The Independent Stitch

The Free Spirit Book

I've been promising to talk about the book that's coming out this fall from Free Spirit Publishing. I've heard back from Free Spirit that it's okay to put the cover up here, so it's time. My understanding is that the book's scheduled to be released in September 2007.

The name of the book is High IQ Kids: Collected Insights, Information, and Stories from the Experts, and it's edited by Kiesa Kay, Deborah Robson (me), and Judy Fort Brenneman. It took a long time to put the book together. The publishing house that decided to take a chance on it, after many others had said they thought it would be a great book but not one they could publish, is the perfect publisher to be issuing it and the people there are wonderful to work with.

So here's the cover:

That boy looks like what all three editors (and many of the contributors) wish our kids had looked like in school. Our kids didn't. We put the book together so maybe other people's similar kids will look like that. We've asked the press if there might be a similar photo of a girl elsewhere on the outside of the book—maybe the spine, since so many books are displayed spine-out. Our own kids, whose experiences motivated the creation of this book, are 50/50 split between boys and girls.

A quick overview of how this book came together

I wish I knew where I'd picked up the concept that I'm about to mention, which has helped me a great deal over the past couple of decades, but I don't. I probably came across it thirteen or fourteen years ago, when I was scrambling to learn what I needed to know about high-IQ kids, because my parenting responsibilities suddenly required this type of information on an emergency basis. The idea stuck because it's served as a compass point ever since.

The concept is that there is an “optimal” IQ, say between 100 and 145, with which people function easily and well in contemporary society. The idea is that people with IQs between 115 and 144 are smart enough to do anything they want but aren't so smart that they have trouble fitting in.

I just had to look up the latter set of numbers in the manuscript of High IQ Kids. I don't know all that much about IQ stuff, although I probably know more than most people because I've had to learn.

Personally, I view IQ like height: some people have more, some less. Some people need to use step stools while others bump their heads on doorways unless they duck. IQ is an arbitrary measurement, just like height is. It has nothing to do with the spirit inside. Height might have something to do with which rides you're allowed on at an amusement park like Elitch Gardens, and IQ might have something to do with which activities you enjoy most, but neither of these even remotely describes the entirety of a person or a life.

The helpful idea that I came across, though, is that children with IQs of 145 and up don't just have an extra dose of the same thinking ability that their peers have. They think differently. They may have trouble understanding, and being understood by, their age-mates—and their teachers and their parents, and the psychologists who are often called in to help everyone get along. Like extremes of height, extremes of IQ make a profound difference in daily living until you learn how to navigate in your particular vessel.

Most discussions of IQ don't differentiate between the experiences of people at different points above a certain IQ level (whatever that is). From X on up (choose a number), all is assumed to be peachy.

Not necessarily.

Many high-IQ kids don't appear to be smarter than average because for many of them the extra IQ points come bundled with learning challenges: for example, an inability to remember math facts, or cerebral palsy severe enough to prevent speech, or Tourette syndrome, or ADHD (I'm skipping a digression here on ADHD and intelligence), or a combination of these and other factors.

About fourteen years ago, I found myself struggling to get my brain around all this stuff while in crisis. One of the resource people I discovered was Marlo Rice, a psychologist who specializes in high-IQ kids and also has helped advocate for individual students' needs in the schools. A few years later, because she knew I'd been engaged for a while in a self-directed crash course in parenting a high-IQ kid, Marlo gave my name and phone number to Kiesa Kay, who was dealing with similar issues for her children, who were younger than mine. In the middle of this, I also met, and began to work on freelance jobs with, Judy Fort Brenneman. On behalf of her son (mid-range in age between Kiesa's kids and my child), Judy was paddling her own canoe upstream on the gifted/learning-different river.

Kiesa, Judy, and I all came out of our experiences with a strong desire to help other parents avoid some of the pain, frustration, and expense that we and our children had encountered.

Kiesa's first project to put this into action was an anthology she edited on “twice-exceptional” kids (gifted and learning-different), called Uniquely Gifted. She asked me to contribute an essay.

Then Kiesa and Annette Sheely began assembling another anthology, this one on high-IQ kids (those above 145 IQ). Judy and I first got involved  as contributors to this work, and later as co-editors with Kiesa while Annette devoted more time to her counseling practice and her own incipient parenting.

We've been passing the responsibilities for this project back and forth for a number of years. Now we finally have a book that's on its way to being published . . . on its way to doing the work we want it to do.

It's the one book we wish we had been able to consult while we were doing our best to raise our kids. It contains personal stories that are funny, heartbreaking, and sometimes both, as well as academic papers that discuss researchers' studies and insights. It's as quirky and wide-ranging as the experience of being one of the adults in a high-IQ kid's life.

“Experts”

First the people at Free Spirit said, “This book willl need a different title,” and we said, “Sure. That's fine. We aren't attached to the one on the manuscript, but it's the best we could come up with over the years.”

They went into a huddle and then said they couldn't come up with anything better, either.

They did suggest a variation on the subtitle, which we had phrased as something like “for adults who care.” They shifted this to “from the experts.”

Because I'm a contributor to the volume, as well as an editor, I gather that I'm being included with the “experts.”

I think of an expert as someone who knows a great deal of what there is to know about a topic . . . therefore, not me. I'm always aware of how much I don't know about any given subject.

So I've looked up the word expert. I seem to have greater expectations of someone to whom the word is applied than the dictionary does.

The American Heritage Dictionary gives this definition for the noun form: “A person with a high degree of skill in or knowledge of a certain subject.” Here's what it says about the adjective form: “Having, involving, or demonstrating great skill, dexterity, or knowledge as the result of experience or training.”

The meaning of great is open for debate, but on the subject of raising a high-IQ kid (and a couple of other topics), I do have some experience that seems to be helpful to others. I guess the word applies, although I still don't accept it comfortably.

However I'll accept easily that all of the contributors to this book are sharing their hard-earned knowledge, acquired as a result of experience, training, or both. I'm one of those contributors. And I'll accept that it's the right subtitle for this book.

Are we there yet?

High IQ Kids is a big book—about 550 manuscript pages, which will be fewer pages when it's typeset but there's no changing the fact that it's approximately 124,000 words, including the short extra list of books Judy and I put together on Wednesday night for the reference section, at the in-house editor's request.

I'll be so glad to see this as a real, useful book that's out in the world, available to help parents, teachers, counselors, and others involved with high-IQ kids' lives, so the kids themselves can figure out how to get through doorways without bruising themselves or others.

Although we've been through the acquisition-level editing, we've still got in-house copy editing, proofreading, and indexing to manage over the next couple of months before this book goes to the printer.

But at the moment, it's off our desks and on someone else's! YAY!

Free Spirit Publishing

Free Spirit Publishing, founded by Judy Galbraith, is a strong, well-focused, independent publishing house. Several of its early titles helped the editors of the new book stay sane (or as sane as we did stay). Among those books are The Gifted Kids Survival Guide (both versions: the one for under-10s and the one for teenagers) and The Survival Guide for Parents of Gifted Kids.

It's nice to think that with our own book we are now able to contribute to the ongoing dialogue and to support the next generation of parents and kids.

Norsk Strikkedesign completed (I think)

I think the Norsk Strikkedesign-inspired sweater is completed. At least it’s in full use in my life as of today. Also, between yesterday and today the first leaves on the lilac have unfurled themselves.

I’m pleased. So are the dogs . . . you can tell by the looks on their faces ("Okay, you're warm, let's get going on this walk."). Note the built-in wrist warmers. I tend to forget gloves on the types of days when I would wear this sweater.

Tussah is on my blog page; she's the reddish dog. That black-and-white character on the left is Ariel, who is twelve and a half and has an obedience title and is very, very smart. Both were rescued dogs, Ariel at about six or seven weeks and Tussah at maybe five or six years.

Digression

This morning’s walk with the dogs took longer than usual because my almost-twenty-six-year-old daughter needed to rescue a bunch of the earthworms that emerged because of the rain and then got marooned on the asphalt.

Yesterday when I took a short break from editing things, I sought out some information on earthworms—I didn't fact-check this stuff, so don't quote me. (Lots of worm-rescue took place on yesterday's walk, too.) Earthworms come out of the ground when it rains because that’s when they can travel without dehydrating. They can’t see, but they can sense light. They can’t hear, but they can feel vibrations. They breathe through their skin. They can live underwater for a couple of weeks if there’s enough oxygen in the water. Their estimated lifespan, barring the intervention of birds, dehydration, cars, and other perils, ranges from four to eight years.

My daughter seems to have been born with a natural inclination toward earthworm conservation.

Knitting-related note about the slow walk in today’s gray, damp weather: the new sweater performed perfectly. Cozy and comfortable.

Finishing the Norsk Strikkedesign-inspired sweater

Here are a few notes about the finishing process for the sweater. First, a photo of what the inside looks like along the front bands. There’s herringbone stitching along the cut edges of the folded-over steek. It's black and I stripped down the yarn to its component plies (i.e., what I stitched with is thinner than the full yarn), so it's hard to see exactly what's going on. That's the point. Another point is that the sweater is neat inside (see below, too). This photo also shows the stitched-down edge of the folded-over front band (button side).

When I first tried the sweater on a few days ago, it was fine but not great. Even though I had stabilized the neckline in all the usual ways before picking up stitches to knit the neckline finish and even though I liked the depth and breadth of the V, I felt like the sweater was too open across my shoulders and wasn’t sitting solidly on them.

Because I have narrow shoulders and because I like to have my clothes feel like they’re completely comfortable when I’m wearing them, I frequently need to adjust patterns and tweak finishes.

After spending a year on this sweater, I want it to feel like a natural part of my life, not like something I only think to wear on special occasions. I want it to be as comfortable as a T-shirt and my favorite jeans.

It wasn’t yet.

The problem was in the neckline.

I pondered a bit, and then decided to see what would happen if I worked one line of single crochet just at the juncture between the body and the ribbing, all the way around the neckline. (The closest corollary I can think of is “stitch in the ditch,” from sewing.)

As I crocheted, I placed the stitches (and snugged them up) so they would draw the neckline in without changing the existing smooth line. Of course, the crochet is black so it’s as unobtrusive as possible.

Here’s what the results looked like, with an arrow pointing at the crochet chain:

I put the sweater on. The solution worked perfectly. The sweater feels like it fits my shoulders now.

I like the results well enough that I would do this again on a sweater that did not need a slight adjustment. That line of crochet makes what is to my mind a perfect transition between the two types of knitting. I love the effect.

Here's proof that the sweater has dropped into my life as a full participant:

This is part of why the inside needs to be neat. When something spends part of its time over the back of my office chair, the inside is what I end up seeing.

Next

Part of my brain is still thinking about adding duplicate-stitch accents to the upper body, but right now I’d guess that I won’t get around to even trying that. Another part of my brain is already contemplating which of the many possibilities will be my next project (other than the socks-in-progress, which are filling in the post-sweater gap).

Over the next three months, I have several trips on the docket for work. I need a portable project that can be done on plastic or bamboo needles: lots of interesting but not too taxing knitting that can be packed in a small bag. I've been wanting to swatch up the alpaca I got at Serendipity Yarn in Salida, Colorado, a couple of weeks ago, but it's not the right gauge or quantity (too much) to be good for short, minimalist-luggage trips.

I am beginning to wonder what ONE yarn shop I should visit in New York City (I'll be in Manhattan twice, but without much open time in the schedule). I've read the lists associated with Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's recent visit to NYC. A tour won't be an option for either of my trips. I'll need to do the quick-sneak-out-of-meetings.

Ideas for travel knitting come to mind. I can always do sportweight socks. However, I’ve dug out some laceweight alpaca and checked my needle binders. My smallest bamboo circulars are 2.25 mm, and I have nice, flexible Bryspun straights in the same size. There are two shawl designs that I’ve wanted to play with for a while, one by Evelyn Clark and one by Eugen Beugler. . . . Maybe I have enough yarn for one or the other, and maybe that yarn will work with the requisite needles. . . .

And the ongoing flow

Now I need to get back to tech editing patterns and reviewing illustration roughs for the fall title from Nomad Press.

I think the book for Free Spirit Publishing is almost off its originating editors’ desks, including mine . . . although yesterday we received a request from the in-house editor for a lengthier list of books for the appendix of resources. I’ve gotten permission to post the cover for that book here, which I’ll do soon. Possibly after I get that list of resources together. It’s already a 123,000-word book all on its own.

Eric Maisel, whose work on creativity I admire and have used a great deal, will be doing a blog tour in conjunction with his newest book, Ten Zen Seconds. I'm scheduled to host him here on April 19, which is the day I leave for New York for the first time. Eric writes so prolifically that it takes several publishers to keep up with him, but this title happens to be published by SourceBooks, which is headed up by Dominique Raccah, who is one of the savviest independent publishers in the United States today. I've learned a lot from her at independent publishers' seminars.

Here's what Susan Tweit in Salida had to say about the long weekend visit Donna Druchunas and I got to pay to her part of the world. I'm not sure about the crazy comment, although she's probably right.

Norsk Strikkedesign progress : Coming into focus

Did I fall into a hole? Yes. It's been crazy around here.

Several fall-release titles from several publishing companies have been landing on and being launched back off my to-do list, my desk, my computer. On some, I'm the writer; on some, the editor; on some, the production department, marketing department, and publisher. Because these projects are associated with a variety of companies and topics, their schedules are not even remotely coordinated.

Since I last checked in here, I have also traveled to Salida, Colorado, up in the mountains, for a Sunday afternoon library program that Donna Druchunas and I presented. She talked about writing books and I talked about publishing them.

I got to visit with Susan Tweit, one of my favorite writers, and her husband, Richard, who (among many other activities) makes sinks out of granite. These water basins are really sculptures that juxtapose natural rock surfaces with smooth, polished shaping. When you turn the water on, there's also that wonderful, subtle smell of wet stone. I've missed that. His artwork sure makes a living space feel nurturing in ways I'm not accustomed to finding indoors.

Donna and I took a quick side trip to Serendipity Yarn in Buena Vista, where Donna had taught a workshop on Saturday. It's a wonderful and dangerous place. I came away with three eight-ounce skeins of hand-dyed alpaca that were on clearance.

I stayed over an extra day to visit three high-school English classes and talk a bit about writing and editing and publishing. High school's changed a lot since I attended. Students can wear more comfortable clothes and the classes are smaller and more relaxed. I met lots of interesting kids (and was amazed at how few knew what a blog is) and a terrific teacher.

And while all this has been going on, I have been slowly, but persistently, moving the Norsk Strikkedesign-inspired sweater toward completion. The photos are funky because I've been snapping them quickly under less-than-ideal circumstances.

When I last posted (where do the days go?), I'd designed but not yet knitted the front bands. Well, they now feel like ancient history! I knitted them as planned, set up to be doubled back to form a self-facing.

At this point in a knitting project, I get antsy to dunk the fabric in water. That's because I usually work with natural fibers and water relaxes the yarn into its new life as a textile. The whole finishing process, but especially the water treatment, is like finally getting a picture to come into focus.

But before I could run a basin full of comfortably warm water and drop the sweater into it, I still needed to finish a number of details, including the neckline.

I decided to follow the lead of the sweater that inspired this project and make a neckband of twisted 1/1 ribbing in black with a narrow edging of contrasting color.

Before I started to pick up stitches for the neckline, I marked off two-inch segments around the neck opening with open-ring stitch markers, starting my measurements on each side at the juncture of the body and the front band. The two-inch segments didn't come out exactly even at the back neck, but they didn't have to. I used these markers as rough guidelines for the spacing of the stitches, which I picked up with a crochet hook. I also put a stitch marker on the needle after every ten stitches, but I used the fine rubber rings for this because they don't get in the way of the new stitches as much as the plastic split-ring kind. The two-inch segments and the ten-stitch groups didn't coincide, but the combination kept my process sort of organized.

When I had picked up stitches all around the neckline, I counted the number in each half (from front edge to center back). There were six more stitches on the first side than on the second. Usually I would slide the needle halfway out and pick up the second half again, but this time I did something lazy that's easier to accomplish than describe, although doing it with black yarn isn't the greatest idea—it's too hard to see what's happening. I used my crochet hook to loosen the yarn along the half that was short a few stitches, easing in more length from the ball end, and pulled up the additional stitches, spacing them out where they might be least obvious. Whatever works. . . .

In a perfect world, the width of the ribbed neckband would correspond to the purl ridge that's the fold-over line for the front band—plus maybe a couple of rows to fill out the angle at which the neckband would attach to the front band. The arrows show the points that will ultimately match (the photo also shows how much black yarn I had left to finish the sweater . . . of course, there is more at the store).

However, I wanted my neckband to be as wide as possible. Wider than the perfect join might permit. I figured I could probably work a few extra rows and ease them in as I stitched the bottom edges of the neckband to the tops of the front bands. If it didn't work, I could always rip and try something else.

I knitted the neckband and finished it off with one ribbed row and one bind-off row in the darker green.

I like the texture of the twisted ribbing with the sweater's patterning. Twisted ribbing also has more body and pulls in a bit more tightly than a regular, untwisted ribbing.

Here's the neckband, just finished. I haven't stitched its lower edges in place yet and the front bands are curling out because they won't be finished off until later. At this point, though, I knew I liked the shape and width of the neckband—it was filling the neckline nicely. I also liked the darker green on the edge. I thought about using each of the other colors—lighter green, blue, red—and settled on this one.

Here's the whole sweater at the same point.

I split some of the black yarn from four plies down to two and worked buttonhole stitch around the buttonholes to hold their front-side and back-side edges together and make them more durable. When I did this, the buttonholes flared out, which made me mutter, but I figured I could line them back up when I got the sweater wet later on. If they still flared out after that, I'd pick out the stitching and replace it with something even less bulky.

Then I stitched the neckband ends to the top layers of the front bands, and then the upper edges of the bottom layers of the front bands to the inside of the sweater. I tacked down the long edges of the front bands on the inside of the sweater.

Sounds boring. It is. I'd rather be playing with pattern or texture. But it's all necessary.

This is the point where I pay a lot of attention to transitions between sweater parts on the inside. I've usually already tended to them on the outside. I want everything to lie as flat as possible and to stay in position when the garment's worn. At the lower edges of the front bands, I threaded my yarn needle with a single strand of the black yarn to join the layers together: I wiggled the needle between the layers, moving it up and down so it caught the backs of stitches in the layers alternately, holding them together with short transits of yarn. I went back and forth across the band three or four times in a small space.

In a way, I consider this cheating. But I'll cheat to get a crisp lower edge on a front band.

Then I stripped down more yarn to two plies and worked a not-too-close herringbone stitch over the cut edges of the steeks. I made sure to slightly shift the needle-insertion point plus or minus a half-stitch each time I made a new stitch and to keep the yarn loose so the stitching wouldn't distort the front side of the sweater.

I keep talking about stripping the four-ply yarn to its components. I do a lot of that for finishing, because I don't like the bulk a full strand adds. On this yarn, stripping was not as easy as it should have been because sometimes the strands were slightly felted together. The separating worked best with about 12-inch lengths, which is on the short side. I would have preferred 18-inch sections.

Finally, with all edges finished and all ends secured, it was time to wash the sweater!

Nope, I haven't sewed on the buttons yet.

I'm always fascinated by the ability of wool to absorb water. I filled our big soup pot, which was almost big enough, and doused the sweater in it. The wool soaked up all but about a pint of the water.

I treated the fabric to two sloshes in water with dishwashing liquid and then shifted to the kitchen sink to rinse, because the soup pot really wasn't big enough. I rinsed more than usual, until the water ran almost clear. I gave up before it became completely clear. I think most of what I washed out was spinning oil and the leftovers of mechanical fiber processing. It wasn't dye. It was just murk.

I squeezed out as much water as I could, pressing the sweater against the side of the sink, and then plopped it back in the soup kettle to carry it downstairs where I would run it through the spin-only cycle of the washing machine. The water-logged wool was heavy enough that I needed to arrange the soggy fabric around the agitator so it wouldn't unbalance the machine and cause it to stop in mid-spin.

Yes, I always panic slightly when I start the spin-only process. There's always a risk that I'll get the setting wrong and the machine will dump hot water on the new sweater and then start agitating. If I want felt, I plan for felt.

I stick around while the machine spins.

All was well.

So I layered old comforters and old towels on the bed, arranged the sweater on top of the pile, patted it into shape, and pinned the front bands so they'd dry well aligned and to the correct length. I placed the pins carefully so they wouldn't push the edges of the bands into funny scallops.

I left the sweater there for a day, then gently flipped it over (front-band pins still in place) to finish drying with its back open to the air.

That's where it is now. Just about ready for buttons.

Meanwhile, I've been knitting on a pair of socks, with time so broken up that I'm knitting a double-pointed needle's worth of stitches at a time, instead of a full round. I'm still making progress.

Buttons and buttonhole planning: Norsk Strikkedesign progress

Kristi was right. Shuttles, Spindles, and Skeins has a great selection of buttons. It took about half an hour, but I settled on the buttons for the Norsk Strikkedesign-inspired sweater.

Next I needed to plan the buttonholes.

I am always tempted to launch right in and try things on the real sweater, and I did that this time, too, for a bit, and then ripped back. I needed more info. I often perform technical tests with whatever yarn is handy. Because the button band and buttonholes have to fit the yarn and gauge I’m using, I worked my test runs with the real stuff on the correct size needles. The samples look weird because I used every ball I had handy, although that also shows the structure I am working with.

I plan to work horizontal buttonholes. I also plan to sew on the buttons with their shafts parallel to the buttonhole direction. This means the leaves will be running sideways. I don’t know whether I’ll run them all sideways in the same direction or will alternate them. My daughter thinks I should alternate, so I’ll take that under consideration.

The horizontal buttonholes will come into being because I’ll knit tabs, or the knitterly equivalent of slit tapestry sections, or unjoined intarsia bits, or however you want to think about it, and then reconnect at the ends of the buttonholes. Because the front bands are doubled, I’ll knit matching slits on both sections of the band so when I fold the band to the inside the slits will match up. Then I’ll overcast or buttonhole-stitch the edges of the holes together. Here's a whole band swatch, folded out, with the paired slits showing.

Questions to be answered:

1. How should I set up the buttonholes—with or without any cast-on/cast-off stitch at start and finish?
2. How long (how many rows) shall I make the tabs for the buttonholes?
3. How many rows from the edges of the band shall I start and finish the buttonholes?
4. How far apart shall I put the buttonholes? And how far from the top and bottom of the sweater should I put the end buttonholes?

I actually knitted three test swatches for the buttonhole band, although these photos show only the final one.

The first band swatch answered question 1, whether I would bind off one stitch for each buttonhole before I knitted the tabs and then cast it back on when I rejoined to continue knitting the solid band. That technique produced not-very-neat slits that looked like they’d be way too big—a good solution for another button, another yarn, another style. I’ll knit my tabs as straight slits. (Makes the placement math easier, which is nice.)

Having decided not to “lose” any stitches in the buttonholes, I needed to answer question 2, how many rows long the tabs should be. The resulting holes must fit the buttons nicely so they won’t be hard to fasten (I like zipper speed, not fiddling) and won’t pop open (or what’s the point?). I made sample buttonholes that were 5 and 6 stitches long. The 5-stitch version won—shown here on the final test swatch, folded over, with a button halfway through.

On to question 3. The buttonholes will not be centered on the band. When a cardigan or shirt is buttoned, movement pulls the front halves of the garment away from each other, so the shaft of the button comes to rest at the farthest-toward-center end of the buttonhole. The buttonhole needs to be offset enough that its end accommodates the button’s shaft so the button appears neatly centered on the upper, as well as under, band.

The button on the photo below is upside down, so you can see how the shaft will align with the buttonhole when the sweater is fastened. Or that’s the plan. The white-headed pins are there to show the ends of the buttonhole. It's definitely off-center.

Now. How far apart to space the buttonholes, and how far from each end to place them.

At the bottom of the sweater, I want a button lined up with the middle row of the lower pattern band. There’s a sweet spot 7 rows from the bottom edge, thus 7 stitches in from the end of the band (since my stitch and row gauge are the same).

At the top of the sweater, the button can be closer to the last row because there will be a collar above that. I also would like the sweater to fasten close to the top of the edge of the opening. I provisionally think I’ll put the top buttonhole 3 rows/stitches from the top edge.

That’s 10 rows down, from a total of 112, leaving 102. I have 7 buttons, which will mean 6 between-button spaces. Dividing 102 by 6 gives me an even 17 rows/stitches between buttonholes. I can’t believe it’s this easy, but I’m not going to go look for trouble.

I do count out the intervals on the stitches that are on the needle ready to be turned into a band and I mark them with split-ring markers.

Here’s the bottom:

Here’s the top. The placement isn’t perfectly aligned with the top green pattern band, but it’s close enough for me.

By knitting tabs, I’ll be burning a few bridges: I’ll break and rejoin the yarn for each tab, so if I want to back up and go a different direction, I’ll have short bits of yarn (and will probably need to go buy another skein of the black). However, I am feeling comfortable enough with this solution to turn the remaining black yarn into short pieces to try it out.

I hope this makes sense. It’s been a wild day in the office with all sorts of work avalanching unexpectedly onto my desk. It's a miracle I'm posting at all.

Front edges : Norsk Strikkedesign progress

So, having cut the steeks, joined the shoulders, and set in the sleeves (never to my satisfaction; oh, well, move on) of the Norsk Strikkedesign-inspired sweater, it's time for me to finish the front cardigan edges.

I've been delaying the decision of how I will do this, as usual, until I see what I've got. I've planned wiggle room that will accommodate several alternatives and have eliminated other possibilities through my previous actions. Now it's time to narrow the options to one . . . although I can always rip and re-do if I decide later that I want to shift to one of the other still-available finishes.

I really want to get this fabric wet and let the stitches relax into an integrated unit! But not yet.

When I told my daughter I was thinking about a zipper again (I like zippered cardigans), she said, "No, Mom. Pewter buttons." She's probably right.

I thought about horizontally ribbed, vertically ribbed, seed stitch, and other types of bands.

I thought about buttonholes. Buttonholes are not my favorite things, although they have their place and are, of course, one of the ways of fastening buttons. But not the only one. I thought about how in many cases I like horizontal buttonholes better than vertical buttonholes (more on that in a later post).

I thought about working horizontal buttonholes in a band that's being picked up and knitted horizontally. Yep, can do that, although you wouldn't know it from looking at many knitting reference books.

I thought about how I like the bottom edges of front bands to meet squarely with the bottom edges of the sweater itself.

I browsed through a few resources—Montse Stanley, June Hemmons Hiatt, Vogue Knitting's big book—for ideas that could kick my thought process in a new, ideal direction. In June Hemmons Hiatt's The Principles of Knitting, which I've fortunately owned since it was relatively new and affordable and which I am grateful that I did not lose in the 1997 flood, I found an idea for working horizontally ribbed front bands that is not right for this sweater but is intriguing enough that I might want to knit a whole other sweater to try it out. It's a subtle touch. Hardly anyone else would notice. I might like it a lot. Move on. I have this sweater to finish, and after that I have a bunch of other ideas in line.

And then I thought: What about making front bands that would match the foldover hems on the lower body and sleeve edges? This should have been my first thought, but it wasn't, in part because it involves a bunch of extra knitting and, as I mentioned, I'm at the point where I want to block this garment and wear it. Well, and see if I actually like it. If I stuck to this solution all the way to the end, I'd be working horizontal buttonholes through two layers of fabric on one of the bands—nice. It would be a neat and appropriate finish, because of the synchrony with the bottom edges.

Because I'd have a squared-off area at the top of each front band and those areas would overlap, I could use a neckline finish similar to the one in the original design, which I like even though it doesn't show very well in the book's photos.

I rewound my one remaining ball of black yarn into a center-pull so I'd have two ends available. Then I picked up 111 stitches along each front edge, using a separate circular needle for each side. I started picking up at the top of each edge, beginning with the row where I placed the marker for the start of the neckline decreases and moving toward the bottom edge. I'm lazy about picking up stitches. I use one of my grandmother's old crochet hooks instead of knitting-up. Although it's small in the photo, that's the white thing lying on the sweater. I find it easier to position in the right picking-up spot than a knitting needle.

Because my stitch and row gauges for the color-pattern areas of this sweater are identical—6.25 stitches and rows to the inch—there are also 111 rows between the bottom hem's turn-up row and the start of the neckline decreases. This made picking up the stitches really easy: one for each row. In my knitting life, that doesn't happen often.

At the bottom edge of each side, I cable-cast-on one more stitch to compensate for the usual feeling that the front band wants to be shorter than the main body edge, for a total of 112 stitches along each side.

Then I knitted a few rows on each side to see what I thought. Bad photos again. Knitting early morning and late night again. Sorry.

Here's the lower edge with a couple of rows knitting; more accurate at the bottom, because the fabric curls back on itself farther up on the edge. That jog bothers me, despite the extra cast-on stitch, but I have ideas for what to do about it if it's still a problem later.

I decided what was happening was promising.

I clipped open-ring stitch markers into the fabric where I thought buttons might go, to get an idea of both placement (which, in my mind, needs to coordinate with the patterning) and how many I might need. I don't like buttons to be either too close together (after all, I'm basically a zipper person, kind of in a hurry) or too far apart (I don't like gaps).

The markers are on the body itself, not the button band, which wasn't big enough yet to accommodate them. I also haven't counted rows for placement--I'm just eyeballing.

It looks like seven buttons will do nicely.

Meanwhile, I've gotten past the halfway point on the band that will hold the buttons. I've knitted the front face, the turning row, and four rows on the foldover section. I don't want to knit the buttonhole side until I know what buttons I'm using (unless I change my mind again and do something other than buttons). I'll want to size and position the buttonholes right. By knitting the button band, I've already limited my choices in buttons a bit, but I've also decided how much mass I want in the black line the bands will make down the front of the sweater. I thought about knitting in pattern on the front surface and decided against competing with what was already going on in the body. The width of the band will also affect how I make the collar.

So I'm slowly eliminating my options, or making choices, or. . . . Well, just knitting the way I knit, starting with an inspiration and discovering exactly what I'm making and how I'm going about the process at the same time that I'm doing it.

Here's how the top edge of the band I'm working on fits with the row where the decreases start.

Tomorrow, conveniently, we have to drive to Boulder for a medical appointment. Exactly 364 days after I bought the book and the yarn that inspired this sweater, I'll be back at Shuttles, Spindles & Skeins to see if they have buttons that feel just right, whether they're pewter or not.

Meandering along toward a warm, jacket-y sweater that will go with both my everyday jeans and my dress-up black stuff. . . .

Art and freight

My office is in a spare bedroom in the basement. It’s far larger than a corporate cubicle—as I recall from when I could find the tape measure, it’s 10 by 11 feet—and it’s full of computer equipment, books, a space heater, and three wastepaper baskets (one for office paper to be recycled, one for junk mail to be recycled, and one for actual trash). I spend a lot of time here.

For a while, in 2000 through 2002, I got out pretty often to take painting workshops and do figure drawing. I loved it. The frequency with which I did this decreased dramatically in 2003, when Priscilla Gibson-Roberts conveyed Nomad Press into my keeping. It’s not as easy to arrange that change of perspectives as it used to be.

But Thursday and Friday this week, I signed up for a workshop in painting with pastels (which I’d never used) being given by Rick Stoner at the Loveland Art Academy.

Wow, did I enjoy spending chunks of two days working with my eyes and not my brain. One of Rick’s refrains to all of us: “You’re thinking too much.” (I tend to think too much.) And a new medium!  Pastels are pure color.

I don’t think I’ll be taking them up. They’re too expensive. But I had a great time. Maybe I could buy a stick a week for five or six years. (Several of the people in the class used the wonderful handmade sticks in that link, which are, amazingly, not more expensive than pastels from the art store.)

The images below are workshop pieces. I don’t think they were particularly successful, but I learned a lot by making them happen.

I made these two on the first day.

The image below took most of the second day and acted as a patience builder. It didn’t work, and didn’t work, and didn’t work, but I kept at it and in the long run it was better at the end than it was at the beginning or halfway through.

For the final painting, I had only a bit over an hour left. I was not about to waste that much time, but since the previous piece had taken about five hours I knew I wouldn’t get far with sixty minutes. I had to leave promptly at the end of the workshop to rendezvous with a freight delivery. So I shifted from the smooth to the textured (wire) side of the paper to see what that was like. Beyond the first laydown of color (which was amusing), I didn’t enjoy the texture. So now I know.

The other thing that happened on Friday was that the fourth printing of Arctic Lace got delivered. We'd expected it all week, and it finally showed up. Between 7 and 8:15 a.m., I got the timing roughly coordinated with the local Roadway dispatcher.

When I arrived home at 4:30, the truck was parked in front of the house. Usually I end up transferring boxes from the back of the truck to my hand truck at the curb, then hauling them up to the garage four or five at a time. This truck was equipped with a liftgate. The driver could move the whole pallet off the truck with a pallet jack. With the boxes still on the pallet and levitated by the pallet jack, he pulled and I pushed the stack uphill . . . with me hoping and trusting that the solid block of books would not fall back on me. By 4:50, we had all the boxes within ten feet of where they needed to be. That's fast for moving 57 boxes of books. Then he left. This was his last delivery ever. He’s changing to management.

I only thought to snap the photo below after I'd already begun to strip off the pallet wrap and had removed a half-dozen cartons or so. Yes, that's the top of the garage door above the pile. The pallet is about four feet across.

Earlier this week, someone with whom I was consulting for help in counteracting some of the physical stresses of too much computer work asked if I'd be open to adding weight lifting to my normal exercise routine, which consists of walking and yoga. She said the weights would help build my trapezius and rhomboid muscles, which might in turn ameliorate some of the problems I’ve been having. I said I would be open to that, and that I think my daughter, who lifts free weights regularly and is up to twenty-pound weights, might have some five-pounders I could start with.

At 5:10 p.m., when all the boxes were safely ensconced in the garage,

I went to the computer and generated shipping labels for about half the back orders, drove to FedEx Kinko’s, and by 5:50 used my hand truck to deliver four of the cartons to the driver of the final ground pickup of the week. (I've got another batch of four ready to ship out on Monday.)

Except for making phone calls and setting up the shipments, I stayed out of the basement all day.

Soon: more Norsk Strikkedesign-inspired knitting progress.

Two for two: ForeWord Book of the Year Award finalists

Both of the books that we published at Nomad Press in 2006 were recently selected as finalists in the Book of the Year Award competition sponsored by ForeWord magazine.

ForeWord is the only review publication that covers independently published books exclusively. In ForeWord’s definition, an independent publisher is anyone other than the conglomerates (most of the New York publishing houses are components of a small number of international conglomerates). These independents include all the publishing entities from university presses to an individual with an idea (we're close to the latter, although we have more than one idea).

Our 2006 titles are two of the twelve finalists in the Crafts & Hobbies category. They are:

Arctic Lace: Knitting Projects and Stories Inspired by Alaska's Native Knitters by Donna Druchunas

and

Spinning in the  Old Way: How (and Why) To Make Your Own Yarn with a High-Whorl Spindle, by Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts

Winners will be announced at BookExpo  America in  New York City this June.

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Our previous books have also been award-worthy.

Knitting in the Old Way, by Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts and Deborah Robson:

• Finalist, Independent Publisher Awards (IPPYs) (category 43)
• Finalist, ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards
• Finalist, Colorado Book Awards

and

Riddle in the Mountain, by Daryl Burkhard:

• Winner, Independent Publisher Awards (IPPYs)

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I think that's pretty good for a very small handful of very determined people.

We’ve applied for a few other competitions this season, but the other preliminary results haven’t been announced yet.