Cozy Canuck Chullo

When the weather turned cold, back in the fall, I dug out all of our winter clothes. The kids rooted through the bin of stuff and reacquainted themselves with their hats and mittens from last year. I started plopping one of a few different hats on Claire's head every morning before I dragged her off to school.

Don't get me wrong, the kid loves school. It's the physical act of going to school that she hates. If it is at all cold, she will whine and moan and shuffle like that old man who used to live next door to my parents, till we get to the kindergarten pen. When we get to the pen, in a perfect world, I would give her a kiss and a hug and watch her trot off to her class lineup to wait for the bell to ring. In reality, I usually arrive at the pen sort of haggard with her dragging behind me like a limp noodle. More than once she has broken down into tears at the gate because she is cold and on at least two occasions she received special treatment and got escorted into the school early (she can work a system, I tell ya). Honestly, she has as much cold-weather gear on as the rest of the kids. She's just sensitive to cold. If her ears are cold...that's the worst. She'll stand stock still and whine about her ears and no amount of me saying "Standing still does not help you get to a warm place" will get her moving.

After going through the entire rotation of hats that we have, I decided something needed to be done. The knitted hats were thin enough for the wind to blow through and the fleece hats put so much static into her hair that she found it hard to function after they were removed. We were stuck.

One day, during the morning yank to school, I realized that what she needed was a fair isle hat with ear flaps. The double thickness of fabric would keep the wind from blowing through (especially if I used smaller than recommended needles) and the ear flaps would be better than watching her tug and tug and tug all those other hats down around her ears.

I came home and went through all my patterns looking for the perfect thing. I found one I sort of liked but it was knit flat instead of in the round, with DK weight yarn when I wanted worsted, with more than two colours in a row and a few more pet peeves I'll keep to myself. So, using that as a jumping off point, I designed my own hat. Since the basic idea comes from another source, I don't feel right charging for it as if the idea were entirely my own but it deviates so significantly from the other that I do feel like I can offer it up to the knitting community for free.

Here it is, the Cozy Canuck Chullo, being modeled by Madame Jillian (Claire modeled the Cherished Pullover so Jillian deserves a turn this time):



I've written the pattern for two sizes: small, which fits a small child (19" circumference) and large, which fits a big kid or a woman (20.25"). I made them out of Cascade 220 and I recommend that yarn for just about anything you can come up with to make out of it. The pattern tells you which colours I used in case you like those (and I made a boy version by substituting an orange for the pink...easy, peasy, lemon squeezy) but it would be easy to devise others (Claire, a prototype I haven't photographed, is white and chocolate brown and two shades of - I bet you can guess - PINK).

Anyway, if you want to make one, you can link to the pattern from my design web site (sadly neglected for almost a year) www.froggiemeanie.com or through Ravelry. I'd be happy to hear what you think of it!

(I'm posting this at 2 PM...the pattern should be up at both places by 4).

I'm On A Roll (Yes...Another Finished Project)

Last year I started making the ubiquitous Central Park Hoodie for myself out of a shade of Tahki Donegal Tweed that nearly makes me weep with glee. At the time, I had high hopes of getting it done quickly but some other project caught my attention and I ended up putting the sweater in time out with both fronts, the back and both sleeves save half a sleeve cap done. During my latest fit of finishing things up, I decided that the hoodie should be completed too. Being a cardigan, I figure I can wear it now and then even if I don't have a hope in H-E-double hockey sticks of getting it done up.

It didn't take long to finish. It was a quick, easy knit and the only deviation I made from the pattern was to graft the seam in the centre of the hood and make both button bands in one big long piece (that was sort of soul sucking but worth it in the end). This afternoon I sewed the buttons on and so here it is, ready for its debut.

First the close up shot so you can appreciate all the wonder of this tweed (and the cables...and the expert job I did sewing in the sleeves...ha). As I was knitting I was occasionally struck by the thought that I would have liked it better if the tweedy flecks were red and orange and yellow and green rather than navy and turquoise and almost-white-blue but in the end, I see that would have been wrong. It's great just as it is:



Here's the back:



The grafting of the hood was the right choice. Thanks to my knitting buddy Kate who looked at me like I was out of my mind when I suggested maybe I'd just whip it closed with a three needle bind off. She's got a good head on her shoulders, that knitter.

Finally, what I know you all want to see anyway, the profile shot - me and the boy:



Wow. I don't feel as big as I look...most of the time. You can't see the buttons in any of these pictures but you aren't missing much. I intentionally chose something really close to the colour of the sweater so that they'd just fade into the background. I can only get the top three done up anyway.

One last thing. If you ever decide to make a Central Park Hoodie of your own and you seem to be getting gauge and the sweater looks teensy, tiny, made for a Barbie doll...soldier on. As soon as I gave this puppy a nice warm Eucalan bath it relaxed and bloomed and transformed into all sorts of lovely things. It measures out to be exactly what it was supposed to be. "Puppy" was an apt description there a couple of sentences ago. The second it hit the water, my entire house filled with the smell of wet dog. Ok, maybe it was wet sheep but the resemblance to dog is uncanny. Smells great now though.

Growing Up So Fast

Since she was a wee tiny thing, I've always known that Claire is the studious sort. She was eager to learn to sit up at about six months of age but after that she was perfectly content to sit and study the world. The mere idea of locomotion didn't occur to her till she was almost 10 months old and realized she could size things up better if she were closer to them. Honestly...she taught herself to crawl in the space of one hour all because the vacuum cleaner was too far away for her to fondle. I have a video of that somewhere. Lemme see...



Awww...

As she's gotten older, she hasn't been a running, jumping child like a lot of her little buddies. We enrolled her in gymnastics last year because her gross motor skills were so abysmal that we thought she needed some sort of intervention (it worked like a charm). Instead, Claire was the child who wanted to learn how to draw pictures or print her letters or learn definitions of "big words". For a long time, her favourite movie was "Leap Frog: Letter Factory" (more exciting than Dora even).

Last year, she went to Montessori school. She liked it a lot at first and learned a million things about a million things. One day she came home and rhymed off six facts about fish (they have scales, they lay eggs, they are cold blooded, they breathe with gills, etc). Another time she told me the names of all the continents. On a third occasion, I picked her up and the teacher told me she could read a list of small words.

Then all of a sudden, all the learning stopped. She wasn't being pressured at home or at school so I don't think that was the issue. However, her disillusion with school coincided pretty closely with the onset of her bladder/kidney infections and I think the kid just felt like yuck for the better part of six months last year (if not longer).

In September we enrolled her in a different program and she started in on antibiotics for her double ureter and suddenly Learns-A-Lot-Claire was back. She started asking about how to read all the time and was suddenly interested in basic addition and subtraction. She'd take Jillian aside and try to educate her about all the things she had just learned at school. I thought it was all pretty cool.

Still, I was awfully surprised when the kid actually started reading and writing full sentences. Her teacher told me that she had to sound words out for herself and that I was to resist the urge to correct her or try to teach her too many spelling rules (so. very. difficult.) but it seems to work so I follow my instructions. One day she came home with a page she had done where she was to draw her favourite toy and write what it did. Her page had a drawing of her favourite ball and a caption that said "mi. bol. rols." (they learned about punctuation marks the same week).

For Christmas, I bought her a bunch of beginner readers, thinking that in a few months she'd be able to read them on her own. Nope. We read 'em once, help her with words she doesn't know and she's off and running. Today I captured this super sweet moment - reading an entire book to her sister:



Yesterday she was dragging herself across the carpet to get to the vacuum. Today, she can read books. Too fast...wayyyyy too fast.

I spend a fair amount of time wondering how a little brother is gonna mess with serene, studious Claire's life...hoo boy...we're in trouble.

I Really DO Knit

Several months ago, I decided it would be nice to make the kids Christmas presents. I sometimes get a bit twisted up about how commercial Christmas has gotten. Although I know I need to go with the flow, I thought it would be nice to give the children something handmade every year as a little love-filled tradition. So to that end, back in the summer, I decided I'd knit them sweaters. I guess I was sort of weak from all the Ontario humidity when I determined that a hat wouldn't be enough and a sweater apiece was more appropriate.

I casually asked them what sort of sweaters they would like to have. Jillian didn't have any sort of opinion on the matter but Claire said she wanted a blue one with butterflies on it. I figured I had a job ahead of me to either hunt down a chart or design my own butterfly. The thought of knitting intarsia made me a little woozy but I was going to step up and do right by her.

I had mentioned to a few people that I was hunting for butterfly sweaters and a buddy of mine (Hi Vall) alerted me to the fact that the newest Lopi book had a butterfly design in it. I got my hands on the book and decided that their design was perfect for Claire. I started it back in the fall but the colours I chose, which looked perfectly good together in the balls, didn't make me happy on the sweater and I got discouraged. I admit that it ended up in the void at the back of my knitting chair for a while.

After that disappointment I decided to pick something out to make for Jillian. At this point, it was only about 10 days before Christmas and I knew that if I was going to come even close to making the date I'd need something simple and fairly heavy-weight. I went through my Miss Bea books and picked out something appropriate, dashed up to the yarn store and got a couple of balls of yarn and packed it all up for a hospital project to do while Claire was having surgery.

Turns out that Claire's remarkably fast recovery time doomed my knitting. I had visions of spending untold hours on the children's ward knitting my worries away while my poor infirm baby moaned and groaned and recovered from her trauma. Instead, I was back here, blanching at all the wild things Claire was doing a mere 48 hours after her surgery and trying to keep her from blowing her incision wide open. I ended up knitting on that little project after the kid's bedtimes when I was pretty much ready to hit the hay myself.

In the end, I didn't get either of the sweaters done for Christmas Day. Things got too busy and I decided not to stress myself out with all-night knitting sessions (pregnant mothers of two shouldn't do that stuff...it's bad for everyone's health).

I didn't feel bad about those sweaters till after New Year's Day. I'm not the resolution sort and I'm not very sentimental about the New Year but I do think a little something got to me about starting a new year with that unfinished business and girls who were growing faster than I knit. So, on Sunday, I dedicated the entire day to those projects. I'm only a little bit ashamed to say that I didn't get out of my jammies till just before bedtime when I had a bath.

On Monday morning I presented the girls with their new sweaters. In the end I think it was better that they didn't get them on Christmas morning when they'd have been overshadowed by Barbies and games and books. Instead, they both got quite excited about my handiwork and made me happy that I'd started in on the projects even if they didn't get done when I wanted them too.

They were very interested in wearing their sweaters but weren't nearly so interested in having their pictures taken in the sweaters. But, for the blog, I do the best I can. DH got me an external flash for my camera for Christmas and I have no clue how it works but I do know that my indoor photos look better even if I just put it on auto and set the flash at 45 degrees (any flash photographers with tips out there?). For some reason the new flash freaks me out much more than my new lens did. The new lens feels like a toy...the flash feels like highly technical equipment.

Ok, I've digressed enough, here they are:

Claire's sweater is Fiorildaslod from Lopi book 27. I knit it in Cascade 220 in a bunch of colours that looked really great together on the balls but not as great knit up. I wish I had chosen a couple of purples instead of the greens. I loved the lace ribbing on the body and sleeves.

The 53 bodies and antennae on the butterflies are duplicate stitched/embroidered on at the end. I used the colour of the main sweater for that part in hopes of making the colour combination look better and I think that was a) a successful plot b) a lot less soul-sucking than switching colours for each butterfly like they recommened in the pattern. The embroidery was time consuming but not difficult.

The pattern also called for this to be knit in the round and steeked but my fair isle guru Anne told me she thought that was going to end up not looking so great with heavy yarn and so I knit it back and forth instead. There was only about 9 rows where I was doing colourwork on the wrong side and that was completely endurable. As advised, I did crochet the button bands on and it was quick and easy and looks good next to the lacy ribbing. We chose clear buttons so not to make the whole thing look too busy.

Jillian (is it just me or is she starting to look awfully grown up?) has the "Cookie" sweater from Miss Bea's Rainy Day. Again, it is made from Cascade 220 in a colour I thought would look nice on Jillian. The patterns in those books are really great. They are intentionally designed to be fairly simple but still stylish. It seems like Louisa Harding went out of her way not to complicate things. In this pattern, the cable happens on the same row as the top of the little diamond pattern every single time. You don't even really need to keep track. All the patterns have charts and they are colour coded in a way that makes me really happy. And they fit kids at the point they say they are going to fit. All good things. It is getting hard to lay hands on these Miss Bea books nowadays but I highly recommend them if you see them and have a little person in your life you want to knit for. I'm also impressed at the girl to boy design ratio in these books too. It's not ever 50/50 but there are a lot more designs for boys than I've seen in a lot of pattern books for kids. It knit up so darned fast that I almost felt like it was cheating to present this to her as a token of my toil. I think I could have made it two or three evenings if I had really set my mind to it.

I don't even try to pretend that this is an exclusive "knitting blog" anymore. I got confirmation of that a while ago when I got an email from someone who called me a "mommy blogger". Still, it started out life as a knit blog and I still do it so I'm going to still try and put up the occasional knitting post whenever I can. Especially when life is routine and and my only other news is that my body seems to know that I passed the six-months-pregnant point and decided to make me tired and achy. My pelvis has decided to loosen its grip on, well, everything and it seems like any bit of exertion is too much. I pay for it in the evenings by being stiff to the point of nearly immobile. Hot baths seem to be my only source of relief so I've had a few of those. The baby, like Jillian before him, seems to be soothed by the baths and I sleep better if I soak before bed. Unlike Jillian, he gets so active sometimes that I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if he pops right out through the skin of my belly like one of the critters from "Alien". I might be brewing a boisterous little fella. I figure we're all in for a big change in a few months.