying that they make for gratifyingly quick and easy projects. It also made me smile to use my 9mm needles. Some years ago I saw them in a Salvation Army thrift store, priced at $1. I knew I didn't have a pair of 9mm straights, and I stood in the store with the needles in my hand for a few minutes, mentally debating buying them. With money so tight, I try never to buy anything unless I am absolutely sure that I will use it. At the time, I'd never used size 9mm needles in 35+ years of knitting, and maybe I never would. But I told myself, "It is just a dollar, you'll never get a better deal, and if you don't buy them and do need 9mm needles at some point, you'll kick yourself because you'll wind up having to pay a lot more." I bought the needles, and then just three months later was gratified to find that a pattern I'd picked out called for a pair of 9mm needles. This project is only the second or third time I've used these needles, but I'm still smugly satisfied that I made the right call that day.
This project used up the 60 grams I had left over when I knit this yarn up the first time, so I'm going to count this project as resulting in a net stash decrease of 60 grams.
This photo shows Cauliflower's gift in its entirety. It's not much fun for a kid to get a wool sweater in August, so I threw in a few inexpensive items from the dollar store and thrift shop: a planner pad with stickers, a temporary tattoo kit, and a little owl ring (Cauliflower has a thing for owls). Not too shabby, and I hoped it was cool enough to suit a 12-year-old. It's going to get harder to please Cauliflower from here on in, as she'll be developing her own tastes and becoming more conscious of what's in and cool, and meanwhile her middle-aged great-aunt is becoming increasingly out of touch with what's in and cool.
And, because a wool sweater is not an exciting gift for an boy turning eight in July, I added a few dollar store trinkets: a scavenger game that can be played in one's own home, and two Hot Wheels miniature cars.
This project used 2 grams of cream Drops Karisma that I had left over from another project, and there were 10 grams of cream and 15 grams of charcoal left over from the new yarn that I bought for this project, so that's a net stash increase of 23 grams.
For the hat pattern, I chose the Armley Beret, designed by Woolly Wormhead. It's an attractive design, and I thought the little tapering cables around the brim looked like little trees, which would accord well thematically with the green I wanted to use for the yarn. As for the scarf, there was no pattern, but that's never stopped me before when I was making a set. It's generally so easy to improvise a design for a scarf that will go with a hat design.
And here's the hat and scarf with the gloves. They don't look as though they go very well in this photo, but that's just the lighting -- the combination looks better in person than it does in the photo. Better that than the other way around, I suppose.
As for the scarf, I toyed with the idea of doing repeats of the tapered cable motif for the entire length of the scarf, but that would have meant having to repeatedly adjust the number of stitches and I didn't want the hassle. I wasn't sure it would look all that good anyway. Instead, I worked three continuous lines of the bottom cable, and for the edging I used the 2 x 2 twisted cable that was used on the hat brim. I had a ridiculous amount of trouble getting the edging right, so I'll just write here for my own future reference that when picking up stitches for edging along a cabled knit, picking up *three out of every four loops* gives one just the right number of stitches so that the edging will be neither too full nor too taut to sit right. The scarf is just over 6' long and 7 inches wide.
I had 10 grams of this peridot yarn left after I completed this project, so that's stash growth of 10 grams.
Then I had just 10 grams left over of the newly purchased olive yarn, and I used approximately 10 grams of each of the rainbow-coloured stash yarn (or 70 grams), so that's a net stash decrease of -60 grams.
On my birthday in August 2021, my favourite gift of any that I received was the news that my nephew Luke and his wife were expecting their first child in February 2022. Of course, my immediate response was to start planning what I was going to make for my impending grandniece or grandnephew. By the end of that day I had decided I would make the baby a knitted baby blanket and pair of booties, and also a framed cross-stitch motif with the baby's name on it out of a kit I had on hand. I then selected suitable patterns for both a baby boy and a baby girl, and messaged Luke on Facebook with my congratulations and a request that he let me know what he and his wife were having in advance, as I'd be making something for the baby and would need some lead time. Two months later, he dutifully let me know that they were expecting a boy.
The pattern you see above is the one I'd selected for a boy, the ABC Baby Blanket, designed by Jenny Williams. It's an attractive, easy, quick knit. It could even be an excellent stash buster if one knitted the squares in different colours, but I wanted a solid colour for my version.
The yarn I chose was Lion Brand's Wool Ease in the Stillwater shade, which I would describe as a light sea green. It's 20% wool, 80% acrylic, which gives it both the nice feel of wool and makes it easy care and (I hope!) durable, which is just what one wants in a baby blanket.
This project knitted up quickly and without issue. As I worked, I thought back to the baby blanket I had made for Luke when he was born in September 1987, just a month after my fourteenth birthday. In those days I didn't have much access to patterns or yarn. I never even knew Vogue Knitting magazine existed at that point -- that revelation would come when I saw it on the newsstand in a convenience store when my mother and I stopped to get milk one evening in the spring of 1988. The baby blanket that I made for Luke wasn't made according to a pattern at all. I knitted a number of garter stitch squares in baby fingering yarn in white and pastel blue, and sewed them together. I'd never make something so basic now. I don't think I even wove in the ends, and I know the squares weren't properly seamed. I was, after all, only thirteen. But that amateurish baby blanket became Luke's blankie and he was very, very attached to it. Over the next several years blankie became very much the worse for the wear. It was no longer the fresh blue and white it had been when new, but grayish and discoloured, with a number of "you don't even want to know what made that" stains, and it was fraying and raveling in a number of places. It got to the point that it was such a disgusting object that I could never see it without wanting to scream, "KILL IT WITH FIRE," and stuff it in the wood stove at my brother's farmhouse, but Luke clearly didn't care what his beloved blankie looked like.
Then one mid-winter day when Lukie was four, he took his blanket outdoors with him when he went out to play, left it outside, and didn't realize it was missing until bedtime. Luke became quite agitated and demanded that a search be made for it, but trying to find a grayish blanket after dark on a farm in mid-winter in Southwestern Ontario is an exercise in hopeless futility if I ever heard of one. The blanket could have been anywhere in quite a large, unlit area, there were piles of snow everywhere, and it had snowed that afternoon. My brother tried to take the tough love approach, saying to him sternly at eight o'clock, "No Luke, you took your blanket outside when you shouldn't have and you lost it, and you're just going to have to go to bed without it, and we'll have a look for it tomorrow." This reasoning was apparently lost on Luke, as when ten o'clock arrived he was still screaming. Sympathy, substitutes, bribes, and threats were also of no avail. My brother and his wife were, as my sister-in-law has put it, "out there in the yard with flashlights and shovels like a pair of fools until well past eleven" in a desperate effort to find the blanket, while Luke stood at the storm door, alternately sobbing loudly and repeatedly shrieking, "FIND IT!!!!! FIND IT!!!!!" They couldn't find it, and Luke eventually passed out from sheer exhaustion at about midnight, after he'd been crying and screaming non-stop for four hours straight.
I have thought of that first baby blanket I ever made and of that incident every time I have knitted a baby blanket since, and hoped I wasn't kickstarting a similar chain of events for the new baby's poor parents. And now I've come full circle, and have knit a baby blanket for Luke's son. I wouldn't wish an evening like that on any parent, but I suppose if it should happen my brother and his wife's reaction will be something along the lines of, "PAYBACK SOMETHING SOMETHING, BOY."
Further up in this post, I wrote about the sweater and cap I made for my grandniece Cauliflower for her twelfth birthday. Then at the end of 2021, I impulsively started working on the one for her thirteenth birthday, in August 2022. It just seemed like the most appealing project on my list for the coming year. I have been alternately making a dress for her on her "odd" birthdays and a sweater on her "evens", but the dress I made her for eleventh birthday in 2020 was the last one I am ever likely to sew for her. She's reached the age where she needs her dresses fitted on her, and I can't do that as I so seldom see her, so it's sweaters from now on. My sister-in-law tells me this is just as well, as Cauliflower isn't currently as much into dresses as she was when she was little, and would probably just as soon get sweaters anyway.
This project plan began with my finding 100 grams of bright blue (left over from a cardigan I made for my father years ago) and 190 grams of Patons Decor in Rose Temptation (left over from a cardigan I made for me in 2018) in my stash, deciding they looked nice together, and looking for a sweater design that would be suitable for them both, with the addition of some new yarn in a coordinating main colour.
This year I directed my search to adult-size designs, instead of children's patterns, as Cauliflower has recently begun to wear women's size extra small. It didn't take me long to settle on the Vintersol sweater, designed by Jennifer Steingass, which I would be knitting in its smallest size. I already owned a copy of it as I have used the design before to make a sweater for me, so that was a cost-efficient plus. Not that a teenaged girl would want to wear the same style of sweater as her middle-aged great aunt, but again, I seldom see her, and will just have to remember not to wear that particular sweater around her for the next few years.
For my main colour of yarn, I went to Michaels with a yarn sampler of the two colours I already had, and selected Lion Brand Wool-Ease in their Riverside shade, or as I'd describe it, a rich dark blue. I bought three skeins of yarn a skein at a time with Michael's coupons, which brought the total cost of this project to $16.59.
The finished sweater. It didn't photograph all that well -- the rose colour looks a little psychedelic -- but I am quite pleased with its actual appearance, and I think Cauliflower will like it too. The design is so effective, and the colours work together well. I'm going to put together a manicure kit for her as well, to accompany the sweater and help Cauliflower embark on her teenage years in style.
This project used 80 grams of the bright blue yarn and 80 grams of the Patons Decor Rose Temptation from my stash, and left me with 10 grams of the new Lion Brand Wool Ease Riverside, so that's a net stash decrease of 150 grams for this seventh project.
When I add up all the increases and subtract all the decreases, I find that I have a year-end stash decrease of 182 grams, which isn't bad. My yarn stash resides in four plastic boxes kept under my bed, and while I've been wanting to reduce it to one or two boxes for years, it at least isn't growing, and the boxes are gradually becoming emptier.
This post has been held up so long not because I didn't have my photos and project information ready -- I had all that done by mid-January -- but because the effort of coming up with some pithy words to sum up the year that has passed and the current one as it's progressing, has felt beyond me. Again and again, throughout late January, February, and so far this month, I would open the draft, read and edit and type a few words at the end, and then close the draft with an exhausted sigh. Our world seems to be a constant and ever-worsening state of crisis, what with the seemingly never-ending pandemic, the looming climate emergency, ever-growing financial disparity, numerous wars and countless terrorist attacks, the rise of right-wing extremism, government incompetence and corruption, misogynistic, homophobic, and racist oppression, and the tide of deliberate misinformation designed to mislead and distract us and to destabilize our society. And then, in my own life, I struggle with chronic fatigue issues, financial difficulties, and extreme isolation. I'm not even making a living, and it makes me feel terrible that I'm not pulling my own weight, let alone doing my part to make the world a better place by lending a hand to others. Even though I try to keep myself on an even keel emotionally by being grateful for what I do have -- so, so many people in this world are far worse off than I am -- and to focus on what I can do rather than what I can't, I often feel helpless, useless, overwhelmed, and afraid of what's to come.
But... I can knit. Every evening of 2021, whatever happened that day, when my fridge died, when it took 40 days to get a new one, when my microwave died, when my beloved Trilby died one September morning at the age of 15 leaving a small, cat-shaped hole in my heart, when a routine task such as a trip to the grocery store had left me too tired to do another thing that day, when I'd been too low in energy that day to even really get up at all, and when I was in any case always too fried by that hour of the day to do any really taxing mental or physical work, when I realized it had been months since I spent any time with anyone, I would sit up in bed, propped on pillows and knitting or doing other needlework while I watched the news, and then while I watched something more relaxing and enjoyable, such as a murder mystery drama or horror film. My evenings relaxing in bed with my knitting and watching whatever's playing on my laptop often feel like the calm centre of my life. And then too, the things I produced in that time were of some small use: keeping a baby warm, making a child feel extra-loved and special on their birthday, or helping me look and feel more put together.
Not everyone is so fortunate as to have the physical dexterity to knit, the opportunity to learn how to do so, or the time and the access to yarn, needles, patterns and other technical resources that I have, and while knitting doesn't do a lot to make the world a better place, it is a help in the task of staying calm and carrying on, and that in itself is valuable. So, when I say I count my blessings, my ability to knit is one of them. It's a little thing, but when one is adrift in a stormy sea, sometimes those little things can serve as a flotational device, making a crucial difference in keeping one afloat.
And in these days when everyone is having a hard time, my hope for my readers is that, whatever happened in your lives in 2021, whatever is happening at present, that knitting is a comfort and a pleasure to you as well, helping you cope and making it easier for you to deal with whatever else you have on your plate.
