My mother and I have had an email back-and-forth since last week about the fact that she received a tracking number for her first ever shipment of the Rockin Sock Club. I, oblivious at the time to Tina’s comment on the sock club blog that tracking numbers were provided for the 400 packages that shipped last week, had no idea why she, my own mother, had a delivery confirmation and I did not. The audacity! The insult!

So what do I get in my email inbox today?

Subject: ok then
Body:  I definitely WILL NOT be telling you what I got today!! JUST NOW!!!

My own mother, the very woman who taught me to knit, the very woman who I turned onto Socks that Rock, the very woman who I’m sure joined in part due to the socks I knit my step-dad for Christmas, which were the last kit of Rockin Sock Club 2008.

Alas, I sit here, with no club kit, and a mother who is taunting me from several hundred miles away behind a computer. She is reading Dyer’s Notes and squishing yarn without me!

I stamp my feet in disapproval! My feet that are, incidentally, clad in one of my favorite pair of socks. Knit out of none other than Socks that Rock, of course.

My sole (no pun intended) consolation? By the time this post was done, I received my tracking number!

I have finished and blocked my Kaura hat and we won’t discuss just how pleased I am with it until I post pictures. In the meantime, I’ve apparently moved to Crazy Knitter Town, Population 1.

Originally, when I conceived of this idea of a matched set of hat and mittens, I was going to make the Green Autumn Druid Mittens. Then I started looking at the pattern while my hat was blocking. Two or three columns on a magazine page. Two small charts. No problem. Plus one chart that was an entire magazine page. Yes, an 8 1/2” x 11” chart. I may have started sweating a bit, actually. But I wiped my brow and decided I could handle it. Until I read further and saw it called for 68 stitches around the hand. At the required gauge, I quickly realized that one of two things was necessary: 1) my hands would have to mysteriously grow at least an inch or more in width in a short period of time or 2) I would have to knit on size 0 (2.0mm) needles. Number 1 wasn’t going to happen without some fancy feat of science that would render all my other gloves and mittens useless, and Number 2 required more patience than I thought I would have for this project.

Back to the drawing board. Like I need an excuse to look at more patterns? Pshaw.

I actually drummed up several other plausible mitten patterns that involved cables and that I felt would look nice with the Kaura hat, all the while trying to come up with ones that could be worked suitably small for my hands with minimal modification. Chevalier is gorgeous but too heavy weight. Gallus is beautiful but did not seem quite right to go with Kaura. Magic Mirror was a close contender, but called for 64 stitches in sport weight. Even in the fingering weight I wanted to use, again that would mean I’d be probably working on size 0s, which I didn’t want to do (remember this point later). Regina had cables and bobbles, and I could probably have worked them into mittens, but I thought perhaps that was too much bobbles for one set of outerwear.

So what did I select?

This is the beginnings of Entangled Stitches. Take a look at the pattern if you’ve never seen it. And there you’ll find the answer.

Making moot my entire search and the guidelines I had set, I selected a pattern with the following qualities:

1. Gloves. Yes, Ten fingers. (Grand total of fingers knitted in my lifetime? Zero.)
2. 68 stitches across the hand. (You will note this is peculiarly similar to the pattern I vetoed for just this very reason.)
3. Knitting on size 0 needles. (See above.)
4. A ridiculous amount of tiny cables. (I can do some 1x1 crossing cables without a cable needle, but not ones where you knit the second stitch through the back loop, that just makes life too complicated. Did I mention I don’t have a size 0 cable needle, so I have to use a double-pointed needle?)
5. 14 charts. (Do I even need to explain this one?!)

And this is why today, I am the mayor and sole citizen of Crazy Knitter Town. Care to join me?

The other day, I mentioned that the Kaura and Druid Mittens patterns together evoked a 1950s ski chalet feel for me. Hot chocolate, heavy wool sweaters, berets, wooden skis, ski poles you could use as a weapon should the Abominable Snowman pay you a visit on your snowy adventure in the mountains (or hills, if you grew up skiing in the midwest like me).

By good fortune, about two weeks ago I did a trade with someone in the Selfish Knitters group on Ravelry. I had a few skeins of handspun, hand-dyed yarn that I simply was never going to use, and I wanted to find a good home for it. Did I say I was never going to use it? That’s an understatement. If you put me in a yarn shop with a bunch of yarn and I had to spend hours lining up each yarn in my order of preference, these yarns would be down at the end of the list. Not because there was anything wrong with them; they were all gorgeous in their own right. But really, what possessed me to ever think that I would want a loopy boucle in shades of tan and brown? My own mother is probably spitting coffee on her monitor at the thought of that. I could probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve worn brown in my life.

Then there was the thick and thin yarn, like this skein in muted shades of pink, purple and peach. Shades, I might add, that I would never, ever wear. Replace “brown” in the sentence above the picture with “purple” and “peach” and, well, you get the picture.

Like I said, lovely yarn. Me? No. So we traded, and each got something we wanted and everything worked splendidly.

So what does this have to do with ski chalets and Bing Crosby, you ask?

That’s the cover of a 1957 knitting pamphlet, “Men’s and Women’s Hand Knit Winter Sport Fashions of Bear Brand and Fleisher Yarns”. This was the prize in my end of the trade! Each page is better than the last, full of amazing vintage sweaters, each outfit topping the last. I think this one might be my favorite:

I have a fondness in my heart (perhaps the word should be obsession?) for all things vintage, but those outfits had even me cackling. The allover crown print, matching kerchief for her, each hand knit sweater neatly tucket into matching ski pants. But wait! What if you smoke? There’s nowhere for your cigarettes in that sweater!

So if you smoke, why not knit yourself a ski sweater with a convenient little pouch for your Chesterfields, like this swell gal?

Welcome! And for some people, welcome back! Yes, redhotknitter.com is officially open again and ready for business. And since no one needs a long and drawn-out rambling welcome post, let’s get to the nitty gritty.

It’s 22 degrees in Chicago today. That might sound cold to some of you, but considering the fact that the temperature last Thursday and Friday was reading in double-digit negatives, this is “tank top weather”, as my friend Julie put it. Seeing as I would probably get frostbite on some rather necessary parts of my body if I actually went out in a tank top, I’m instead inside knitting a hat. (Fine, if you want to be technical, I’m blogging about knitting a hat. I haven’t yet mastered typing and knitting. If you have, I want to know about it.)

Enter Kaura.

When I was visiting my mom and step-dad in suburban Washington, D.C. over Christmas I got the inspiration to do a vintage-inspired set of mittens and a hat in red. Now, if you know one thing about me, it is that I love red. I mean red. Red. RED. However you’d like to emphasize it. Really freakin’ red. Fire engine red. Stoplight red. Scarlet red.  Not maroon, not brick, red. Red, people.

We went to my favorite yarn shop, A Tangled Skein, conveniently located blocks away from their home. (We’re not going to talk about how unfair it is that this shop is 704.84 miles from my home. Not that I measured. Why do you ask?) I bought some Cascade 220 superwash for a Kaura hat and some Araucania Ranco sock yarn for Green Autumn Druid Mittens. Both patterns together evoke sort of a 1950s ski chalet feel for me, and what better color choice of yarn than red?

This is my Kaura hat, a little more than halfway done. While I got gauge on my swatch, I felt that it was going to knit up a little tight, so I upped the needle size about 3 notches. I figured this would also help since I’d rather go for a little more beret-like shape if possible, but I’m going to wing that in the blocking. (Famous last words.)

This was my first attempt at bobbles, which turn out to be fun! Kind of. I think I’ll have to poke all of them a bit once it’s all complete, as they have a tendency to want to be a little bit more squashy than bobbley.

Maybe if I’m lucky, when I finish this hat I’ll actually start straight away into the mittens, and realize my dream of having a matched set! Now wouldn’t that be an amazing feat, following through with two whole projects with one collective purpose!

I’m brushing off some cobwebs, folks. So if anyone arrives here, bear with me. The site might be up, down, sideways or in various other forms of flux. In other words, “coming soon” about covers it.