Zimmerman on the Brain

I'm starting to think Elizabeth Zimmerman's books should feature a warning lable of some kind.

Yesterday my hands were absent needles and yarn (very unusual but after all I was entitled to a bit of recovery time after my Pi marathon last week) Nonetheless, my brain was busy vicariously knitting along with EZ all day! Her "pithy" words, 'knocking around in my head and it seems I'm powerless to turn them off.

'On line for a bit of distraction - trying to get excited about all the new fall patterns coming out, I looked several times through the new offerings from the Twist Collective. (Mimico is sooo fabulous!) but I kept getting stuck on an article on a "lost" sweater EZ knit decades ago. Clicking over to the advice column by Anne and Kay and they're advising knitters to use up single souvenir skeins by knitting the February Baby Sweater and highlighting how fine yarn is more economical to knit with than thicker alternatives - Knitter's Almanac! - Time to get off line!

I flip through the new VK - Zimmerman's "Ganomy" hat is front and centre and Jared Flood has a feature article channeling her genius of knitting in the round (the article isn't about her but that's all I see as I read it!)

So last night, (My Beloved's out of town, Darling Daughter's, out on the town) Number One Son was enjoying a bit of TV before we head back to the screen-free cottage today, I was fresh and cool from a lovely swim at my sister's, my evening cup of tea in hand, I should have reached for that sock project as I settled in but instead I just flipped open the Almanac to the Aran sweater and vicariously followed along.

Once back to the cottage later today I'll just give over to this Zimmerman thing and hope that Eunny's brilliance awaiting me in the Tangled Yoke and just plain tangles in the red ribbed alpaca scarf to sort through will give a bit of relief.

But I'm also taking a mass of coloured worsted to start swatching for my Fair Isle cardigan. That could be a good distraction but then again, I'll have to try to enjoy that project for its own value rather than regarding it as just creating remants for me to play around with a Zimmerman seamless sweater or three!

'Like I said, warning labels are probably in order - maybe I should make some of my own!

Thanks for dropping by!

Wine Cork Board FO(ish)

A recent post referencing our project to make a wine cork board at the cottage received a few interested comments so I when I was back up north last week I took more snaps to share. To recap, I made a huge error in assessing how much my 3 years' worth of corks would cover which meant we had to revisit how to make this board a reality waaaay in advance of having enough corks to fill it even as the behemoth of a frame that was already assembled and its spattering of roly poly corks hogged the entire cottage dining room table for days on end in July.

In the end My Beloved had the concept of breaking the single expanse of the frame's interior into 5 separate sections by adding four cross pieces. This allowed us to partially fill the middle and outer side sections with wine corks and the remaining two sections with cork boards purchased at a craft store while minimizing the resulting hodge podge appearance.

The board's mitered pine frame is about 7' x 2.5'. (I can't get back far enough in our narrow little hallway to get a better shot)

Its held flush on the wall by two screws over which two slots at the back of the frame simply slide. This keeps any knocks the board might receive from pulling it off the wall as well as providing a nice solid surface for tacking photos up, taking them down and moving them around as I'm keen to do. The corks lie just a bit below the edge of the frame on a thin piece of 1/4" ply wood and are held in place with wood glue.

(There was one coloured cork in the collection - a RED one - obviously my favourite so I took care not to cover it up.)

(Below you can see the corks in the middle section and the cork boards in the sections on either side.

We'll work at filling the three wine cork sections until they are done and then we'll trim the cork board areas to accommodate each year's accumulated corks as we collect them.

We could of course, get corks from friends and family to speed up the process but we're keen to use only our own so we'll have to be patient. In the meantime, the solution works - the photos are up, evoking all kinds of wonderful memories as we pass by the frame many times each day.

But the board also allows for changing the display whenever we choose and frankly there are so many photos on it, its hard to even see just how incomplete the actual cork collection really is.

So its not an FO and won't be for some time to come. Its definitely a WIP but maybe that will be part of its ongoing charm.

I Came Close!

Here's what I accomplished on Pi in the week between early last Sunday evening when I cast on and 2 hours before party time - about 2:00 p.m. yesterday when....

...I ran out of yarn. I knew it would be close. I knew Saturday in the sweltering heat at Soccer Field Day...

...as I knit kind of side saddle with the work on top of the cooler beside me rather than on my lap, I wouldn't be ready in time to block it. I hoped I could finish the knitting though.

I worked on it until about 1:00 am Sunday (by that point I had made it counterclockwise around to the single green marker) then got up early and put another few hours on it Sunday morning, set it aside to prepare my contributions for the birthday dinner and get dressed and then set to it again. In that final hour my heart was actually beating a bit faster as I flew along on the garter stitched edging wondering whether the time or the yarn would be the first to run out. If I'd had enough yarn I would have made it!

In the end I printed off a copy of the almost finished shawl picture at the top of this post and tucked it onto the birthday card. Mom was very pleased. With the high humidity yesterday it felt like about 40 degrees celcius as we gathered pool side at my sister's place. Unlike a week or two ago I don't think she lamented the absence of a warm and woolly shawl to throw around her shoulders (she was the only one not to bring her suit and go swimming - she definitely did regret that - the water was beautifully cool and refreshing!)

She does have one more ball of that yarn left with which she needs to crochet the neck band onto her sweater and then I can have the rest. I'm sure there will be enough to do both jobs but my mother is a plodding perfectionist so I'll have to wait. I'll put the few stitches left on Pi without an edge onto a holder and chase her down about getting the sweater done in September so I can have the remainders.

The Pi shawl is an EZ "unvention" that is much like an algebraic "formula". The knitter is free to plug in the variables of her choice (size, yarn, gauge, pattern) and see what the "solution" looks like in the end with the finished FO .(I'm suspecting that most of her "patterns" are similar in this respect but I'll have to dig deeper into her writings to see if that's true for sure).

While the knitting is essentially complete for this Pi, the variable of blocking still remains. It should open up significantly with a hard blocking, changing the feel and drape of the fabric to an as yet to be determined degree that I'll look forward to discovering in the fall.

Thanks for dropping by!