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I am starting to suspect rather strongly that I need to go back to the tiny squares.
I finished my handspun hat sometime last weekend. Tried it on. The bind-off was too tight. I ripped that out, tried it on again, and the bottom edge fit, but the rest of the hat? It was kind of a mess. Not floppy enough to be a beret, too floppy to be any other sort of a hat, and generally just unwearable. Everything about it, from the pattern to the gauge, was wrong. Just wrong. It was a fun experiment knitting a hat from the top down and working with my own handspun, and I’ll revisit the project eventually, but right now I don’t have it in me to frog and reknit.
I’ve been working on some Bellatrix socks in Socks that Rock, which have been a lot of fun, but I managed to leave them at the school yesterday, so they’re on hiatus until I can get back there to pick them up. That is particularly irritating because I was nearly finished with the first sock, and it was the only WIP that I’m actually enjoying at the moment. Here is what they looked like a week or so ago:
I’m still plugging along on the Barrow socks that have been in the works since something like August, and I’m completely and totally over them. I just want to have socks, for crying out loud, but there is still at least a repeat and a half of the cable chart to go and then the toe and I’m just really, really glad that I am looking forward to wearing them.
The pink sweater also continues, and I’ve have to rip the sleeves back a few too many times to be having any fun with them. I realized yesterday that I dropped a stitch somewhere and will need to rip back again to fix it.
I put in the neck edging the other night, and felt al accomplished until I tried it on and realized that the sleeves need to be about twice as long as I knit them if I want the sweater to look balanced, and odds are good that I’ll need to rip back the hem and add another inch or two to the length. I guess I should feel lucky that I have the extra yarn to do that with, but mostly I’m annoyed. There are at least two other sweatery type garments that I want to move on to, but I’m making myself finish this one before I get involved in another “big project.”
All in all, I feel like I’m working backwards as much as I’m working forward and its kind of not fun anymore.
Is there a knitter alive who has missed the instructor’s list for Sock Summit? The one that’s here and here? I kind of can’t get my head around it. I can’t think of a single sock-person I’ve heard of who isn’t on that list and it blows me away.
Taking a trip to Portland in August is probably not the best thing for my job or my budget but, uh…I might have to be there.
10. My yarn has a much more tenuous relationship with my cat than my husband does.
9. In the four or so years we have been living together, every time I have gone to the freezer to get ice, there has been ice. This is particularly interesting because I could count on one hand the number of times I have filled the ice cube trays. I’m pretty sure the stash isn’t responsible.
8. It is really unlikely that I could afford my yarn habit as I know it without my husband. Just sayin’.
7. When I’m over a project before the project is over, the yarn is never kind enough to knit itself, but occasionally if I thrust it at my husband, he will knit a row for me.
6. Jason never comes out and tells me that I can’t have yarn, but he does go a long way towards keeping the habit in check and making sure I don’t blow my car payment on merino. The yarn offers no such support.
5. I am an extremely flighty, scatterbrained person. Knitting and all the things that go along with it, go a long way towards further distracting me from whatever else I should be doing in order to be a functional, if slightly eccentric, human being. Jason, on the other hand, keeps me grounded and makes sure I remember to actually get things done. (After I finish my row.)
4. I knit. I knit a lot, and I am still terribly impressed with myself and with the magic of taking some sticks and strings and loops and turning them into something real and tangible, and I like to admire that process along the way. While it is delightful to smooth out a sock on my lap every inch and a half and smile at it, its so much more gratifying to hold it up and wave it in someone’s face every inch and a half. I don’t think very many non-knitting men would smile and pet the sock and nod and look impressed with the regularity that Jason manages. I’m pretty sure the yarn wouldn’t be as much fun without him.
3. My husband cooks. The yarn? Not so much.
2. My husband makes me coffee nearly every morning. And I don’t mean that he sets the timer on the coffee pot and pours me a cup when we get up. We have a french press and a grinder. This means he measures the beans, grinds the beans, pours the water into the press, times, it, presses it, and then concocts the magic potion of cream and sugar and coffee in the cup and–and this is the kicker–brings it to me while I sit on my ass with my feet up in my robe on the computer. None of my yarn has ever made me a single cup of coffee.
1. While I have a couple skeins of yarn that are unbelievably soft and squishy and cuddly (I’m looking at you, baby alpaca), none of them is as nice to curl up with as Jason.
Happy Valentine’s Day, sweetie! I love you!
I’ve been wanting to knit a Thorpe (Rav link) and I’ve been wanting to knit with my handspun, and so the other day, I tried putting the two together.
The first stumbling block was not having the proper needles, which I solved by pulling out some square Kollage needles (which are, in case you’ve been wondering, fabulous) and figuring out how to magic loop. Much like cables, once I saw how simple magic looping really was, I felt silly for not trying it sooner.
I’ve been knitting for a bit now, and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I am no longer knitting a Thorpe and the hat is destined to be Something Else. What I don’t know is what they will be. Stay tuned.
I had some of those days this weekend, and added blocks to the blankie I’m making from sock yarn scraps.
(Please to be ignoring the cat fur. I swear that I vacuumed just the other day. There’s just nothing for it.)
I think that the blankie is fabulously terrible, and finishing the little squares makes me feel very accomplished. This is a good thing, because while I should have been trusted only with simple mitered squares, I went and finished socks. I wish I could say that I finished a pair of socks, but…well….
I didn’t. At best, these socks are cousins. Possibly fraternal twins, which might not have been such a bad thing if I hadn’t meant for them to be more or less identical.
There really is no telling what I was thinking, but let’s talk about all the ways that these went wrong. The toe of the sock on the left? Its at least two rows shorter than the one on the right. Best part about that is that initially, I thought it was too long, and ripped back several rows. The feet seem more or less the same, but probably are a few stitches off from one another. And then there is the leg. Oh, the leg. It made my husband laugh and ask, as politely as he could manage, if the socks were supposed to be the same. Well yes. Yes, they were. But the one on the left tries hard to stripe and doesn’t quite succeed and the one of the left isn’t at all shy about swirling. I might have been able to write that off as a quirk of handknit yarn is not for the fact that the sock on the right is no less than four stitches bigger than the one on the left. Four is a lot of stitches. Four is something like a quarter of an inch. Maybe closer to a half. Its bigger enough that wearing them at the same time feels weird and confuses my feet.
This is not okay.
I’m calling them done because I can’t stand to look at them again right now, but eventually, one of them will have to be frogged and reknit, so that I can try to have two socks that bear more than a passing resemblance to one another.
(The yarn, by the way, is Beckon Stretch Merino from Three Irish Girls’ Sock Yarnista club, and it is lovely.)
