You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July, 2008.
I finished the first Popsicle sock, and I’ve decided that I’m pretty happy with it after all.
I love how the ribbing slides off the edge and am totally going to apply that same principle to another sock in the future. I also really like that there’s a good portion of stockinette on the top of the foot to really show off the yarn, which I still thing is beautiful.
Once I finished that, I had a brainstorm about the traveling sock that I frogged because of the green flashing. After a lot of fuss over how I could stay with the needles I wanted and keep things simple, I remembered that I could just knit the thing from the toe up and it would change how the colors stacked. I gave it a shot, and I’m happy with it so far.
I’ve tried this toe up business before and was pretty unimpressed. I guess I’ve gotten smarter because even though it was, as Christine would say, fiddly as $%#&, it didn’t feel as awkward as it did in the past. Using two circs also helped. There was something about having the thin, flexible needle in the cast on and first row that made it much easier to keep the stitches tight and even, as opposed to two equally thick, immobile needles to contend with.
Evidently, casting on a bunch of projects in quick succession leads to my hating them all.
I’ve turned the heel and am almost through with the gusset decreases on the popsicle sock, and I’m just not sure I like it. Maybe my gauge isn’t quite right, or maybe my ankles are just too small, but the way that the sock lays on my foot just seems….lumpy. Or something. I’m going to keep knitting in hopes that once the decreases are finished all will be right with the world, and besides, I really think the way the ribs melt off the top of the foot is cool and I want to make it happen. But there’s a very real possibility that I’m going to knit an entire sock and then rip the whole thing out.
On Friday, I realized that I didn’t have any travel knitting. In a slight panic (because I needed to be out the door soon but knew I was going to have time to kill when I went to the theater by myself), I wound a hank of sock yarn and started a plain old stockinette sock. I love the yarn (I finally understand all the fuss about Lorna’s Laces) and I love the colorway, but I don’t love the way the sock is knitting up. It isn’t pooling, exactly, but the green is flashing in weird little three row patches at sort of the eleven and and five o’clock positions. I’m trying to be all zen about it and just accept it as a quality of the yarn, but really, its just making me batty. My only real solutions are to knit from both hanks at once and alternate or break the yarn every few rows, which effectively takes away its portable status, knit on 0s which I don’t want to do, or….I don’t know what. Use a different pattern.
At least I still love the chevron scarf.
I may be becoming a little obsessed. My Sock Yarnista package for August arrived the other night and I cast on yesterday morning.
This was yesterday:
And this is this morning:
Popsicle (by Nicole Hindes), Azalea Orchid Kells Soprt Merino, Sock Yarnista Club August 2008
I can hardly bare to walk away from them. Yesterday, I tried to put them down to work on something else, but didn’t make it through more than three rounds. The idea that maybe I can’t work on them on the metro and should find something else makes me twitch.
Can’t tell you what it is, really. The pattern has bobbles. Bobbles! Those weird little lumplings that go on baby blankets and sweaters. I have no idea who would put them on a sock (evidently, the chick who wrote the pattern, huh?), and I almost left them off, but I’m glad I didn’t. They’re fun, and break up the ribbing just enough. The yarn is the gooiest most girley thing I have ever knit with, and the whole thing just makes me unreasonably happy.
Broadripple (Knitty, Summer 2003). Plymouth Yarn Sockotta (Color 15618). Size 1 needles.
Despite my complaining while I was knitting, I’m pretty happy with these. I might have said that I hate the yarn a few (ha!) times while I was working, but now that I’ve had a day and a yummy new skein of yarn between me and the socks, I can admit that there is absolutely nothing wrong with Sockotta. Its a perfectly lovely yarn. As it happens, I just don’t prefer to work with cotton (now I know) and I chose a poor pattern for the yarn, and its really all just my own fault.
Christine was here this weekend and as usual, adventure and hilarity ensued.
Against all of our better judgement, we went to the yarn store. (They were having a sale. Our willpower is only so great.) I don’t think I realized quite what an undertaking driving from my condo to Capitol Hill was, but I managed to only miss one turn (which frankly, I think was a devious Google Maps trick) and didn’t get lost at all and only possibly went the wrong way on the Beltway to get home. I might possibly be getting a little carried away buying yarn, and might possibly have bought 4 skeins of Tilli Thomas Milan. The blue is going into the stash to play with later, when I need something luscious to knit with, and the reds are becoming a chevron scarf.
We dyed yarn, using the jacquard dyes from a type dye kit and Knit Picks Bare yarn in fingering weight superwash merino/nylon. It was surprisingly easy, and we managed to get through the entire process without dying anything that wasn’t meant to be dyed. Not even the concrete on the patio. I’m pretty tickled with the final product. The entire process is documented in pictures here.
We watched a lot of Dr. Who and The Black Parade is Dead! and knitted through most of it. I was evidently paying for my monogamy with the Broadripple socks by being unable to knit on anything for more than fifteen minutes at a time. I got a bit done on those, knit a few squares for my mitered square blankie, and started and made progress on the new chevron scarf. I am totally smitten with it. Its the sort of project that you have to lay out and fawn over and pet every two rows.
Christine brought a spinning wheel, but despite her patience, I couldn’t quite seem to get a feel for it. (I officially apologize to the wheel for anything unladylike I may have said about it, or its mother.) I have the patience of a flea, so after ten or fifteen minutes, I was over fighting with it, and had only maybe a foot of some seriously dodgy looking yarn. I’m still jealous of her having the wheel, though, and would love to get my hands on one for an extended period of time, so that I had the luxury of fighting for fifteen minutes and walking away, knowing I could try again whenever I wanted.
We’re not going to talk about how I spent $23 on dpns and promptly lost one. We’re just not.
What we are going to talk about is how kind Lantern Moon was to replace the wayward needle. Not only did they replace the needle–without so much as asking me to pay shipping–they sent me two needles. Clearly, they know that I am not to be trusted.
I have to wonder, though, about their packaging choices:
Does anyone else think that maybe, they went a little overboard, using that big ol’ box for those tiny little needles?
…and not wood.
I tried to make a yarn swift this weekend, following Crafty Diversions’ excellent tutorial. By tried to make, I mean that I went to the hardware store and walked in circles, trying to find all of the supplies, and then went home and spent a lot of time on my balcony sanding and sawing and calling my husband away from his video game to hold something or to get the saw to work because I evidently am not strong enough to cut a 2×1 piece of poplar with a handsaw.
I got everything ready to be assembled….and discovered that the drill isn’t charging. That was on Sunday, and it still hasn’t held a charge.
By the end of Sunday, I had gotten myself so jazzed up to wind sock yarn that I decided to just wind the ball completely by hand, the way I always had before. This is what I wound up with:
The real irony? I decided I didn’t want to knit socks with it after all.
WIP: Broadripple, originally uploaded by autumnbriars.
I’m about an inch away from starting the toe decreases on my first Broadripple sock. Despite knitting them almost entirely on two circulars, I waited until well after the gusset decreases were finished to try them on.
This is not like me. Usually, I’m a firm believer that every now and then you have to put the sock on your foot and smile and wave it around a little. These socks were meant for my mother and not me, and her feet are larger than mine (as if nearly every other foot in the world), so probably that’s why I didn’t bother.
It was a bad move, and now my socks are walking on pretty thin ice. I threatened to ground them, but the fact is that the only other project I have on the needles is a baby sweater and I’ve forgotten where I am in the sleeve decreases and haven’t been able to psych myself up to tear out the sleeve and start over.
There’s nothing wrong with the socks, per se. But it turns out that cotton? Not so much with the stretch. Despite having knit at the same gauge as usual, with the same heel flap as usual, these socks barely fit over my ankle. You know those jeans in the back of your closet that you can wear, but only if you lay down on your back on the bed to zip them? Putting on these socks is sort of like that. Its a process. You have to really want the socks.
I would rip them out, but hello! they met Darth Maul, and therefore they must stay in one piece. And so I’m pressing on…and evidently making the socks for myself.
These were the last on my WIPs from before Summer of Socks started. My goal for the rest of the summer is at least three pairs, including one toe-up. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but I’m a lazy knitter and I’d rather surprise myself by doing more than disappoint myself by doing less.
Vog On (Knitty, Summer 2007).
Knit in Toftsies 722 as a BPAL Switch Witch gift.
Bruce Wayne Socks.
Knit in Sanguine Gryphon Eidos (Protagoras), the best sock yarn ever. They are for my husband, and I’m here to tell you that boys have big feet. The pattern is my own, which I shall post as soon as I can be arsed to decypher my notes.
My knitting makes me feel stupid on a regular basis. I’m used to it, and its something I’ve come to terms with it.
But knitting does not usually make me feel quite so stupid as the second ‘Vog On sock is making me feel. If the pattern were any simpler, it would be stockinette. Its a four row lace pattern over 28 stitches, and two of the rows are all knit. Somehow, I keep finding myself with one too few stitches on a needle. I had no trouble with the first sock, but this one? Is consistently wrong.
Earlier today, in a fit of frustration, I pulled two whole needles out to try and rip back a row, totally not stopping to think that, yanno–its not such a good idea with lace. Even simple lace.
And so I broke my sock.
I tried to pick up the stitches, but that only made it worse. I swore a lot. I threw it, and that made me feel a little better, but didn’t do anything to resolve the actual issue. I tried to console myself by baking cookies, but I broke the pan. (No joke. I’m not sure what happened, but I was using an air bake pan, and Something Happened inside the air part between the two sections of pan and the the whole thing inflated like a balloon, making my cookies look like a Dali painting and also dumping cookie dough onto the bottom of the oven to burn and set off all the smoke alarms.)
Once the pan issue was resolved and I’d eaten a cookie or two (no, really, its only been two), I came back to fix it. I think I have the sock in a place where I can keep going without having to rip it all the way back to the heel flap, but I’m waiting to see how the lace pattern lines up.
Of course, I just did my first round to try it out, and now I have one too many stitches on a needle.
