nerd knits

The Baby Surprise Jacket was delivered to the parents-to-be with all due fanfare:

I know we don’t do it for the applause, but it’s nice to have your work appreciated.  It was oohed and aahed over, and I was proclaimed the Queen of Knitters.  It gives you the warm fuzzies, yanno?
Oh, and thank you all for [...]

All seamed up and ready to go!  With any luck at all, I’ll buy buttons tomorrow, sew them on Wednesday evening, and I’ll finally be able to stick a fork in this sucker.

I started to seam it up with applied i-cord, and found myself totally disgusted with the way the one of the raw edges [...]

Lookie, lookie!  It’s a weird-shaped knitted thing!  You know what that means.

Yay!  It really does fold into a sweater!  A few ends to weave in, a couple short seams, a few buttons…it’s just lovely, isn’t it?
I did, however, find an oddity as I was looking it over a few rows before casting off.

This is a [...]

To all of you burried under unexpected ice and snow…greetings from sunny Denver, where the high today was in the mid-seventies!  I walked out of work today to find that the air held that glorious, telltale scent of spring – warm wood, fresh flowers, earth thawing…delicious.
Today was a lovely day – and I’m not just [...]

…but this thing continues to baffle me.

It’s not that I can’t piece it together, per se.  I know how to fold it, and once a section is knit I can see where it goes.  It’s that I can’t look at the schematic and figure out where to place the stripes.  Honestly. my initial inclination was [...]

(Garter stitch, that is.)
I understand why garter stitch is much-beloved among many knitters – it’s easy, mindless, reversible, and non-curling.  Additionally, I think it’s quite attractive in many applications.  And yet…and yet…I inevitably find knitting it very perplexing.  I know, for example, that one “purl ridge” equal two rows, but I always seem to bully [...]

It may not look like much now, but many knitters will recognize this as the beginnings of the ubiquitous Baby Surprise Jacket, one of Elizabeth Zimmerman’s more ingenious patterns.  Even Bradon, ever the engineer, was impressed with this little feat of knitting when I showed him the schematics.  This is a gift for an April [...]