The Interior of My Brain: A Knitting and Fiber Arts Blog

Every year. late October and all of November is a hectic time for me. My daughters’ birthdays are three weeks apart in late November and December, and I always knit them something that I hope they’ll like after I put time and thought into it. This year I was especially pressed for time, because I was still working on my husband’s June birthday sweater three weeks into November, when I should have been packaging my daughters’ finished sweaters for mailing. So their sweaters were rush jobs that were basically the same thing in different yarn, after it turned out that my LK150 wouldn’t knit the yarn I had gotten for an intarsia sweater for my older daughter.

My younger daughter has always been hard to give presents to, because she has been a minimalist from birth who doesn’t want anything unless she has a specific use for it. She wanted a vacuum cleaner for her 18th birthday. She already has dozens of sweaters from me, but she knows it’s futile to tell me that she doesn’t need yet another sweater. Her older sister is by no means greedy and acquisitive, but she always had ideas about books and toys she wanted for her childhood birthdays, and she gratifyingly tells me now that she will love anything I make her, so just surprise her.

So I was really surprised and pleased when I showed the two of them pictures of my cats and mice vest and cardigan fraternal twin set, and my younger daughter said, “I want that vest.”

That particular vest was much too short and wide to fit her, and I didn’t have enough of the background color to knit a replica of the original one. I bought Melissa out of a teal blue tweed yarn that I thought would look nice with the muted pastels I intended for the cats.

My two daughters are pretty much the same size, so I calculated the numbers for the first vest, the one for my younger daughter’s late November birthday, based on how much too short and how much too wide my original cats vest was on her when I tried it on her during our visit to them in October, and added the needed rows to the length and subtracted the unneeded stitches from the width. These were the numbers I would use for my older daughter’s version as well, so I wouldn’t have to make a new set of calculations when I made the second birthday sweater. I raced like mad to get the first vest done in time to mail it so that it would arrive for the birthday itself, and then I raced like mad to finish the second vest done in time to arrive for the December birthday on the other side of the world. Getting birthday sweaters to my daughters so they can open the package on their birthday is much more important to me than it is to my daughters, and they always tell me that I really don’t need to stress myself on their account. I guess I stress myself on my own account.

I was pretty certain that I had enough of the teal yarn not to have to worry about yarn chicken, but I kept an eye on the rate of consumption by weighing what remained at milestones in the garment’s progress. I conserved yarn by attaching new skeins to the yarn in my feeder with a spit join, which had the additional advantage of minimizing ends that would need to be woven in. When I had the front knitted, I saw that I might be slicing it pretty thin, but I should be able to knit the back and the ribbing around the armholes and neck without having to resort to a Plan B.

When I finished and sewed the back to the front and weighed what remained, I saw that the game of yarn chicken was on, and I planned a contrast color for the last couple of rows of those ribbed edges in case my measures to execute Plan A failed. I weighed my remaining yarn often and fastened the last stitch of my first armhole ribbing with a locking stitch marker in case I needed to unravel the knitting and use the yarn for the second side.

And I did need to unravel it. I got as far as I could on the second armhole using the yarn that remained in my wound yarn cake, and then I unfastened the locking stitch marker, spit-joined the ends together, and knitted the second armhole using the yarn I was cannibalizing from the first armhole. I was a couple of inches shy of the starting point on both armholes, so I cut off the dangling ends of the teal tweed from the inside of the garment and spit-joined them to eke out the last bit of bind-off on both armholes. I used every inch of that yarn. I no longer have even a trace of it. It’s all in my daughter’s vest living in her closet. Then I mailed it off and it arrived the day before her birthday. She didn’t open it until the following Monday, but that’s her business. I accomplished my mission.

On to the next mission, the cats vest for the December birthday. By then, it was already December and I was starting the second vest at the time when I should have been mailing it. I gave myself a deadline of 10 December to get the finished garment into the mail, so I was all grim business about what I needed to get done. I searched through my ancient stash for whatever I had in a quantity that would serve as a background color, and I found a couple of skeins of Brown Sheep worsted in a green that wasn’t quite grass green and wasn’t quite Kelly green and wasn’t quite acid green, but had characteristics of each shade, and it would be a good background for the red spectrum I was going to use for the cats. Then I weighed the green and saw that I was going to have to supplement it. I found an emerald green that didn’t contrast with the other green in certain lights as much as I thought and hoped it would, although the contrast is quite visible in natural light.

Based on the weight, I devised an alternation of the two yarns that I hoped I would suffice to make the color usage the same on both sides of the garment, or at least for the part of the garment beneath the armhole where I wanted matching colors at the seams so that it would look like a design decision rather than a loss at yarn chicken. But my main color petered out even sooner than I had calculated, so I had to use the emerald green a lot more on the back than I did on the front, although I was able to match the seams. I think I used up the emerald green entirely, and I needed to find a third saturated emerald/Kelly green in my stash for the neck and armhole ribbings. Fortunately, I had many to choose from. Vivid, saturated greens were big during my First Knitting Era in the ’80’s and ’90’s, and I have hung onto that bit of fashion history in my stash. From the design standpoint, it was a good thing to throw a third green into the mix, to make the other two colors look less like losses at yarn chicken, which of course they were.

The second birthday cats vest was in the mail on 10 December. It might even have landed in my daughter’s post office on the very date of her birthday, but she couldn’t pick it up that day. We FaceTimed when she finally did open the package.

My daughters understand that when I send them a knitted garment, I want them to send me modeled photos. I try and probably fail to not be too rude, particular, and insistent about how I want them to style the garment and the kind of light and camera angle I think will get the best pictures, but I have strong preferences that no one is able to achieve except for me. I thank them sincerely for whatever they are able to send me, since they are busy people and my priorities are not their priorities.

The teal vest, modeled. It’s big and loose enough on my daughter for her to have used it as outer layer over a hoodie. It hadn’t occurred to me to style it that way, but I like it a lot.

My older daughter sent me a set of modeled photos that I tried to like but I just couldn’t. I apologetically asked her to try again, with different styling that I described precisely, with photos of articles of clothing that she owned. She kindly complied without complaining, although I expect she was exasperated with me.

The glamour girl poses suit her!