magnolias and nantucket jacket blues

Did I mention that this is one of my favorite times of the year? The magnolias have been magnificent this spring. I pass several different varietals on the way to my local Peet's in Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto. This little tree is on Walnut street near Cedar… After all the chilly grey of the winter, the riot of pink is positively soul-restoring.

It's another balmy Saturday in Berkeley, after a week of rain. I drove down to Stanford yesterday to visit my brother Max, who's on grad school tours now. The hills are green with all the recent rain, and I was struck again by how much Stanford resembles a gigantic country club. Lush, almost tropical with its palm-lined avenues, and the long open collonades (is that spelled right? hm) of romaneque arches in yellow sandstone, breezy sunshine, and glinting mosaics.



Anyway I gotta hand it to my brother for always landing with his bum in the butter, as the South Africans say. Here he is, next to a maquette for Rodin's The Gates of Hell. Stanford's Rodin collection is just amazing. What a sculptor. The hands, the feet, not really for their anatomical detail (although that is impressive as well) but for the resonance of their humanity.

But right, back to my brother. With acceptances to Harvard and Rockefeller, and Stanford and Teach for America pending, Max puts the ROCK in rock star.



Maybe by now you're wondering where the "nantucket jacket blues" part comes in.

Well, I thought I'd made it all the way through a pattern for once without seriously altering it, but I guess not. After weeks of cabling away I finally have the body of the sweater finished, (proudly displayed in this pic) and have been working on the sleeves these past few days.

I went to try the one 2/3's completed sleeve on, and realized…I hate it. HATE it. The seed stitch underarms totally don't do it for me. Maybe if I had skinny little, waify arms, I'd be able to rock it, but no. Can we say, "alligator arms?"

So the one almost-finished sleeve is sitting sadly on a holder while I test out a revised pattern for the other. (Nothing like pattern writing on the fly.) If my experiment works, then I'll rip the first one out, and knit it to match. Ribbit, ribbit. And I will post my changes faithfully here at Woolly Wumpus, so check back in in a week or so, all those of you who similarly don't need extra bulk attached to their arms.


Here is the offending sleeve, whip-stitched together for trial purposes. I goofed one row of the seed stitch too, which doesn't help.

See how weird it looks? Weird! This is such a texture-heavy sweater that to my mind, making the sleeves even heavier is a mistake. I'm knitting Chart B into the sleeves (the yarn-over sequence) to help lighten the feel and make the overall effect sleeker. And gone will be the seed-stitch filler. Down with alligator arms.

OH yes by the way, this pattern seems to be one of the more popular ones from the Winter 2006 Interweave Knits magazine. It's called the "Nantucket Jacket" and graces the cover in a similar rust-red to the one I ended up using. I'll include full pattern and yarn notes when I write up my chages. So stay tuned…