The unveiling

The man is now the husband. It's still a bit surreal to say that. "I have a husband." I thought that this change wouldn't really affect much, other than the fact that I am now obligated to wear at least one piece of jewelry every day. We've been living together for three years. He takes care of my son. We were spouses already, but something clicked into place after the wedding. I'm not sure how to explain it. We're just more complete somehow, like saying how we feel (through the vows written by our dear friend Jolynn) in front of a bunch of people we know made it more real, more permanent. Maybe we're just high on leftover wedding cake.

Either way, I walked down that aisle and I am ecstatic. I had my borrowed and refitted temple white wedding dress and my homemade ivory veil. I got a lot of compliments on the veil from those that knew I made it. It didn't seem to matter that it was not the exact color of the dress. I tried peroxide-based bleach. Still no change. I tried whitener. That swatch felt like a brillo pad by the end of the process, even if it was whiter. I tried bluing. It turned the swatch vaguely green, though it did look a little whiter against the dress. In the end, I decided just to leave it alone.

My maid of honor Kristin insisted that really, it looked just fine together and the veil was pretty and took so long to make that I should just let it be and move on. A lot of my relatives knew I was making the veil and they all had compliments. Two cousins who did not know asked my mom: what's up with the veil? Not that it looked bad; they just know there had to be a story, which my mom shared. The response: it was perfect, because I'm a different sort of person and it made the wedding mine that there was something "unique" to it. I can live with that. And you know what? I loved my veil and that I got to say "Yep, I made that."

The niece loved her shawl too. Despite the 90 degree weather outside, when I presented it to her, she insisted on wearing it all over the non-air-conditioned house.

Already fashion savvy, she found several unique ways of wearing her shawl: as shawl, as scarf, as headdress. I'm waiting for her to discover it would make an excellent pair of butterfly wings.

Yarn Clearance!

Jo-Ann's is moving locations. What that means: store-wide yarn clearance. Not that I need any yarn. I have an overabundance, though much of it is also clearanced, mostly acrylic, from my days of grad student poverty (they seem so long ago already). This clearance, I was a bit more picky. I was out for wool (or wool blends).

My first want: some good sock yarn. I have yet to knit a pair of socks and I really want to try my hand at it. I stumbled upon this variegated skein of sock ease:

Also, these pretty skeins of sensations, two of a pinky variegated bamboo and ewe and two of a blue/green variegated wool and nylon blend:

Finally, my son picked out a collection of brightly colored chunky wool blend skeins for a scarf he's been wanting. It took a lot of coaxing, but I finally talked him out of the variegated acrylic yarn whose colorway was aptly entitled "circus."

I already got some cotton on clearance from Herrschners, whose catalogues began showing up in my mailbox a few months ago.

As for works in progress, the veil is almost complete. I love the look of it, but I'm losing my patience with how much attention it requires. I pay attention to five words in a conversation and soon enough, I'm frogging back a row from some simple error at the beginning. If I'm lucky, I notice the error before I finish the row.

I started in on the scarf tonight, because I needed a mindless knit to counteract the weeks of veil knitting. I'm using a broken rib and so far, it's looking good. The gage is 9 stitches to an inch, so it moves a lot faster than the sport weight I've been working with this week.

Chunky weight yarn is a thing of magic.

Attack of the killer sterilized cat

Over the Easter weekend, I had a bit of time to make headway on the veil. Because I was at my parents' house, carless, and in a position to kick my son outside to play in the fenced-in yard, I spent quite a bit of the weekend sitting in a chair in the sun on the enclosed back porch, knitting.

They have a new cat, who was found out back in a nest with her four siblings over six months ago. She had a brother go to my brother and another brother went off to live with my sister. Her two sisters were adopted by a cat-loving couple who are good friends of my brother-in-law. At the six month mark, she became eligible for reproductive part and claw removal (my dad makes his own woodwork from scratch so it was either declaw the cat or put it down), so for the past three weeks now, my mother has been very adamant that we need to keep the cat calm, rather than allowing her to play in the rough-and-tumble way that kittens do. The cat, of course, wants no part in calm anything and promptly makes her way into as much mischief as she can.

Apparently, this goes double when mohair is involved. There I sat, yarning over and counting my stitches while watching my son jump on the newly erected trampoline. Suddenly, my knitting was pulled from my grasp. Alarmed I looked down and there was a cat with the long tail from the cast-on end dangling in her mouth. She managed to separate a few strains of mohair before I disentangled her from the veil. From then on, every ten stitches or so, she would leap at my right-hand needle with enthusiasm before falling to the floor, having no claws to catch her footing on my nice neat stockinette. I eventually gave up after finishing my row and used the free needle to swing in the kitten's general direction so that she could pounce in earnest. When she tired of the game, I shut her in the porch with the slider's screen door and sat at the table to start the next row.

She attacked my mohair twice on Easter morning as well, but at least I was better prepared. I have seen many a cartoon featuring a fluffy kitten and a ball of yarn, but it never really occurred to me to be on the watch for fiber-munching felines. My cat is more than content to sit just beyond arm's length on the couch from where I am knitting and fall asleep. He only gets bite-y if you decide to reach out that arm to pet him if he's not in the mood for human interaction. Never has my Kitkat attacked my yarn without very consistent provocation. And for that, I am now very grateful. My cat is fiber-considerate. And he plays a mean game of billiards.

When a knitter plans a wedding.

My first thought, when I began tackling the wedding plans was this: could I knit the dress? This insanity quickly cooled to a much more reasonable knitting of the veil. Then the hunt began.

I've never knitted lace before, so I was rather anxious to pick just the right pattern, one that would be interesting enough without becoming too difficult for a first time effort. I searched through book after book, page after ravelry page of anything that popped up under the restrictions of "knitting" and "free" and "lace." Finally, it hit me. I'd use one of the earliest patterns I found, a circular shawl pattern meant to replicate a chrysanthemum's petals. 

I'm deconstructing the circular and knitting it back and forth on size eleven wooden needles I inherited from my soon-to-be grandmother-in-law using sport-weight yarn instead of lace-weight. So far I'm happy with the progress. It looks a little wild, but with every few rows, it looks less like the random distribution of cobweb and more like a veil.

Lace. Is it mesmerizing? Not really. Do I get why so many knitters are enthralled with it. Maybe a little. But with every stitch, I'm a little closer to being married, a little nearer to having my family considered complete in the legal sense. And a little closer to having the wedding I didn't get the chance to have the first time around. Not a big thing, just a small, simple homemade affair, something I think this veil will symbolize pretty well. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some knitting to do.