Whew! Well, Knitty mania has settled down a bit over here, and we're beginning to climb out of our chart-checking, sizing-figuring and website-making burrows. One thing this means: more consciousness to devote to blogging! I'm still adjusting to having two blogs (this one and Sepia Salax), and I've been trying to work out what goes where. My tentative decision is that knitting- and design-related entries will be double-posted, and most other entries - rhapsodizing over books, ranting about politics, and relating personal adventures - will go up over there. So if you want to read the whole shebang, subscribe to Sepia Salax. If you want a pure, unadulterated knitting/design fest, albeit with fewer entries, keep an eye on the Family Trunk Project. Also, know that the Trunk Project blog is still morphing, design-wise, and will only get better from here.
I do think I'll continue posting knitting I do from other peoples' patterns in both places, because hey, knitting is knitting, right? And I always learn new things from making other peoples' patterns, that can then be applied to my own stuff. Believe it or not, there are a few little things I managed to crank out in the interim periods between Family Trunk patterns. For example:
Portlanders will remember that we had an extended cold snap back in January. It started to dawn on me at about Day 4 of the extremely chilly weather that I didn't own a hat. Not a single one! I have made hats for other people, and at some point I owned a store-bought hat, but even that had slipped away into the mists of time. It's not very often that Portland gets cold enough for me to want a hat and mittens, but that time came this winter. So, like so many modern knitters before me, I whipped up a version of Jenna Wilson's Shedir pattern. I used about a skein of the Felted Tweed left over from the Kenneth McNeil, which helped to alleviate my jealousy that David, and not I, would be getting that finished sweater.
It was a quick, well-designed pattern, as many have observed before me, and it made a charming change from having to figure out the math for each step on my own. It took me about three days, and convinced me that a small project sandwiched between each big one and the next would be Family Trunk policy from here on out. Zoning out for a few days really helped me get back in the math-and-charts groove. Mark Twain called this phenomenon "refilling the tank," although in his case the zoning out occurred in the middle of certain projects and often lasted years. As far as I'm concerned, though, if it's good enough for Mr. Clemens, it's good enough for me.
