Baby Knitting Woes

I am so happy to be able to join up with Ginny this week for another yarn along! The past week and a half have been consumed by baby knitting.

The brighter green is a Sunnyside cardigan for my nephew/godson, Maximilian Kolbe. (Can you refer to a baby as your godson before he's baptized?) I knew I wanted to knit him something and found a skein of this yarn waiting in my stash. My cousin has big babies, and I was afraid he'd outgrow it before he got a chance to wear it later this year, so with a little nail-biting I cast on for the 12-18 month size. According to the pattern I don't have enough yarn, but according to other people's Ravelry notes, I do. So we'll see how long the sleeves end up being ... if they end up being at all. (More on this in a moment.)

Anyway, I started knitting happily away and was a good bit in when I realized I'd forgotten the first buttonhole. Whatever, I thought. It's just one buttonhole at the very top. I am not knitting back. Who ever buttons their cardigans all the way up to the very top, anyway? (I am a perfectionist but I am also lazy. I've gotten used to embracing things as "design elements.")

Well, I can't say that I believe in karma, but after reaching the bottom and binding off I realized that I had managed to forget to make the last three buttonholes. Now, if this was a little girl's cardigan, I might be able to rationalize this as another "design element" (see "Maile," below). But it's not, and I can't. So I will be ripping this out and reknitting once I finish the sleeves.

Oh yes. The sleeves. I bound off while my mother-in-law was visiting for Easter--so last Monday? Tuesday? I set the cardigan, the needles, and the yarn in my knitting basket. Two days ago I went to retrieve them. I found the needles, I found the cardigan ... I did not find the yarn. I have literally torn apart my living room looking for it, so it must be somewhere else. But that makes NO SENSE. I put in my basket; I did not bring my basket anywhere else! I am terrified I won't find this yarn and will have to go buy more and knit something else for Max from scratch. Sigh. We'll see; hopefully St. Anthony will pull through for me on this one!

The lighter green is the sleeve of a Maile cardigan for another friend's baby. Although my gauge is off a bit, so far it is going better than poor Max's cardigan.

The book is Pillars of Gold by Alice Thomas Ellis, and I'm afraid that after this book I've exhausted our library system's supply of  her books, which is depressing. Unfortunately her books are also mostly out of print (although surprisingly this one is available as a Kindle edition), so buying them can get a bit expensive; but I guess a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.

why she writes

I was very recently introduced to the author Alice Thomas Ellis by a friend--so recently, in fact, that I haven't yet had the chance to read any of her fiction. But I've borrowed a book of weekly columns that she wrote under the title "Home Life."

So far they are very delightful, written very loosely in a spirit of play, dancing along a train of thought without worrying about wrapping all the ends up. My favorite, so far, is one called "Power of Speech." The opening paragraph:

I have a work by Mrs Beeton which she wrote for the 'smaller establishment': that is, a household with only a cook, a couple of maids and a boy to carry the coal. She says firmly, 'On entering the kitchen invariably say "Good morning Cook."' OK, you ponder, but what if Cook is out on the area steps dallying briefly with the muffin man? What if your household is so small you don't have a cook? Still, many housewives talk to themselves. I often say things aloud when I spill the milk or trip over the cat and there's no one here to listen. I plod round M&S muttering "prawns, butter, underpants" because otherwise I would forget what I'm doing there, and so do a lot of other ladies. One has to keep talking or one loses the knack. When the children were very small I spent weeks alone with them high up in the Welsh hills and I used to lose the power of speech. I would return to London bereft of all vocabulary, communicating in grunts and diddums talk. You feel a fool asking, for instance, Professor Sir Alfred Ayer if he would care for an icky bitty more soup in his ickle bowl.

 I totally wander around the grocery store muttering my shopping list under my breath, and I always say things when I'm the only one at home to hear them.

Writing of this sort is one of the many kinds that makes me want to blog. She takes the stuff of everyday living and turns it into something enjoyable, sheds a new light on it. And I love her for not having some great and profound point at the end of her columns--it's about the sheer and slightly wacky delight of life. One of the reasons I don't post more often than I do--aside from, you know, being kind of lazy--is that I have a high standard for what I want my posts to do. They must be entertaining or thought-provoking or beautiful to the extent that whoever reads them is impressed, or at least somewhat interested. I think about writing far too much; I write far too little.

Which is a problem for me beyond just blogging. Oh well.

But that joy, that enjoyment that sparkles in her words. She is having fun. That is why she writes.