Laurabelle’s Blog

As I wrote previously, I've been moving towards wearing hand-knitted socks. For the most part this has been fabulous, but it did uncover a lack in my wardrobe: black shoes.

It's not that I don't own any black shoes; I have at least about five pairs. It's simply that they're all at least moderately formal and therefore too tight to wear with anything but hose. Therefore a shoe-shopping trip to REI was in order.

My requirements were simple: black, comfortable, open on top to show off socks, and a strap to hold my foot in (because I have a narrow heel and my foot will always fall out without a strap). And of course they have to look good to me and on me. Finding shoes to meet these criteria wasn't a problem; I settled on Ahnu Kicks as the most comfortable.

Few shoe-shopping trips are without their casualties. Mine was a lovely green-and-brown pair of Teva Westwaters that the assistant brought out by mistake; I had asked for the black but didn't complain because in fact the "pesto" colorway looks much better to me than black-and-gray. These are even more open than the Kicks and will be especially nice for summer wear.

The socks featured in the photos are from a Knitty pattern called Hedera. I finished them Tuesday evening; the yarn is Pagewood Farm Hand Dyed Sock Yarn and just lovely. (I fell in love with the color when I saw it in another Raveler's stash and traded her for it.) I like the pattern, but if I were to knit it again, I would make a few changes:

• The tubular cast-on looks slightly funny with the “twisted rib” (knit stitches are through the back loop to twist them). I would still use a tubular cast-on but would try modifying it to knit through the back loop like the ensuing rib.
• The heels are a bit long (48 rows, 24 st picked up on each side). 32 or 36 rows would be more to my liking.
• The given stitch counts are a little wrong after the gusset (the number of stitches remaining on the top of the sock is 29, not 27), so if you follow the instructions you end up with 58 or 62 stitches (for the small and large sizes, respectively) instead of 56 or 60 like you're supposed to. One just needs an extra gusset decrease row to get back to the right total stitch count.

I am up in the middle of the night, blogging, because I went to sleep at about 8pm, woke up when Jeff came to bed at about 11:30, and wasn't able to get back to sleep. Now I feel a bit like Christmas Eve, in that I want to wear my new shoes but have to wait until morning and can't sleep for anticipation...

Several years ago Jeff's mother gave us a pasta maker. I think we used it once, though I don't actually remember doing so. (I do remember trying to roll pasta dough by hand, which didn't work terribly well.) The machine has sat in the closet for at least as long as we have been in California.

So why I suddenly decided to make fresh pasta on Sunday for my mother, who is visiting for the weekend, I don't know, but it was an awesome idea.

Making fresh pasta is a little weird. You start out by making a pile of flour on your work surface (or if you're a pansy, you can use a bowl). Make a well in the center of your flour and crack some eggs into it, then whisk the eggs and start mixing them with the flour. Knead the dough until it becomes smooth and elastic, then divide it in four and let it rest for a little while under plastic wrap or a bowl.

Now comes the rolling. A pasta machine makes this a lot easier; it has rollers that squeeze the dough thin and even. The rollers are adjustable, so you start out on the widest setting. Put the dough through, fold it, roll it through again, fold, and repeat about 6 times. Tick the rollers to the next setting and put the dough through a few times; repeat until the dough is smooth, satiny, and as thin as you want it.

Four years ago, I knitted gloves for Jeff. These were not just any gloves; they were fingerless, with a mitten-top that could flip forward to cover the fingers. I even made the thumb flippy by means of a large buttonhole. (I have never seen either gloves or a glove pattern with a flippy thumb; I don't know why no one else has done it since it's so amazingly easy. I didn't have a full pattern I liked, but I took a glove pattern for the right gauge and substituted a better thumb (and mitten-end) from another mitten pattern.

That first pair of gloves kept Jeff's hands warm at Lena Lake and for almost four more years. He nearly wore them out; the holes were becoming pretty obvious.

And then he lost one of them on the way to visit my family for Christmas. He was pretty upset about it; those gloves were special to him both because I made them and because they were awesome. He had cold hands for a couple of months after that.

One of my colleagues went to the San Francisco Legion of Honor a while ago and told me she saw a painting that looked like me. That's random, I thought, and I completely forgot about it until this week when she dug up a photo and showed it to me. She's right, it does sort of look like me, though I suspect my face would have a rather different expression if I had just seduced a man in order to cut off his head while he is drunk.

The painting is Portrait of a Lady of the Saxon Court as Judith with the Head of Holofernes, attributed to Hans Kranach, circa 1537-1540. You can also find it on the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco website.

I tried to do a little bit of research about the painter and the subject, but I wasn't terribly successful. I found the basic story of Judith, but I didn't find anything at all about Hans Cranach. On the other hand, I found a bunch of Judith paintings by Lucas Kranach the Elder, including my favorite, Judith mit dem Haupt des Holofernes. The paintings are so similar that I have to think the artists must be related, but I'm not sure what the connection is.

Check out these other versions:

• Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Lucas Cranach the Elder, circa 1530
• Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Lucas Cranach the Elder, circa 1530

I find the paintings' variations rather interesting. Some show more of the severed neck, some less; some face right and some left; the sleeve decorations vary quite a lot. Still, it's almost the same painting; the grayish head, the lady's face, her floppy hat, the gloves cut to show her rings, and even the white-and-black-striped panel on her bodice are completely consistent. It makes me wonder why Lucas painted the same thing so many times; was he unsatisfied with his results? Or was it such a popular subject that every nobleman wanted one?

And if anyone finds out how she severed a man's head without getting any blood on that gorgeous dress, let me know.

Today, I went to Stitches West 2009. For those who aren't in the know, Stitches is a sort of knitting convention with a bunch of classes but also a large marketplace of knitting vendors. I didn't sign up for any classes (I haven't yet found a knitting technique I couldn't learn on my own), but I did go down for the market.

It was a madhouse, even on Friday (apparently Saturday is supposed to be worse). I found a bunch of yarn I liked, but I was not generally overwhelmed by temptation. I did have to restrain myself at specific shops, but overall I emerged relatively unscathed.

From left to right:

• Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Lightweight (2 skeins)
• Miss Babs Hand-Dyed Yarns and Fibers "Yummy" Hand-Painted Sock & Baby Yarn — 2 ply Superwash (3 skeins)
• A Verb for Keeping Warm Superwash Merino (2 skeins)
• A Verb for Keeping Warm tote bag (under AVFKW yarn)
• Cascade Petite 100% undyed silk laceweight (2 skeins)
• Wooden shawl pin
• #0 47" Addi Turbo Lace
• beaded stitch marker (free from Miss Babs)

In total I bought seven skeins of sock yarn (enough for a full week of socks!). I can't wait to start my March socks.

Jeff's father takes a trip to Ohio every December, and this year Jeff and I went with him. We spent a couple of days in Cincinnati with Jeff's aunt, then drove down to rural Kentucky for a few days with his uncle's family, then back to the city for the last couple of days.

Jeff's aunt (not his father's sister but the one married to his uncle) is involved in a documentary of a small hydroelectric station, called the Mother Ann Lee because it is located on old Shaker land. It's an old station, very small and out-of-date, and to boot it can only be accessed by water or by a narrow trail. For all these reasons, the power company wanted to get rid of it; it just wasn't worth it for them. Enter a small band of crazy engineers who are restoring and modernizing the station in order to get it back on line and providing power again.

It's not a large station (I think I was told it could power 2,000 homes), but every little bit counts. Kentucky is a coal-heavy region; this plant is the only one in the area that can provide clean-energy credits. For these local-energy activists, the idea is to put small, distributed, green power stations all over, so that there is less dependence on huge monolithic plants.

(I put green in quotation marks because there are many arguments on all sides about what actually constitutes green energy and what is the most environmentally friendly ... but I don't want to get into that here.)

So Jeff's aunt asked us if we would be interested in seeing the Mother Ann Lee, and of course we were. She led us along the base of a cliff, above a steep hill that led directly into the river. We had to step carefully on the damp leaves, but we didn't fall.

For most of my life I've worn the same kind of socks, the white cotton sport socks one picks up in a pack of twelve at Target, Wal-Mart, or the like. Jeff would call them quantity one (1) socks; they fulfill the purpose but could stand some improvement.

In college I tried to change this by buying nicer-looking socks. While I did succeed in purchasing about five pairs of attractively-patterned socks, these are now aging. When I pulled them out of the drawer recently, the elastic gave an unmistakable creak. So in early December I resolved to knit myself some nice socks. This also has the advantage that I can knit them out of wool, my preferred sock fiber. I've never been able to find commercial dress socks in wool.

I have a few pairs of hand-knitted socks already. My mother knitted me a couple of pairs (one multicolored and one plain brown), and I made myself a bright red pair shortly after I started knitting, out of inherited stash. For whatever reason, I didn't wear them much.

I knitted myself two pairs of socks after Christmas. The first pair is Twisted Tulip Socks from the Spring 2008 Interweave Knits. Those were fun to knit. The yarn is Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Mediumweight. I love the springiness of the yarn, though I think I will switch to Socks that Rock Lightweight for future projects. Mediumweight is a bit heavy for me.

The yarn for the other pair was a Christmas present from my mother: Regia Color 4-ply (wool/nylon). The pattern is Jaywalker (free on Ravelry), and as advertised, it's a snug fit. The socks are nice and warm (a good thing in our chilly apartment).

I've seen other knitters resolve to knit a pair of socks each month. I think I'll give that a try — starting with March. February is a lost cause.

Back in August (yeah, yeah, I know, I'm behind) my college friend Maggie and her other half, Louis, came to California for a hiking trip with Jeff and me. The destination was the Rae Lakes Loop in Kings Canyon National Park. Our permit reservation was for entrance on the Thursday before Labor Day, and we planned to take five days (exiting on Labor Day itself). We were doing the clockwise circuit, up Paradise Valley, around to the John Muir trail, past the namesake Rae Lakes on day three, over a 12,000-foot pass on the fourth day, and then back down to the trailhead. The entire loop is 46 miles.

We drove to the park on Wednesday and car-camped overnight; the campgrounds were almost deserted. The next morning it took us longer to get going than we wanted (I don't know why it always takes so long!), and we didn't quite make it to the trailhead by 9am, the deadline for picking up our reserved permits. As it turned out, our lateness didn't matter after all; the rangers were detained elsewhere so hikers were directed to self-register.

The first couple of miles were flat but relatively shadeless and over reflective sand; even in the morning we became hot. That phase did pass, and presently we entered shadier environs.

I have a ton of catching up to do on this blog. I'll start out of order, with Christmas.

I spent the fall in a frenzy of gift-knitting. This was part of the reason for my hiatus from blogging; I felt I couldn't blog these projects for fear of giving away the secret. Not that most of the recipients read my blog, but one never knows.

The first-finished (way back in August) was a lace shawl for my sister-in-law. Jeff helped me pick out the yarn, a nice peachy-pink alpaca. The pattern is Miss Lambert's Shetland Pattern for a Shawl from Victorian Lace Today. I dropped one stitch in the whole shawl, but I picked it back up later and sewed it in. I can find the mistake, but I bet no one else will see it even if they're looking for it.

I finished two long-waiting knitting projects today. These weren't particularly big projects; one of them was quite small. They had just been sitting for a while.

The smaller project was a steering wheel cover that had been sitting for a few months; I knit it in a week or so at the beginning of July but never quite got around to sewing it onto the steering wheel. (I usually knit at home or during lunchtime at work, and the steering wheel is sort of stuck to the car.)

Today I went down to the car with Jeff before he went out on errands, and he kept me company while I stitched it on. He says it was very nice to drive with, so yay! No good photos yet though; the garage where I stitched it up is dark and less than photogenic. I caught a nice photo in the car after work.

The other project I finished is about 21 months old: a baby blanket for my cousin's first baby. I knew she was having some trouble, so I started a blanket as a sort of prayer that everything would be fine. I would make the blanket, and the baby wouldn't come until it was done, and the blanket would be beautiful, and it would all be right in the end. My faith was unshakable.