I was home all last week due to Hurricane Ike, and managed to fit in a bit of knitting between kid wrangling, cleaning up the yard, getting poison ivy and making toast over the gas burners on my stove when we didn’t have power.

I now have the completed pieces of the Estes vest (Rav link), ready to be assembled. This has been a really fun knit - I used some worsted weight yarn I got from Carroll in our Knit Night destash a couple of months ago and doubled it to get gauge. I did the fronts first because I wanted to do some adjusting of the pattern. The vest as pictured in the magazine was pretty short, so I wanted to add some length to it, and I had read on Ravelry that the pockets as written were very small, so I wanted to make the pocket openings a bit bigger. Both problems were solved by starting the pocket openings as directed in the pattern but knitting another half repeat before starting the waist shaping.

And again, another example of the joys of blocking. The pattern calls for steaming the pieces, but I wet blocked, and I’m very happy with how it came out. Before blocking the texture was a bit too exaggerated. Now it’s just right, and look at the difference it made in the size of the front! I was a bit concerned that the whole thing was going to be way too small, but it came out just right. Trust the swatch Porpoise, trust the swatch.

It’s been a long time (read: more then 15 years!) since I’ve done any serious cable work, and I’d forgotten how fun it is. Plus with bulky weight yarn and no sleeves, it goes really quickly! I finished one front piece in a day before the hurricane (mental health day where I stayed home in front of Buffy with my yarn - bliss), and got the other front and the back done over the course of the last week in the evenings. Now I’m itching to get to some other cabling work, and I have grand designs on a couple of child sized Aran sweaters. I only used 6 of the 10 skeins of this yarn so maybe there’s enough for a sweater for one of the kiddos.

The last week has also been a great source of stash enhancement for Ironman. I think I’ve mentioned before that he does woodworking. Well, my mother-in-law, Mermaid, arrived last Monday in time to enable him in a major way. She is a wood sculpture by profession, and the two of them have spent the last week driving around scoping out the brush piles on everybody’s curbs and swiping interesting wood. they dropped me off at work one morning last week to take care of some cells, and drove through the Museum District, a very tony part of town, and came to pick me up with several very large logs strapped to the roof of the car. Apparently folks were very entertained by the sight of two people pulling wood off of the streets and taking it away with them. In any event, the final touch on this vest will be handmade toggles from either Crepe Myrtle or “Ike wood” (an as yet unidentified hardwood that looks maybe like some kind of nut tree but we haven’t been able to figure out what it is yet). One light, one dark - any suggestions?

Porpoise Fur