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To the lighthouse

By in Ada, Island, Jolyon, Outside 4 Comments

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As I’m writing today, we’re in Portland watching the clouds lower and waiting for the cold sizzle of freezing rain. My daughter has seen the inside of a school building exactly once this year and has logged a total of nine days of education since December 1. Our world has been snow and ice and sledding and baking and free play and Swallow and Amazons for so long I can hardly remember the shape of our standard routines. This wintry dreamtime has been such a complete holiday from real life that I dread the return of early rising, school lunches, and long commutes in dreary weather. If our thaw works quickly and we aren’t glazed in a fresh layer of ice, that day might be tomorrow, so I’m looking backward instead.

At the turn of the year, natured graced us with a golden day. I swept the children out of the farmhouse and into the car for a quick walk before the sun set. The wind had calmed; Mr. G stayed behind to enjoy the respite from its teeth as he set new fence in our most exposed corner, where the breeze comes in boorish from its romp across the Pacific. At the southeast tip of the island is the little Cattle Point lighthouse, built in 1935. The surrounding land is part of a conservation area crisscrossed with pleasant walking trails—as long as you’re not nervous about the rather abrupt plunge down to South Beach.

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A fellow walker watched my children and dog pelting ahead up the path and kindly asked if I was familiar with the lay of the land. Indeed, there’s been enough erosion here that the trails we walk today are not the trails of my childhood, and in some places they wind very near the edge of the cliff. As tempting as it might be to climb atop that stone the boy is passing above, the sandy soil is scooped out beneath it and I wouldn’t care to test whether an extra forty or fifty pounds might be enough to send it on its inevitable tumble to the sea. The kids stay clear. But I believe the only way to grow agile and surefooted and canny in risk assessment is to test yourself on trails such as this one from an early age, so I let them run.

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A gentler slope here

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Darn, I wish this hat were something I needed to photograph for a pattern release!

The lighthouse isn’t grand or terribly iconic, but its stout little octagonal tower and drum lens go on keeping the shipping off the rocks of Cattle Pass. The Coast Guard allegedly intends to do some restoration work here to shore up the building before it slithers seaward.

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Two bald eagles reign over this territory and we crept near their tree to watch them awhile, because that was the sort of magic on offer this day. The sea was full of splashy ducks and cormorants. The homeward trail got a wee bit tiring…

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…but the beauty and the docile weather made a rather dribbling pace no hardship. All the mountains were out—Mount Rainier, about 120 miles away, is just visible on the horizon at the right edge of the frame in the photo above—and the road home provided a close look at this handsome fellow in the twilight:

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My parents chose this home, crossing the continent years before I was born and setting down new roots. I had the freedom to leave; I’ve visited many beautiful places and I hope to see a great many more, and I could have stayed for good in a few of them, but this island has always called me back. On days like this, I think the greatest gift I can give my little ones is to infuse their growing and becoming with this same landscape. Who knows where they’ll fly? But if they carry this place in their hearts, they’ll know what they’re looking for when they find it.

Knitter on the Road

By in Mei, Traveling No Comments

2016 was a peculiar year for my knitting. It was a year of odd whims and obsessive loops. I knit FIVE Littlewing baby vests; why such a simple little shape should have captivated me to that extent is a mystery, but I was determined to hone the geometry and somehow the prototyping never got old. I buckled down at last to write the Lalita pattern, which is in the testing phase now and ought to be ready to publish in a few weeks. I started my Bohus Stickning Wild Apple, completed the colorful yoke, and then had an uncharacteristic crisis of confidence about the short rows and set it aside. (Nothing an evening’s focus can’t resolve, but somehow when evening rolls around I find it’s easier to add a few rows to my Scalene shawl.) Just lately someone asked about my old Minaret sock pattern and I thought I really ought to overhaul it for independent release—and somehow that led to designing a whole new sock that’s similar but better. (And then knitting it twice at different gauges.) In the midst of it all, I decided to drop several holiday gifts of reasonable scale to bust out a sweater for my sister-in-law.

Let’s blame Michele Wang, who can’t seem to design anything I don’t want to knit, especially when it’s in Brooklyn Tweed Quarry. I mean, Snoqualmie and Auster in the same year? She’s killing me. Being BT’s copywriter, I get to see the new collections ahead of time, and on a total impulse I snagged six skeins of Quarry in Alabaster the day before Thanksgiving and cast on a sleeve for Mei on the drive to Cousin Walt’s house in Olympia. At this gauge, it wasn’t long before I had all the pieces of a sweater, and I just managed to sew them together before we left for a pre-Christmas visit to Texas. Luckily, making this trek involves many, many hours of travel. I tackled the collar, which is roughly the size of Connecticut, in the way-back of the minivan while my offspring sang “Charlie on the MTA” and quite a few self-composed nonsense variations for 220 miles. It took a couple of sessions of porch knitting (poor me) and late-night scotch knitting (while my in-laws did show and tell with their gun collection—I had the epiphany that this branch of my husband’s family loves their arsenal in exactly the same way that I love my knitting tools), but I finished in time to pop it in the mail for delivery in NYC on the 24th.

How about some pictures? The light was flat, the camera was my phone, and the wind meant business.

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Next up? More Littlewing vests. I got my hands on a couple of skeins of Stone Wool Cormo (send me all the Cormo!) and I’m going to try a worsted-weight + smaller size hack of my own pattern. And I’ll introduce those new socks sometime soon. Tomorrow’s another travel day — the kind where I’m not at the wheel all the time — and the race to the toe is on.

Littlewing live!

By in Design, Littlewing Vest No Comments

Winter Solstice seems like an auspicious day to publish a new pattern—for the shortest of humans on this shortest of days—and to reemerge from blog hibernation, no?

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After much tinkering with the geometry, test knitting in all sizes, and a little more tinkering and a whole lot of life getting in the way, the Littlewing vest is now available for purchase! Sized for babies newborn to two years old, this vest uses 150-250 yards of DK-weight wool. I’ve used two yarns from Green Mountain Spinnery—the blue shown above is Mewesic and I did a newborn size for a friend’s baby in New Mexico Organic—and loved the results. But I also did a prototype in YOTH Big Sister…

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And Martha, mama to this little peach, knit one for her nephew in Brooklyn Tweed Arbor, so really, the options are wide open. If you’ve got worsted weight in your stash that you’d like to substitute, you could probably just knit the next smaller size and come out fine.

My favorite feature of Littlewing is that it’s reversible. For wee ones who can’t sit up or move around much, the front fastening is the easiest way to put it on: just lay the vest out flat, place baby on the back portion, flip the front over her head, and wrap the wings in to button or tie closed. But for inquisitive and coordinated specimens who can’t see a button without wanting to taste it, just flip the vest around and you’ll stymie them completely.

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One change I made after the test knitting phase was to add an optional second set of buttons to secure the lower hem. I recommend this modification for the larger sizes. The four-button vest comes out like this:

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Littlewing is available for purchase in my Ravelry store. I hope you’ll love this little wardrobe staple for the small folks in your life; I can’t wait to see some out in the wild. (And now, off to cast on two more, because the tiny cousins are landing thick and fast! The good news is that these will be my sixth and seventh iterations, and I’m not sick of knitting this pattern yet. They’re like eating potato chips.)

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