New Year. New Sleeve.

In case you haven't noticed, the holidays are over.

Signs are everywhere. This morning, Dolores took down the Christmas tree. To be perfectly accurate I should say that she took out the Christmas tree when she landed on it at 4 a.m.; but in our house it amounts to the same thing.

The cookies are all gone. So are the pies. Mrs. Teitelbaum has put her menorah back on the top shelf and flown to Fort Lauderdale to wait out the winter with her great-nephew Maurice the Florist. And instead of my inbox filling with junk messages that say LAST CHANCE PRE-HOLIDAY SALE!!! my inbox is now full of junk messages that say LAST CHANCE HOLIDAY CLEARANCE SALE!!!

In America, your last chance is never really your last chance. That's one of the things that makes this country great.

Meanwhile, I'm able to knit for myself again. The lopapeysa (remember the lopapeysa?) grew another sleeve.



You may recall that I decided to just follow the pattern for this one, aside from changing everything about it. That meant coming up with a new chart for the colorwork about the cuff. Not a tall order, as the yoke contains elements that are easy to echo in a smaller circumference.

After the colorwork passage, I knew I wanted purple cuffs. I plan to wear this while teaching, and my flailing wrists + purple cuffs should = wide-awake students.

Notice, though, that there are no needles in the cuff; nor has it been bound off. That's because the photograph was made right before I ripped back the entire sleeve.

Lesson learned:

It does no good to try on a top-down sleeve repeatedly
if you refuse to acknowledge that the sleeve is way too tight
and correct your course.

That little voice in my head kept telling me it was fine, because I like a "snug fit." But this was not a "snug fit," this was cutting off the circulation to my fingers. Granted, the typical baggy generosity of an unshaped lopapeysa doesn't do a fireplug body like mine any favors–some shaping is a must. But lopi should never be expected to stretch like the Lycra in Kim Kardashian's Sunday drawers.

Learn Along with Franklin: Part I

In keeping with the theme of learning new things in the new year, I've decided it might be interesting and useful to share some of the lessons to found in my collection of antique and vintage children's books. This will be an occasional series–I'll post whenever I run across a particularly sparkly gem of wisdom.

For today, we have a word about multiculturalism/architecture from Health and Safety Series: Everyday Living by Brownell, Ireland, and Giles, published in 1935. This is from "Unit Five: The House You Live In."



Better you should live in a casino.

Steek Geek

The lopapeysa chugged one station closer to Finishville yesterday, after I cut the steek down the front. Snippity-snip. Instant cardigan.



This isn't my first steek, but it's the first time I've secured the edges using a sewing machine instead of rows of crochet. I chose the sewing option because it was for me the less familiar and the more unnerving. Like that nice Mae West, when choosing between two evils I always pick the one I haven't tried yet.

I've only recently started to make friends with my sewing machine. There are still awkward moments, when I'm not sure of myself and she just sits there waiting for me to make a move. We have navigated successfully through a couple of hems, a square pillow and the lower portion of a doll; but never had I run a length of hand-knitting between the presser foot and the feed dogs.

A test drive was in order. I whipped out a swatch* that transitioned (like the lopapeysa) from one color to two. This took ten minutes, and probably saved me an hour's trouble in the long run.



I used the swatch to determine the top tension setting, the stitch length, and the amount of effort I'd need (not much, it turned out) to keep the fabric sliding along the machine bed.

This is not to say there were no bumps. Some knitters like to preserve the illusion of infallibility, but I blew that opportunity years ago. I might as well 'fess up.

The first pass–done with the wrong side of the fabric up, which I'd been told would help me stay on track–was a disaster. It wiggled like an EKG for the first eleven inches, then ran off the steek and and landed in the yoke pattern.

Notice, however, that I am still here, alive, typing this. Notice that the sweater was not wrecked. Notice that the police blotter in the Chicago Sun-Times did not report a man hurling a sewing machine out the living room window and into Lake Michigan.

I learned what happens when (horrors!) your sewn steek goes astray. What happens is you get your seam ripper and you un-pick the stitches. I decided to undo the entire twenty-inch seam. It took thirty minutes. I watched half an episode of Monarch of the Glen while I was doing it. There are worse ways to pass time.

The second and third passes (with the right side up) were uneventful, and whatever jitters attended my maiden voyage with this technique will bother me no more.

Before starting the sleeves, I decided to run a row of single crochet up each selvedge.



I'm so happy I did. The edges have more body, look spiffy, and will provide a more stable base for the zipper.

Sleeves are next. I know I can do sleeves.

*I felt compelled to post a photograph of the swatch to prove that I had done it. I think not swatching and saying you did is one of the dirty little secrets of knitting. It's like flossing your teeth. Maybe you do, maybe you don't; but either way you're going to give the dentist the same answer–which is never "Oh, frankly, I just couldn't be bothered."

Little Man, Big Sweater

The lopapeysa isn't the only thing I've been knitting, but it's the one thing I can show you.



Having now shown it, I will confess that almost everything you see below the yoke has been ripped back and is being re-knit.

One of the great advantages of working from the top down is that the sweater can be tried on while still in progress, without any danger of this happening. For interim fittings to be of genuine benefit, however, the knitter must be able to make honest assessments of his work and correct as needed. I, perhaps due to an excess of enthusiasm, was unable to face facts until I'd nearly completed the ribbing at the hem. Denial, as I was saying to Kevin Spacey and Ryan Seacrest the other day, is a powerful thing.

The problem? The front was fine, but the back had enough extra room to park a couple of minivans, one of them pulling a trailer. It looked like that flap of skin mother dogs use to carry puppies around. This, in spite of my attempts to head off exactly such an outcome by dividing the work at the underarms with considerably more stitches in front than in back.

Man knits; God laughs.

It's startling for a guy to become a knitter, take stock of his measurements and realize that he requires what his dressmaker grandmother taught him is called a Full Bust Adjustment. Even if it does indicate that all those bloody bench presses haven't been for naught.

In a ready-t0-wear sweater, I might have let it pass. I'm accustomed to store-bought clothes not fitting properly. Commercial menswear lines consider stocky fellows under five feet, seven inches to be flights of fantasy, like the Loch Ness Monster or Mitt Romney's moral compass.

But there's no such excuse when I'm making it with my own hands. Rip I must, and rip I did; and the results will be worth it in the end.

I can't sign off before drawing your attention to the length of insipid pink yarn that's holding the live armhole stitches–you can see the ends hanging down. It came from a gigantic ball of shoddy acrylic I picked up years ago, when I still believed that yarn was yarn was yarn. I made three baby gifts from it, taught myself lace by using it for swatches, and have sliced off what must be miles of it in bits and pieces to use for class demonstrations, provisional cast-ons, stitch holders, and stitch markers.

The ball is still exactly the same size it was when I bought it. When Bill Clinton was in the White House.

This never happens with cashmere.

New York Calling

Online registration is open for my early December classes at Lion Brand Yarn Studio in New York City. This will be a first visit for me, and they'll also be hosting a talk/book signing the same weekend. The place is a kick–come and join us.

Yoked

For knitters, one of the staggering things about the streets of Reykjavik is that they are so full of people wearing handknits that you almost stop noticing. The lopapeysa is everywhere. What's more, it's on everyone. The hip and the dowdy, the young and the old, the ample and the spindly all hike about with the signature patterned yoke around their shoulders.

On day one, spotting them was sport enough. "Over there," Stephen would hiss in my ear, "by the coffee shop." Mike would snap a surreptitious picture with his iPad, if a photo taken by waving a large, flashy piece of electronic equipment in the air can be said to be surreptitious.

By the end of the trip, we had moved along from mere sighting to identifying according to which Lopi book they'd been published in. "Number 26," I'd say, casually nodding my head in the direction of a passing specimen. "That's four this morning," Stephen would note. Stephen is good at counting things. Mike would snap a surreptitious picture with his iPad, if a photo taken by waving a large, flashy piece of electronic equipment in the air can be said to be surreptitious.

You can attribute the universal popularity of the lopapeysa to many things. It's warm. It's handsome. It's durable. You can buy the yarn for it at the grocery store for thirty bucks.

But that's not the whole story. It also turns out the damned things are addictive to knit. I started my Vetur three days ago with a swatch to test the colors. I have already finished the yoke,



and I'm having trouble setting it aside so that I can eat, sleep, bathe, engage in human contact.



I had to force myself to put it down so I could photograph it and write this. In fact, I'm tempted to stop writing immed