Right now it is early summer. The birds are singing, the sun is warm, the breeze is soft. Swimmers frolic in the lake. Fisherpersons cast their lines and hope.
But it will not always be so. One day darkness will fall, a heavy chill will descend, and snow will blanket the land. Winter is coming.*
In preparation I am knitting myself a dandy pair of heavy boot socks. Remember this yarn?
It is in the process of becoming a pair of these:
Yeah, that's three photos of my left foot wearing the same sock. Work with me here.
I am in love with the way the two yarns stranded together make such a nifty marled, ragg sock look.
The oatmeal color of the Lana Grossa Megaboot Stretch works perfectly with the greens and turquoises of the tweedy Online yarn. I held the Lana Grossa next to another colorway of tweedy Online yarn, one that is less green and more blue; the two did not do a thing for each other. But these two seem to have just enough yellow in common to be happy together.
When we were camping on the North Shore a couple weeks ago I felt like I should dress in a flannel shirt, jeans, and hiking boots. And maybe sing, "She's a lumberjack and she's okay / She sleeps all night and she works all day." Maybe these socks are my first step in that direction.
While we are admiring these colors, let us take notice of how these same colors may occur in nature:
I missed a photo op earlier this afternoon of a parade of several adult Canada geese and at least a dozen nearly-grown goslings. These five babies (I had to blow up the photo to 100% to count them; you will just have to trust me on the number) are much, much younger. They are also possible loon lunch. This is the first year since 1991, our first summer here, that we have had both loons AND Canada geese on the lake. The loons always chase away the geese and claim this teeny tiny ocean for their own. Good luck, Mama and Daddy Goose! Take care of those babies! (Although the world does not perhaps really need any more Canada geese.)
* Extra points for anyone who can identify the book[s] from which this comes.
Our camping trip last weekend to the North Shore went much better than could have been expected, given the dismal weather forecast for the weekend -- rain, thunderstorms, flash flood warnings, doom/gloom, pack your bags, dude, it's the end of the world. In point of fact, it only rained one night while we were there and even then didn't start until after 10pm, so we didn't mind scattering the embers of the campfire and heading to bed to avoid getting wet.
Perhaps this, which we saw as soon as we caught sight of Lake Superior, was an omen.
It wasn't a very long rainbow, but I think it was the most vivid I have ever seen.
There had been heavy rain earlier in the week, and the many streams and rivers that flow into Lake Superior were still running full. This river was full of debris.
You can see how the guardrail was twisted away from the road and the washout that had occurred.
At the campsite there was tree climbing and dog napping:
There were nature photos galore:
The first and third are the same stump but the third is turned 90°; the second is, I think, trout lilies. They were a week or two past blooming so I only got to see the seed heads. There were hepaticas and wild strawberries and lungwort in bloom, but I got no photos of them.
There was also puking. First Maggie (once), then Matthew (many times), but the rest of us were unaffected. Whew. Perhaps they had eaten some salmonella infested tomatoes before they joined us; but they arrived on Thursday night and didn't get sick until Sunday, so who knows? They were both fine by Monday.
When it was time to break camp Maggie kept Matthew and Andrew on task.
Best of all, there was sock knitting.
The colors are not true in the photo. The background color is more of an olive tan khaki, not as dark as it looks. That ten inches or so of yarn you see lying on my right foot is how much I have left to graft the toe of the left foot. I made the legs extra long; I hate to have cold ankles in January. That little tail is enough to graft, but I want to see exactly how the right foot comes out before I finish off the left. If the second ball -- I wound the 100 gr skein of Colinette Jitterbug into two 50 gr balls -- happens to be slightly shorter, I may finish off both toes with some solid olive green Lang Jawoll that I have in stash. The pair is stalled right now because I ran out of the olive green reinforcing yarn I am using in the heel flaps.The Jitterbug is 100% merino wool, lovely and soft, but I fear it would not wear as well as a yarn with some nylon in it, so I am reinforcing the heels, the spot that I always, always, always wear out first in my purchased socks.
I just noticed that it looks like the columns of purl stitches are wonky in the left sock. They are not, it is just the angle of the photo. I hope.
* * * * *
Back in the heady days of the '60s and '70s there was a saying that dope would get you through times of no money better than money would get you through times of no dope. Be that as it may, I prefer to think that luck will get one through any kind of hard times at all. And my sweetie is Lucky with a Capital L.
On Saturday afternoon he and I took off for a little drive and ended up at Grand Portage at the gas station/convenience store outside the Indian casino there. After we each ate a Haagen Daas ice cream bar with almonds (yum!), he asked if I wanted to watch him throw some quarters down the toilet/into the slot machines in the store. I decided I would rather go back to the parking lot and knit. By the time I had made a pit stop, gotten back out to the car, and settled myself with my knitting, Smokey was back out there, too, with $95 won from a $20 start. That's my Bear.
I made a pair of socks for Maggie, #2's girlfriend.
She and #2 came up this weekend; I finished grafting the toes on Friday evening and left them on the table when I went to bed. She found them when they got her sometime in the middle of the night, and she liked them so well she didn't take them off all weekend.
I am ashamed to say I started these w-a-y back in February. There were two reasons they took so long to finish: the tax season from hell, during which my brain was unable to handle anything more difficult than the Mason-Dixon dishcloth pattern; and once tax season was over, Maggie was 75 miles away and it was difficult to try the sock for size upon her dainty foot. Originally I started them toe-up, but when she tried them on a few weeks ago -- I was past the heel at the time, maybe even on the second sock -- she said they were fine, but #2 confided later that she told him they were a little tight through the ball of the foot. Since I wanted them to be perfect, and since STR heavyweight knits up like a flash, I frogged the sock and reknit it. Once I had the size worked out it only took me about a week, of on and off sock knitting interspersed with knitting on another project, to finish the pair. I knew by that time that I had plenty of yarn so there was no need to do toe-up; besides, I can knit a generic top-down sock without referring to a pattern. ::pats self on back::
Thus endeth the Saga of Maggie's Socks. It tickles me that she likes them so well.
We were entertained one night this week by this fellow. Smokey spotted him while he (Smokey, not the raccoon) was watching the evening news.
Mr. Raccoon had been bathing himself while nestled in the crotch of the tree, but when I came out onto the deck to photograph him he decided he needed to come down.
How does a raccoon come down from a tree? Very carefully.
* * * * *
Andrew found out that he could increase his loan for med school enough to cover a new computer. His old one, a $795 Averatec laptop from Sam's Club, had barely made it through four years of college. This time he wanted a good one. 250GB hard drive, 4GB of RAM, screen the size of a soccer field -- he got what he wanted.
He set it up with the dual boot option so he could also run Windows, which is necessary to play several of his video games. $9.27 to a Guatemalan street vendor scored him this:
which is Windows XP Professional en español. That $9.27 also got him MS Office 97, Windows Vista, and a blank-looking CD that the vendor called el crack and which is supposed to keep Vista working after 30 days. He will only use the XP. Piracy is apparently alive and well.
* * * * *
On a more legitimate note:
I cast on this sock Tuesday evening and knit barely an inch that night. On Wednesday I took it with me to the finance committee meeting and knit most of the leg. I have since turned the heel, knit the foot, and I'm currently decreasing for the toe (which is red; these are fun socks). I'll finish it this afternoon.
Now the kicker: I'm actually knitting these on US #0 needles.
I know, I said that life was too short to knit on zeros. This yarn (Online something or other) is what inspired me. I don't remember exactly where I got it but I'm pretty sure I must have won it because I don't remember buying it. It has been sitting next to my desk since early last winter. (Sitting there because I was too lazy to put it away in the sock yarn box at the bottom of my Tower o' Rubbermaid.) I would look at it and try to figure out how best to knit socks from it fast. My plans were to double-strand it with black. Or turquoise. Or white. Or all three, in stripes.
But last weekend I found myself thinking about knitting it on zeros and adding contrasting heels and toes and cuff. Smokey laughed at me when I said I was excited to try it.
But excitement makes the knitting go faster. I have never knit a sock this fast, ever. Given the ridiculous weather we are having (40 degrees at the moment), it is possible I may be able to wear them before true spring gets here.
* The spring peepers woke up today. Smokey said he listened for them yesterday, and they weren't peeping. But tonight, as we drove to the barbecue place in the next town north, we heard them. And stopped to roll down our windows and listen. Such a glorious sound. Ahhhhh.It was nice of them to wait to come out of hibernation until I truly had a day off.
* Monday was my last day at work. I left at 5:05, stopped at Best Buy to compare cameras, and headed for the Great North. Home by 9pm, in bed by 10. Ahhhhh. Life is good.
* Tuesday was the all-day organizational meeting of the new county board, of which I am 1/23rd. Good meeting, got acquainted with some of the supervisors whom I didn't know, and got myself elected to the finance committee, which was what I wanted. I won't be writing much, if at all, about the board here. It is not appropriate. But I'm thinking I might start a second blog for that topic; time will tell.
* I did knit during the meeting, although not all the time. The project of choice was a sock, but, less than optimally, I was at the turning of the heel. It is a short-row heel, which I have never managed to pull off correctly before, so why I thought I could do it while in a meeting that demanded some attention is a mystery for the universe. I knit half the heel, frogged it, knit it halfway again, frogged it, tried one more time. It wasn't too bad that time so I kept going. After finishing it and knitting a few more rows I inspected it at the end of the meeting and decided that I shall frog it one last time and reknit it, this time when there are absolutely no distractions. And it shall be perfecto. It is a gift for another, after all.
* Wednesday, my first real day off: got up at 8:30, made coffee, caught up (sort of) on e-mail and online stuff, then got sleepy again. Back to bed for a... six-hour nap! I hope to cut back on the nap time a little tomorrow.
* I just flipped a hornet off my hand. Where did he come from? No idea, but he ain't gonna live to see the sunrise.
* My house is a total disaster. Every horizontal surface, including most of the floors, is covered with stuff, and there is a suspicious odor of dog and/or cat *accident*. Must attack all of that, one area at a time.
* The Mason-Dixon dog blanket (scroll down for a photo) is suddenly three-quarters done. How did that happen? I never knit on it for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time, and not very often at that. Oh, yeah, now I remember: we knitters are taking over the world, one stitch at a time.
It was a quiet Christmas. Matthew and I joined my friend Colleen and her friend Alan for a Christmas dinner put on by a local community club. No charge, goodwill offering only. It was held at a lovely, northwood-sy supper club in the next little town south from us. The lady in the Santa hat was in charge. She said they served 140 people.
Ham, stuffing with gravy, steamed mixed veggies, dinner rolls, and homemade cookies and bars(s) for dessert. Just like grandma used to make 'cuz it was Grandma in the kitchen.
See the TV in the bar in the background? Tuned to Channel 45, The Official Fireplace Station Of The Holidays -- all flickering flames, all the time. What was even more amazing was that [I think] the Packers game was being televised. "No, Lenny, we will NOT change the station to The Game. We're having a fireplace on the teevee today."
I saw Mr. S, who was Andrew's history teacher in high school and who commented that he has been reading The Boy's The Young Man's dispatches from Chiapas with interest. Mr. S looked very festive indeed.
After that we came home. Matthew bullied me into letting him open one present. Pink Skullcandy earbuds.
Then he listened to his music and surfed the net, and I listened to an audio book and knitted on his sock.
To make amends for my little rant yesterday -- oh, and btw, thanks for all the bah-humbuggery appreciation y'all sent me, did my little heart good to know that humor still rules the world (I wish! It could do a better job than certain White (And Other-Colored) Men are doing at present, but that is a rant for another day) -- and did you see that Wendy commented (be still my heart, a celebrity comment! wOOt! (and did you read when Norma (yay! Norma!) blogged that "wOOt" is Webster's Word of the Year, except that they spelled it wrong, all the Kool Kids know it's spelled "w00t," not "wOOt") Thanks, Wendy!) -- I'm putting up this little YouTube number:*
Highlights to watch for:
The sweet knit hat -- intarsia? stranded? -- worn by one of the graffiti artists. Yeah, I later realized it is really a ski mask, but still, it is an objet d'knit, and we all loves us some objets d'knit, doncha know?
The awesomely perfect circles! drawn freehand! by that same artist;
The skyline of NYC looking like something is missing, and we all know what that is, and it saddens us.
That album -- or "alblum," as my dear MIL used to pronounce it, and so did my husband, who argued with me for an amazingly long time that "alblum" was a perfectly valid alternative to "album" and whom I only convinced otherwise when I dragged him, alblumming all the way, to the dictionary -- came to live in my iTunes a week or two ago and I have been listening to it and smearing the music and lyrics all over myself, it is so good.
[ascends soapbox] As much as I love that song, I keep disagreeing with the underlying sentiment, that his generation is waiting on the world to change. The counter-culturalists of the 1960s and 1970s didn't wait. They stormed the bastions of convention helter-skelter and willy-nilly and Nelly-bar-the-door, and nowadays many of those counter-cultural values are mainstream, although sadly not so much universally practiced as universally proclaimed: ecological awareness, recycling, organic food production, planet-friendly practices, multiculturalism, tolerance, diversity, social justice. One cannot simply wait for the world to change into something that better suits one; one must be the change one wishes to see™. [/descends from soapbox]
On the other hand, the sentiments in "Belief" seem to me to express a profound truth that the world would do well to grasp:
But, hey, I'm not all about the lyrics. Listening to his pre-song comments in this video of "I'm Gonna Find Another You" I realized that, Doh, of course I like that song, it's... blues.
Go on, knit her a couple. Quick, easy, stash-busters. You know you want to. Deadline is January 15.
Yarn: Lion Brand Cotton Ease (50% cotton/50% acrylic); Lake, Lime, and Berry.
Needles: US#6
Pattern: Basic hat from Ann Budd's A Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns, preemie size.
I was a bit unhappy with the size and shape it turned out to be, thinking that it was too wide for its depth, but an emergency e-mail to Jeanne and I was tactfully informed that 1, babies come in all sizes and shapes (well, within limits), and b, even preemie babies grow and often continue to need little hats. Babies grow? Who knew?
The uneven stitches smoothed out nicely after a quick run through the washer and dryer with the other laundry.
Yesterday's knitting scene:
In the interests of full disclosure, I must tell you that the New York Public Library mug does not contain coffee, nor even Sleepy Rabbit tea, as it did yesterday. Nope, that is Worcestershire sauce-tinted tap water, concocted to re-create the scene more accurately. Do I have mad food stylist skillz or what?
To remove the taste of the forgoing awfulness, please fondle the virtual cuddliness of the knitting:
#2 son asked me to knit him a pair of socks. Listen! Hear that? Hell freezes over.
He has steadfastly refused any and all of my offers to for him. He's a fashionista in his own way, that boy, and his self-image brooks no mother-produced garments. Oh, except for that Dulaan-destined hat he swiped from me last winter. And that glow-in-the-dark scarf I so laboriously knitted him last year at his request and which he wore about twice. Grrrrr.
But I am A Knitting Mother -- ya know, the ones who want to wrap the world in hand knits? So I immediately agreed to make him a pair of socks.
No wool, he said, Wool is itchy.
Okay, no problem, I said, and showed him a recently-received color card of Knit Picks Shine Worsted (60% Pima cotton/40% Modal®). He picked out the terra cotta and cream shown above. One reason I was able to agree so readily was that I had discovered the extreme speediness with which worsted weight yarn knits up into socks. Wham! Bam! Socks!
He sent me a link to these socks to show how he wanted his to look.
Don't guys have silly-looking legs? Why do they pose like that, so their legs look even sillier than necessary? Why do I care?
But the catsock came back the very next day year,
The cat sock came back, we thought he was a goner
But the cat sock came back; it just couldn't stay away.
Away, away, yea, yea, yea.
So where was it? Darned if I know. I found it on the stairs one morning last week. Smokey and I had each been up and down those stairs perhaps half-a-dozen times in the five or six days previous and would have seen the sock had it been lying there. It just appeared one morning. Best guess: the kitties found it somewhere and dragged it out. But I'm not questioning; I'm just planning to wear them tomorrow.
A couple weeks ago Smokey and I flew to New York to attend #1 son's commencement ceremony. (More on that in another post.) I took along the center-pull-mess sock, which had been neglected since February. Just in case the TSA guards decided my US1 bamboo dpns were Too Dangerous For Air Travel, I weighed the entire project including a 9"x12" envelope and brought along said envelope and sufficient postage to mail the whole thing home if necessary. My knitting passed their inspection but my Micra Leatherman did not, so I was glad I was prepared.
I knitted diligently on the sock, so much so that I finished the first one and worked the second one all the way to the heel. However, I didn't have enough of the black KnitPicks sock yarn, nor had I brought along the gray reinforcement yarn. Here's how much I got done:
When we left home the sock on the right was somewhere in the heel area. (Notice how nicely the socks cling to our cedar siding. The black hanging yarn is in fact hanging. Vertically.) I am quite happy with how these are turning out, the wool wire from which they are knitted notwithstanding. I got used to its less-than-luscious feel, and I think the socks will wear well.
My stated objective in New York City was to visit some famous yarn stores and to obtain a US1 circular needle with which to knit socks in the Magic Loop method**. Objective was accomplished; I am now the proud owner of two Addi Turbo circs, size 1 and 2, purchased at School Products. Also purchased, two skeins of this lusciousness:
and so I was totally prepared when I had to stop working on the blue socks.
On the way home we stopped for a couple days to visit with Smokey's brother and sister-in-law. With my brand-new, handy-dandy Addi circ I cast on and happily knat away, feeling all the while like I was now being allowed to sit at the Big Knitters' Table. Even though all it takes to buy the needle and this yarn is a quick swipe of the plastic, I still felt like now I was a growed-up knitter. The above became this*:
which, after an encounter with this:
became this:
which required roughly an hour of detangling. But Koigu is such yarn pr0n that even detangling it is fun. Eventually I worked my way to this*:
which is where it stands today. The colors in the last photo are the most accurate.
* Deerfly and dead mosquito added for, er, scale. Hey, Erika isn't the only one with creepy critters!
** I was so excited to be getting the Addis that grabbed the first ones I touched -- 40", which seems to be mighty long. What length do you prefer for Magic Loop?
* * * * *
While in NYC I checked out School Products, Habu, Purl, and the Radical Knitting and Subversive Lace exhibit at the Museum of Design. School Products yielded the Koigu and the needles, but I was not in the market for a cone of anything, whether alpaca, camel, yak, silk, nor pure gold, so I was less than taken with the store. Habu was a total disappointment to me; once again, I was not in the market for anything they had. Both are wonderful if you are looking for what they have; I wasn't.
Purl was tiny; I'm from the midwest, where you could easily fit six or eight Purls into the yarn store I frequent in Minneapolis. But small though the store is, the yarn selection was ample and gorgeous. Leaving the store with me were two more skeins of Koigu and 225 yards of Tilly Tomas sparkly-spangled variegated silk, the latter destined for a Christmas gift scarf for one who will not be named here.
Purl also has something that should be required in yarn stores: a table filled with decent-sized swatches of (all?) the yarns in the store. Said swatches were also fully labeled with name of yarn, color used, and needle size used for the swatch. (A couple of my [many] pet peeves are yarn displayed without a swatch or, even worse, a lovely swatch or scarf or other item on display with no indication of the yarn it is made from. Sheesh, people, how tough is this? If you want to sell the yarn, show me how it looks and tell me which yarn it is. Don't make me beg for it. /rant)
The MAD exhibit was fun. #1 son went with me to the yarn stores and the museum, and after we left the latter we both said, "That was better than I expected." We had the good fortune to be able to tag along with a couple of women who were being toured through the exhibit with a fairly knowledgable docent. Even though I have an undergrad degree in art history, which required that I be able to talk at length about any given piece of art, whether I know anything about it or not, it was still nice to have that docent chatting about the pieces and forcing us to slow down and think about them.
When did you start carrying your reinforcing yarn for the heel? It doesn’t look like you used it for the gusset stitches, but it’s hard to tell from the picture. I plan to get back to my toe-up socks soon but I can’t decide when to begin reinforcement.
I started with the reinforcing yarn when I started with the black yarn for the heel. Yeah, that was helpful, wasn't it?
In the Widdershins pattern, I changed to black and added the reinforement yarn when I started to turn the heel, at the point where the pattern says, "Row 1 [RS]: K31, m1, k1, w&t" next to the picture of the purple sock that is done to the ankle bone.
On reflection, I think it might have made more sense to start carrying the reinforcement yarn as soon as I started the gusset. I wear out my socks at the back of the heel, but my husband wears his out on the underside of the heel -- where my sock isn't reinforced. This sock isn't for him -- it's for my brother -- but maybe male wear patterns differ from mine. Crap. Live and learn.
Oooh, I feel just like Wendy, answering questions from my readers in a post. Um, sure, Kath, you are exactly like Wendy. Dream on...
I wrote this post a few weeks ago and saved it because I knew it would be hard to write new posts during tax season. I have some things to add to it, though, so here it is in two parts.
Part The First, 1-27-2007:
See that glob on the right? That's what I ended up pulling out of the "center-pull skein"* on the left. Since I'm planning to make a pair of toe-up socks from this and wanted to divide the 100 gram skein exactly in half, I happened to have my scale handy. The original skein? 96 grams (where are my other 4 grams, guys?) The glob? 24 grams. That's exactly 25% of the skein that came out -- and not easily, I might add -- when I tried to find the end. Grrrr. It was a tangled mess to 1, find the end, and B, wind this into 2 actual center-pull balls. As I am a stoic Scandinavian (is there any other kind?) there was no swearing or flinging of objects, although there were gritted teeth and heavy sighing.
It was not a fluke, either. I have 3 of these puppies, in slightly different colors, in my stash. Every single one of them was short -- two by 4 grams and one by 7(!) -- and had this unholy mess in the center. I sent a fourth skein to my Knitters' Coffee Swap buddy because the dominant color was purple, her favorite color.
Sorry, Susan. I didn't know. Now you are warned of what to expect when you attempt to actually use this yarn.
The yarn is Online Supersocke 100 Highland Color. This is the only yarn of that brand I have ever purchased; YMMV -- I certainly hope so. The knitting experience had better be more pleasant than the winding experience.
Later that day:
The knitting experience is... mixed. (btw, don't adjust your monitor -- I'm knitting from a different skein than I photographed at the beginning. Similar, but different colors of blue.) I like the way the yarn looks knitted -- there will be some subtle striping, which I like. But the feel of the yarn, um... stinks. It is hard; it feels like woolen wire -- no loft, no softness. There is a marked difference between the black toe, knitted from KnitPicks Essential (their basic superwash wool blend sock yarn), which is soft and yummy, and the tweedy foot, which is rather hard and harsh in comparison.
All I can hope now is that the tweedy yarn softens and blooms when washed. Keep your fingers crossed for me. And for the recipients -- these, plus a pair knitted from the first skein, above, are intended to be gifts.
* These are not superfluous quotation marks. They are sarcasm tongs. Thanks to Big Alice for the term.
Part The Second, 2-17-2007:
The sock is growing, albeit slowly.
If all the knitting I have done on this sock were still present, I'd be halfway through the second sock. But because I'm using different yarn and different size needles than the Widdershins pattern calls for, I'm having to knit and frog, knit and frog. The woolen wire, aka yarn, seems to be pretty sturdy, though; it shows no signs of wear from all the abuse it is taking. Before you ask, the heel is the black KnitPicks sock yarn being knit with some of the gray reinforcing wool/nylon that comes in the center of every Lang Jawolle skein of sock yarn. I have other, non-sock plans for my Jawolle so I decided to use the reinforcing yarn here. I quite like how it make the heel tweedy just like the rest of the sock. Too bad I didn't think of it before I started the toe :-(
Susan, my Coffee Swap buddy, has started her sock. She too found the unholy mess that is the center-pull of this yarn in the skein. But she is too nice to comment on the quality of the yarn.
Carole of caroleknits.com recently posted pictures of a lovely pair of socks that she knitted from another colorway of this yarn. Her take on the yarn -- and she is a far, far more experienced knitter than I -- is that it should wear well because of the tight twist. I think she is right; so I will just suck it up and make the socks. Not everything has to be knitted out of sensuous yarn, right? Sometimes utility (and colors) should be sufficient.
Also, before you ask, the pink knitted background is a Dulaan sweater. I finished it last weekend and blocked it last night. More info to come.
After I finished the scarf I couldn't decide what to cast on next. Currently on the needles were the second of a pair of socks and a dog sweater. I tried to work on the sock the day we went to Eau Claire to see La Harlot, but I was at the heel-turning stage and there was no way I could concentrate enough to do it. (Don't ask how I know.) Luckily I had had the foresight to pack some other needles and yarn so I made a dumb dishcloth. Here it is, reposing gracefully with my son's gas mask:
Yarn: either Peaches & Cream or Sugar & Cream, lost the ball band Needles: Denise US#7 Pattern: mine. CO 36 st. K3, P3 for 4 rows. P3, K3 for 4 rows. Repeat.
Don't all 17-year-old boys have a gas mask?
Last Saturday I didn't feel like working on the sock or the dog sweater so I cast on for a Dulaan hat:
The next night I finished it (the colors here are more accurate):
The notable thing about the hat is that I knit most of it while at the computer (reading Cara's archives, if you must know). I am determined to learn how to knit without watching my hands. Stockinette and 2x2 ribbing with worsted on size 7s is not too hard, I found, but it will be awhile before I can do it with a real pattern or something on smaller needles.
Last night I finished the sock:
Yarn: Schoeller Eslinger Limbo Mexiko, color 2585 Needles: Crystal Palace bamboo, US #3 Pattern: Widdershins, from knitty.com, summer 2006
A few words here about Schoeller yarn: I'm sufficiently anal that I really would have liked the stripes to line up, but it was impossible. The two skeins of yarn started at almost exactly the same place in the color pattern, and I could have made it work if that were the only problem. But as I was winding the second skein into a ball after the first sock was done, I found that the color repeats were not the same - there was a whole bunch of other repeats in the middle of the skein that weren't there in the first one. So I just had to suck it up and let the stripes fall where they fell. When I knit my first pair of socks, also from Schoeller yarn, I came upon a knot in the yarn just after doing the heel of the first sock. After which the color repeats reversed! Now I ask you, what kind of happy horseshit nonsense is that? I dutifully reproduced the knot and reversed color repeats in the second sock (did I mention I was a tad anal?), but hmmph, I say, hmmph.
The colors of the latest socks are remarkably similar to those of that first pair of socks I knit:
Yarn: Schoeller & Stahl Fortissima Colori Socka, color 9070 Needles: Crystal Palace bamboo, US #1 Pattern: (don't remember; it was chosen for me by the clerk in the yarn store. I think it started out "cast on 68 st.")
Boyhowdy, did these latest ones go fast, once I started working on them consistently - only 48 st per round. The first ones were knit the conventional top-down way. These were toe-up using the Widdershins pattern from knitty.com.
I have made 3 pairs of socks top-down and hate both the "what if I run out of yarn" thing and the hard-to-use-up leftovers that that occur if I guess wrong too far in the other direction. I made a couple pairs of baby booties from the leftovers from the first socks, and that was okay, I guess, but the patterns and colors I chose for socks don't always lend themselves to baby footwear. I've done a couple pairs of short-row heel socks but didn't like them for a several reasons. For one, I seem to be incapable of counting correctly, so the short rows don't come out even at the end of the heel. It hasn't affected the fit of the socks but makes for a less-than-satisfying knitting experience. For another, the pattern - a generic one I found at elann.com - makes a row of holes diagonally along each side of the heel. There is very little chance that this isn't due to my screwing up, but I can't seem to avoid it.* Third, if I put a bunch of hours into knitting a sock, I want it to last roughly… forever! Short-row heels don't have that nice thick, corrugated slip-stitch heel flap that seems like it might do just that. The Widdershins pattern solves 2 of these 3 problems. The counting thing continues.
Heels, good:
Heels, bad:
The heel of the first sock, on the right in both photos, came out perfectly (on the third try). I'm very happy with it. The heel of the second, not so much. I had already knit and frogged it several times by the time I got to the heel flap. So when I realized, about three-quarters of the way through the flap, that it wasn't going to come out right, did I say, Oh, I must fix that! I must rip it out and do it right! Nope. I just finagled some strategically placed decreases and went on with my life. Clearly I will never be a knitter-for-hire.
On the dog sweater project, I need to corral the dog and hold the knitting against her body to determine exactly where the "sleeves" need to be. I'm making this one up as I go along. She is not going to enter any fashion shows or need to impress her friends at the vet. I'll tell you more about this project when I finish. For now, I leave you to consider these two words: huntin' season.
* Once I re-found this pattern so I could link it here, I scrutinized the photo v-e-r-y closely. I think the pictured sock has the diagonal row of holes, too! Hmmph (again). I feel better knowing the holes are not because I was unable to knit wrapped stitches correctly, but jeez! Don't you think Elann could have found a better pattern for their website?
