A Few Sheep Shy of a Farm

Marianna in her hat and mittens

Every family has their traditions, some are carefully kept from generation to generation and others are allowed to lapse as the next generation takes over.  And some are worth picking up again even when it has been years since they were kept. In my family, we have one that I have been restoring over the past few years with hopes of being able to teach the next generation to continue it.

When my mother was a child, her maternal grandmother, who was a seamstress by trade as well as a knitter & spinner, would knit wool mittens for her grandchildren.  In my family this would have been a serious undertaking as my mother is the 2nd of 9 children; a lot of little hands to knit for each year!  My mother tells me that each winter her grandmother would present them with a batch of wool mittens that had been knit and then boiled in order to full them against the cold.  Her grandmother’s mittens were treasured by the children as they kept little hands far warmer than the store bought acrylic variety; so much so that by the end of the winter (when many had gone missing) the children would argue over the remaining, mismatched wool mittens rather than take the matching store bought ones when it was time to play in the snow.

Unfortunately for me, my maternal grandmother is not a knitter.  I believe her mother likely taught her at some point but she became a sewer rather than a knitter as did my mother after her.  Therefore, my generation did not benefit from the tradition of handknit mittens in winter (how I wish we had!) and as the current Grandmother (my mom) is also not a knitter our children were in danger of the same fate!

For the past several years I have been working to turn things around for my children and my nieces and now little nephew.   I have altered the tradition a bit, expanding it to include a warm wool hat in addition to the mittens. And I’m including the two nieces on my husband’s side of the family which gives me a total of 7 children to knit for.   In addition, each year I try to knit for at least one or two children outside the immediate family, usually family friends, for whom I know a new wool hat and mittens will be a welcome winter gift.

In that spirit, this year I am attempting to knit as many as 10-12 sets of mittens and hats to be given out to all the children in the family and a few others.  Rather than choosing the colors for each child ahead of time I’ve taken a different approach this year; I am knitting hats & mittens in 3 sizes (toddler, preschooler, grade-schooler) and then allowing the children to choose for themselves which set they would like.  I have also taken to heart the advice of one of my favorite knitting authors, Elizabeth Zimmerman, and making mittens in sets of 3 to provide a spare for when the first one goes missing as they so often do.

My son refers to his hand=knit mittens as “Snowball Fight Mittens” and so that is what they are.  I am currently working on writing up the pattern for the set and will present it as a free pattern on Ravelry as soon as it is finished.  It is my hope to inspire you to knit up a set for the children in your life, that perhaps my family tradition may become yours as well.

Snowball Fight Mittens & Hat set

I really am going to post again soon, really.

In the mean time, here are a few pics of the kids in their new sweaters, knit by Mari.

Thank you Auntie Mari!

I realize I haven’t been posting much (ha, understatement) for the past year or two . . . then, I also haven’t been knitting all that much this past year.  Life with little ones has a way of keeping you too busy for the things you want to be doing sometimes.

However, I recently had the opportunity to step back from the day to day chaos that reins here by going to the Knitter’s Review Retreat.  And while I was away I realized how much I miss my online knitting community!

The KR Retreat was such a wonderful event, such a nice chance to catch up with friends old and new, to hang out with fellow knitters & even take a class! Unfortunately, my camera is acting up and I didn’t figure out until the end of the retreat what was happening with it so I don’t really have photos to post.   I can tell you that I was inspired by the knitters I met, their projects and the overall energy of the group to begin a new chapter in my knitting & fibery career.  I’ve come away from the weekend with a new sense of purpose and new pattern ideas.  I’ve also found the motivation to begin offering my patterns through Ravelry downloads under the name Margaret Testa Designs, many of my existing patterns are now in there and I’ll be loading the last few as soon as I round up the copies of the pdfs.  I hope to have several more patterns available over the course of the winter, including a couple of freebies, one of which I’m working on now but we’ll save that for the next post, shall we?

As for things around our little almost a farm: The kids are now 4 and 18 months and getting bigger by the day it seems.  Mimmo can’t wait for real snow to start so he can build a snowman and Caterina is now walking, talking and getting into everything.   We recently lost one of the cats, Isabelle; we believe the coyotes may have gotten her but can’t be sure.  Arrow is getting old, he’s almost 13, and his hips are giving him trouble.  I don’t think he is going to last the winter and we are all very sad that he will be leaving us soon.  We are looking into getting a puppy (shepard, lab, golden or a mix) so if anyone out there has puppies that need a home let me know.

We also hatched 8 chicks this past spring, 6 of them have turned out to be roosters! I plan to keep one but still have 3 available if anyone is interested.  The hens are taking a winter break from laying and I expect it will be after the solstice before we have eggs again.  This year we may be ordering a new round of hens and these may be retiring, at least most of them.

For now, I’ll leave you with a couple of photos of our first winter snow.

First snow 2009

PS.  Mari L. asked about photos of the children’s socks she’s knit so far this year . . . I’ll post them as soon as the little purple one shows up; its currently winning a game of hide & seek.

We’ve been having lots of fun this summer. Swimming at the beach, hiking, playing in the backyard . . . Mimmo has been catching the toads in the yard and playing with them.

Knitting wise, I’m working on socks for Caterina for the fall and have a winter hat for her on the needles as well. . . plan to take pics of both soon.

Here is how I spent my afternoon today! I built 3 compost bins in the back corner of the yard, just up from the chicken coop. They are built from wood pallets and clothes hangers so completely from reclaimed materials. The instructions came from someone else online . . . and it was pretty easy to put together. That is, once I’d cleared the brush from that corner and moved the manure pile. The only thing I would do differently is to use pallets with more boards than many of these have as the manure tends to go through the spaces; the plan is to use things like leaves, grass clippings and straw to stabilize the pile and prevent it going out the spaces.