Monkey Socks!

I am off to Costa Rica for a week and a half. Plane Knitting: Claudia's Hand Paint, in Toast.

Dyeing & New Yarn

In addition to 15 meters of fabric, I dyed one skein of Buttermilk-colored Crayon cotton yarn from KnitPicks. I didn't calculate the yardage for stripes, so I have no idea how it's going to knit up. I'd like to make bibs for my new first cousins, but it's possible that it will produce bibs sized for 15-year-olds, so we'll see how that goes.



One Monkey sock is done, and the other is almost to the heel. I'll show those again once they're finished. For now, I'm content to dream about what will happen to these lovely skeins that came in the mail this week:



Left is "Dragonfly" from Sunshine Yarns, right it "Kaleidoscope" from Sunnyside Ellen, both of whom are on Etsy. This is my second purchase from Sunnyside Ellen, and I'm hopeful that this skein will knit up just as nicely as the first one.

Dragonfly is going to try to be Pomatomous socks, and Kaleidoscope is going to maybe be a pair of Monkeys or Flutter-by socks, which I found through the Sockapalooza knit plig. I'm also considering that pattern for the Ashabee's that didn't work as Monkeys.

Oh yeah, Trekking stripes

But I like the colors and it fits okay, so onward!



This pair I finished a few days ago. It's the Sunnyside Ellen in Sorbet in a basic 2x2 rib.

my cheeky monkey

My yarn came today, yay! I knocked off work at 4:30 and went to stand in line at the post office until the world ended, and immediately cast on with Rosalind (the brown/pink/blue/white in the upper right-hand corner) for my Monkey socks, denying all the way that this yarn was too thick (sport weight, even) for Monkeys. It was going to be great, it would be a Monkey in baby clothes. Pastel Monkey.



I didn't even finish the inch of twisted rib before I gave up. For I am stubborn and good at denial, but I'm lazy even more than I am stubborn, and no way was I going to waste more effort than I had to. (On 4 dpns, the ribbing was loose on my leg. Augh.)

So now I am casting about in desperation. I'll find a good pattern for sport weight stockinette socks for all the new sockyarn, yes, but (said through gritted teeth) I really want to make monkey socks.

Ashabee's is out. Clovenpine is out. I've asked for some Watermelon Tourmaline Silkie STR for my birthday, but that is still awhile away and as I've covered, patience is not my strong suit. I got some Lucy STR in lightweight, but I've stashed it deep because it's for a rainy day, a day far in the future when they've discontinued the colorway and I've got Important Financial Responsibilities (read: children*) and so can't spend money on sockyarn and I need a pick-me-up. (Also: Lucy Jaywalkers!)

Part of me wants to plunk down another $20-$30 for a skein of Fleece Artist Sea Wool (in Wildflowers, oooh) that will be specifically dedicated to Monkey socks and then if that does not work, just throw myself off a bridge. But that involves a) waiting (and I believe I've addressed that) and b) possibly throwing myself off a bridge. Over socks. So, Plan F:



Trekking XXL. For Monkey socks. Monkeys don't live in Trekking (like they do in Costa Rica), it's not pink and yellow, which is the color combination I'm currently obsessed with, it does not look like a monkey in babywear, but - and this is the important part - I have some right here.

Upon googling Trekking Monkey Sock, I have counted at least 5 people who are making Monkey socks and are making other socks out of Trekking, but no people who are making Monkey socks out of Trekking. Is this crazy? Is this the knitting equivalent of taking your cousin to the prom? Is Trekking that kid who you used to climb trees with and spy on the neighbors with, but who just isn't really prom material? Is Trekking meant only for stockinette?

At this point, if taking kin to the prom is wrong, I don't want to be right.

*far, faaar in the future, I said.

intractable monkeys

Fighting off my tiredness last night, I did the first repeat of my monkey socks. And I love love love how twisted rib looks in this yarn, where the dark pink meets up with the light pink. Love.



And I've heard over and over again how monkey is specially designed for variegated yarn - you think it'll pool, but it doesn't!

I was definitely optimistic - the internets don't lie about things like this - but yes, Ashabee's hand-dyed merino/tencel yarn in Sugar N Spice colorway does, in fact, flash when knit in the Monkey pattern.



D'oh.

I love the yarn, I love the pattern, but it looks as though I will be alternating weekends between their houses, because they cannot live together. So, I'll be trying out some other yarn in this pattern and trying to figure out what to do with the Ashabee's. Whatever happens, it will almost certainly involve twisted rib in some way.



This is some Patagonia Nature Cotton for a little design project - I've decided I need a little pouch. Something lined, to hold a wallet and phone and keys. Swatching begins now.

And finally, the socks on the needles:

I just want my monkeys

Today I was on the KnitPicks site, considering getting another pair of size 1 dpns (so slippery! so pointy!) so that I can knit both socks of a pair at once, not in the nifty one-inside-the-other kind of way, but in an alternating way, so that my gauge by the second toe is not entirely different from the first cuff, which seems to happen rather a lot.

On the site, I noticed two different size 1s, and raised my eyebrows at this system we have of labeling two different things the same thing. Seems kind of silly. And since I can't find the package my original 1s came in, and maybe had a needle-sizer a couple years ago but haven't really seen it since then, I closed the window and thought nothing else of it.

I have two sets of bamboo 1s, one of which is tainted by having been dropped on some very disgusting floors, one of which I just used to make the Hedera socks. Also, the tainted set I can't really find right now. I'd rather use the KnitPicks ones, but bamboo would work just fine.

So I figured I'd just use the size 1s that I can find and do them one at a time. I need to deny myself at least some knitting-related purchases because this has been getting a little crazy, and I'll just try to be conscious of my gauge.

When I got out the pattern, though, I saw that it called for size 2s, and hark! I just randomly bought some KnitPicks 2s to get over the $40 free shipping mark with all that baby blanket yarn. I got them out and figured I'd better check the mm measurement, because KnitPicks has two size twos, too.

And they're a full three-quarters mm bigger (3.0). No problem! I have a set of four (because I lost one) 2s from Brittany birch hardwood. Those are 2.75mm. But hey, that's okay because I also have a set of Crystal Palace Bamboo size 1 1/2s. Which... are 2.5 mm. Yay! Bamboo 1 1/2s it is for the Monkeys.

Looking at KnitPicks, it would appear that they call this a size 1. Anyway, all this blathering is to say: Down with the Needle Numbering System Below Size 4! I will do my part by listing with my socks from now on the size in mms. They already *have* numbers, their absolute measurements.

Who's with me?

Yarn in pottery

I finished my Hedera socks! And I took a picture of them with my 100% brand new camera phone! And probably I will never figure out how to get the pictures off of there, and so you can't see them, but it's okay, they were blurry anyway because I hadn't realized that there is a flash. Oh, and I gave them to my mom, which I why I don't just take a picture now with my camera.



Does this look good for some Monkey socks? Hell yes it does! The original plan for the Monkey socks was Sunshine Yarn (or Sunshine Handspun or something) in the Costa Rica colorway -- because monkeys live in Costa Rica (I still think this is genius, don't try to dissuade me) but then it went and sold out and I bought this stuff. It's merino/tencel, as I think I mentioned before, and I am ready to get this Monkey party started.

Make me frog you one more time and I'll make you both into socks, swear to God

After a fourth frogging, the Chevron Scarf is finally moving. YAY.

Also, I love a good heel flap:

I take it back!

Aargh. Remember how I was all like "Oh, I am the queen of gauge and don't need to go down a needle size"? Well. My gauge was whacked. I knit about a foot of the ol' chevron scarf, and it had three distinctly differently-gauged sections, only the last of which was not strangely lumpy and unattractive. So. Bought size 4 needles and frogged. Again. This scarf sucks to frog; avoid that if you can.

Oh, and it took every ounce of my willpower and every iota of distraction my job has to offer, but I am not the sheepish new owner of 15 skeins (I'm not kidding) of Lorna's Laces. I came very close upon seeing this Chevron Scarf in Ravenswood and Gold Hill. Because despite having jumped on the Chevron Scarf bandwagon awhile ago, I hadn't yet seen a color combo that I really loved. So, considering the one I'm working on, the inevitable copy I make of Spacecase's, and the one my mom has requested, I had better start making some forward progress and fast.

Of course a lot of the pleasure I get out of knitting comes from the actual knitting part of it. But to be completely honest, probably more comes from thinking about what I'm going to knit in a few hours or after I finish my current projects. And looking at that page of LL's got me wondering what a combination of Bittersweet and Sorbet or Child's Play and Happy Valley would look like. And that's where the massive restraint needs to come in.

I'm knitting a sock from some Sunnyside Ellen (colorway Sherbet) I got from Etsy recently and to much rationalization. I also bought some Ashabee's handdyed merino/tencel, which is awesome and probably destined to become Monkey socks, once the Hederas are done. I'm to the instep there, and doing at least a pattern repeat a day.

Pictures next time.

effed oh: Meilenweit Mega Boot Stretch Socks

Yarn: Meilenweit Mega Boot Stretch
Color: 703
Pattern: my own basic sock
Needles: Crystal Palace Bamboo 1 1/2





And in another five months, I can wear them!

...chevron scarf?

I finished them.



I finally finally finally finished them. With a whole 26 minutes to spare.



There will be no ends weaving in the plane*.



Or in the car on the way to the event.



*But oh, was there some ends-weaving-in. 25 blocks per blanket, 2 blankets, 2 ends per block. It took freaking forever. I finished knitting WAY ahead of schedule and then the ends weaving took every last bit of my time.

All log cabin baby blanket and no log cabin baby blanket make log cabin a baby blanket.

Log cabin baby, blanket log cabin baby blanket log. Cabin, baby blanket log cabin baby. Blanket, log cabin? Baby blanket, log cabin baby blanket log cabin baby blanket. Log cabin baby blanket, log cabin. Baby blanket, log cabin baby blanket log cabin baby blanket log. Cabin baby blanket.

l.o.: g cabin baby blanket.

One down

I have finished the knitting part on the first Log Cabin blanket.



I have not finished the weaving-in-ends part of the first Log Cabin blanket. I will show you that part later. I've left very long ends, and my plan is to weave, weave, weave, then secure each end with a very small length of dual duty sewing thread tied in a serious knot. The yarn is whispy enough, I think, to get away with that.

Here are the projects that I'm officially not working on, kind of like how Alberto Gonzales officially can't really remember anything about anything.

Meilenweit Mega Boots Stretch Sox:



LMKG Chevron Scarf:



Not pictured are the Hederas, which will probably not see any more action until the Baby Blanket X-travaganza of 2007 is over. Those will be going to Mom, because her Cinderella feet worked for the size I made the first one. I'm almost to the end of the heel flap on Sock 2, and might have fallen down a wee little bit on the whole sockyarn thing... more about that when normal knitting resumes. But for now:

Progress Shot of Log Cabin #1

WIP: Log Cabin #1

Blanket 1 is rolling along nicely. The blocks are taking significantly longer, so I feel good doing about one a night. Next weekend we'll have about 16 hours in the car, too, so that should be a boon for the whole project as well.



I've been feeling like a particularly slow knitter recently, maybe just because I haven't finished anything for a while. I don't have a whole lot of time to knit in, and it's mostly taken up with garter baby blanket. So, the inevitable happened: I learned that I can walk and knit.

I got about 54 minutes of sock-knitting time into my hour lunch break. Unprecedented! And so far, I haven't walked into a tree, gotten hit by a car, fallen off a foot bridge (and oh, there are foot bridges), or dropped any stitches. This is a whole new frontier.

Chevron Scarf

A first attempt:



I was doing the decrease/increase rows with what I wanted to be the secondary color, the lighter Spring Fling, but that ended up kind of making it the primary color -- which you might be able to see in the awful, awful picture above.

So I switched it up:



and I like this much better. The Spring Fling is traveling from side to side nicely, but the Fairgrounds is not, which is resulting in lengthwise pools of orange-ish, dark green, and raspberry-ish. I'm trying to tighten up my gauge a bit and force it to move, but if this goes on much further, there might be some frogging.

Wow. Just while the pictures were loading, I started knitting a little tighter, and voila. They just can't drive 55. They're rolling rawhide.

I will NOT go down a needle size (like hell I'm knitting these on 4s, 5s are bad enough for a 77" scarf), and while manually changing your gauge doesn't seem to be an all-that-popular way of dealing with pooling here in blogland, it really works for me. And, now that I think about it, I realize that I have kind of been knitting the two colors differently anyway - when I do the straight across rows, I brace the end of the needle I knit onto against my leg and move the other needle and the yarn over top of it (if that makes any sense at all). This generally leads to a tighter gauge. I knit looser when I move both needles as I work, so this is really just bringing everything in line.

A word about the colors: this is not turning out how I'd expected. The Fairgrounds looks pretty different than what I pictured from my monitor(s) - it's a bit darker. I'd originally been planning to use Fairgrounds with Rocktober, and my discipline in yarn-buying rewarded me with Rocktober being discontinued before I got any of it. So I went with these two colorways because they appeared to be similar colors, just with different values. But not so much.

I'm withholding judgment for now. The colors do remind me of the sorts of colors that are used together in vintage quilts - something about the combinations, perhaps. Pastels with yellow-y darker colors. The dusk-time picture above shows the relationships of the colors accurately, but they are more vibrant than they appear there.

I could really use a swift Part 12

woman cannot live on garter alone

Here's the first shot of Log Cabin #1. (Notice the implication of the existence of a Log Cabin #2. Baby Dots... I just don't have it in me.)



I got the light purple and an orange block done this evening.

Socks that Rock, in Fairgrounds and Spring Fling:

for a Chevron Scarf. I don't mind knit-every-stitch projects at all, especially stockinette socks or the log cabin blanket, but some variety would be very very nice.

It's not like I weigh my yarn or anything.

Coming to the toe of Simple Stockinette Mega Boots Stretch Sock #1, I was beginning to fret a bit that I may not have enough yarn to do sock #2. This is because I had worked hard to make the sock a bit taller than I've made other stockinette socks, because I always have a substantial enough amount of yarn left over - of course I figured this would be back to bite me on the arse.

So I was sad that I didn't have a drug dealer scale like so many other knitbloggers do who actually know technical things about knitting and don't completely wing everything that they do. But then I realized: I live with a drug dealer! Haha, no, I kid. I do live with an Italian, though, who at one point spent enough time weighing cheese to invest in a teeny tiny little scale.

So I said to him: hey, do you still have that cheese scale? And he said: ...yeah, why? And then I said: because I want to know if there is more yarn here (in the ball) than here (in the sock). ((And also this is the part where I say how he totally, by feel alone, correctly estimated the amount of ball yarn relative to the amount of sock yarn.))

And then he got all excited and ran to the kitchen to get out the cheese scale, and when I asked him if I could just finish the round I was on, he REFUSED out of the desire for accurate measurement. Then I made him wait while I went to get my camera, and the fact that I was photographing the momentous weighing made him feel less embarrassed about being excited to use the scale.

So, voila:

Sock yarn:


Ball yarn:


And ball yarn wins by a longshot.

I grafted the toe of sock #1 tonight. You can't see a picture of that yet, because 11pm pictures are even worse than the 5:30pm pictures above.

I'd been worried that they would come out a bit big, but this is the first sock I've made so far that actually is long enough. So I might throw it in the dryer to see if it shrinks a bit. (Because I might get soft if I actually have socks that fit my feet comfortably. The decadence!)

I live in a wool house