Knitting projects update: Fast away the old year passes

It’s New Year’s Eve and it’s snowing like mad outside. (I could post pictures, but they’d look almost exactly like the ones I posted on the 19th. Only more so.) As it’s an inescapably domestic sort of day, and as I’m looking back over the year in retrospect anyway, here’s an update on knitting projects past and present:

  • Cavern cardigan: Done but for the blocking and the ties that go on the front. Must get around to that today or tomorrow, especially as it looks like I’ll be snowed in.
  • Christmas present knitting: A pair of socks for my grandmother and a hat for my mother were finished on time (barely, in the case of the socks—like, just after 12 a.m. Christmas morning), and well-received. Whew.
  • Sci-fi shawl: Resting. Maybe I’ll get back to it now that I’m no longer on a deadline to finish the holiday projects.
  • Just started: Another pair of socks, which promise to be rather slow and fiddly to make. Am I mad? But the pattern was so interesting I couldn’t resist.
  • Vest project: After some more deliberation, I realized that I wanted something with a V neck that buttons up the front. I’m now leaning toward the Tryst Vest, adapted so as to be uncropped.
  • My next sweater project, for whenever I find the time (ha!): a modified version of the Durrow cycling pullover, knit in the round rather than flat, and resized. I love the cabled sleeves.
  • So hilarious I had to link to it just because: the Vlad Tepes hat, complete with little figures impaled on toothpicks! Cf. Cthulhu’s Unspeakable Hat. (As the designer comments, “The beauty of this hat is that from a distance it looks like a perfectly normal hat…And then you notice the tentacles, and then you go crazy.”) But before making either of them, I’m making myself a Jayne Cobb Hat.

I went to visit my family for Christmas, and at one of our gatherings my aunt looked over at me and another member of the younger generation with our respective knitting and remarked “You know, it used to be that when you saw women sitting together and knitting, they were all at least 60 years old.” Which prompted a discussion of the simultaneous appeal of knitting to both a handmade aesthetic and a geeky sensibility, both of which have caught on among people my age and younger in a big way.

And now I must go clear snow off my front steps. And block that sweater…

Comments are closed.