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

"Creative Problem Solving," it says on my resume.

I really really wanted Sorbet, by SunnySideEllen on Etsy. But my rules says only two skeins at once j- one working, one on deck. That would be Rowan 4-ply Soft and Meilenweit. And if I had any working batteries at all, I would show you my stockinette Meilenweit sock right now, but I don't. Anyway, the upshot is that that yarn is working too!

So I bought the yarn and am revising my rule:

1) One working skein(s) for a lace sock project.
2) One working skein(s) for stockinette project.
3) One skein(s) on deck.

I have needs! Stockinette needs! I can really whip off a pair of stockinette socks, especially considering that I don't like them too tall and can squeeze rounds into the smallest intervals of time. So it seems fair to have one lace pair and one stockinette pair on the needles at all times.

Yarn! Woohoo!

yarn!

Yesterday when I tried to take this, the sun wasn't cooperating by being on the wrong side of the earth. But now...

My socks would not win contests.

Probably 50% of my socks have some official "mistake" or another in either the gussets or the toe - a missed decrease made on the next round, or sometimes even a "hey, I seem to have knit the entire foot with 65 stitches instead of 64, so I'll just bury a decrease on the sole and do the same thing on the second one" type of deal. (Real example!)

I feel kind of bad about it, but not enough to tink or, heaven forbid, frog. I will fix mistakes if I catch them soon enough, or if they're noticeable to my eye, which, judging by posts where knitters show pictures and say things like my god, this is horrible, but don't mark where the mistakes are, and I sit there for a few minutes squinting and tilting my head and looking for textual clues about what could possibly be wrong... is not good.

I am okay with following the spirit of the directions if not precisely the counts and numbers and actual directions and such. Especially for socks. For some reason it's different for any other thing I make.

Perhaps this is because of the way I handle my sockyarn buying and knitting, which is this: I am allowed to have enough yarn for one pair of socks on deck. Until I finish a pair of socks, I will not buy another skein. The consequence of this is that I knit socks as fast as I possibly can. Another consequence of this is that I have enough money to buy food, and not, say, an apartment insulated with sockyarn. Yet another frustrating consequence of this is that I miss every damn sockyarn skein that I want to buy from Etsy.

As long as we're talking about my knitting deficiencies, I got hold of the pattern for the Shetland Triangle shawl (which really I shouldn't even be thinking about until I've knit two (2) baby blankets) from the library and cannot understand the pattern at all. No comprendo. I have such questions as: If you start at the long edge, why do you cast on 2 stitches, then increase a few? Where do those other couple hundred come from? How does one read a lace chart? Clearly I need to study up a bit.

So, Hedera #1 is done, toed and grafted, and too short for my foot. Ufserud is clearly too long and just getting longer. I haven't gathered the willpower to start back in on Baby Dots. And I am being entirely outwitted by a shawl pattern.

I promise I will be good.

My dear cousin, the one who I may just have wished I could have been back when we were children, is pregnant with twins. Identical twin girls. I think they've been trying for a long time (I started the baby blanket for her in July 2005), and so this is all very happy and exciting.



But the Baby Dots blanket is not really something I want to be working on. I *love* how it looks - it's a slip stitch pattern, and so colorful and pretty and interestingly-textured. But every six rows you end up with two ends to weave in. And you knit with the yarn doubled, and you knit one side of the border with a different two balls of white than the white that you knit across. So that means you are always working with 4-6 balls of yarn.

Also, it releases cotton fuzzies that are trying to kill me. I've tried knitting with a bandanna tied around my face, but that leads to train robbery jokes (from Other - not in local coffee shops or anything) and makes it hard to breathe. I bought and switched to some Addi Turbos, which makes progress go faster but not really fast enough to make the fuzzies situation any better. I can only work on it in small increments.

So it's a pain to knit, progress leads inexorably toward a ends-sewing-in bonanza, involves lots of sneezing, and I have the irksome feeling that no matter how well I get the ends sewn in, over the course of many washings, they will come loose. Because you can't exactly weave green in behind the white, and there are a whole two rows of green to use and for some reason we aren't allowed to tie knots and so the whole thing feels futile.

I've got some knitpicks Crayon on the way, and plan to do a log cabin blanket for twin #2. If that goes well, and if I have grossly overestimated the amount of yarn I will need, there might just be two log cabin baby blankets for them.

Here's a Hedera in progress (and also my traveling knitting system) shot:



It's going well enough. I missed a yo here and there, but was able to figure out how to fudge it passably. I'm done with the gusset decreases, not yet close to the toe.

When we went to see Blades of Glory, I needed some simple stockinette to work on in the dark, so I cast on my new Meilenweit Mega Boots Stretch (color 703). I knit several inches on it, got home, and realized that, though it fit comfortably, it looked very stretched out. I had googled around to try to find out what size needles I should use and about how many stitches I should cast on - turns out 64 on size 1s is too small. The yarn looks a lot thicker than it is, I think, because the plies are pretty loosely wrapped around each other.

So I re-cast on 72 stitches onto size 1.5 needles. Once I get into the stockinette part, I will let you know how that goes.

Sea Ass

My sea silk came today, and I am hatching a plan. I ended up getting the cornflower and wildflower colorways, which are a little less bright than I was imagining they would be, but beautiful nonetheless.

I'm not a shawl person, really, and kind of find it hard to believe that anyone born after 1900 really is a shawl person, but hey! I wear all kinds of stupid things all the time - and if the weird and outmoded thing I'm going to inflict on my coworkers this time happens to be a shawl, well, then so be it. I have nothing against shawls, it's just that they strike me as out. And not out like bell bottoms or side ponytails, out like bloomers or boned corsets or ruffled collars. Although I'd love to get my hands on a pair of bloomers, too, so what the hell. I can find a place here and there to wear a shawl.

The only two shawls I've ever seen and had a glimmer of interest in making are Icarus and the Shetland Triangle. A little google-fu has given me proof that people have indeed successfully made Shetland Triangles with a single skein of Sea Silk, so I've interlibrary loaned Wrap Style and am airing out the silk now. Because, to quote, talk about stank.

Google-fu has also led me to conclude that the Sea Silk just needs to breathe a bit. Don't worry, though, I will keep you posted.

FO: Stockinette Socks

Yarn: Claudia's Handpaint
Color: bearded iris (purples and tans)
Pattern: none, basic sock
Needles: Crystal Palace Size 1 Bamboo dpns



Sorry I do not have a better picture. It was all I could do to take my shoes off amid the swirling snow -- maybe when spring comes back, you'll get to see the whole socks.

I was not terribly happy knitting with the Claudia's Handpaint. I loved the colors in the skein, then the first sock turned out well -- I'd promised myself that I would lovingly accept whatever the variegation chose to do, and was not disappointed with the nice spiral-y outcome. However, with the second sock I was conscious of not tightening up my gauge and thus overcompensated and loosened it, which resulted in some very very bad pooling. I ripped back to the point where it became noticeable and continued on with tighter gauge, getting the good spiraling. I don't mind non-matchy socks at all, and if the part where the dark purple/dark brown was pooling hadn't looked like a bruise that would probably rise to the level of medial emergency, I would have left it. Further on I noticed that there is a lot more bad grayish-purple and unnatural tan/gray/brown where the colors overlapped in the second skein. What I did really like about the spiraling was how the dark brown showed up next to the dark purple and ditto for the lighter shades. The tan/lavender juxtaposition is very pretty.

Another problem with the knitting part was the splittiness. I can't count the number of times I innocently, and without violence, stuck the needle into a stitch only to hear threads breaking. Eek - that can't be good for the structural integrity of the sock, right?

So yes, all of that was bad, and after I wove in the final end I would have told you that I wasn't planning on using this kind of yarn again.

But then I put them on.

And they are soft.

Oh man. I didn't know handknit socks could feel soft. They always just felt like socks. But several times today I found myself noticing how nice these feel against my skin.

So, overall I kind of feel like these socks rock the ugly -- I could see people looking at them and finding them ugly (that's the ugly part), but I like them (that's the rock part).

Hedera

Having finished my simple stockinette socks (full report on that coming up), I've moved on to Hedera. And even though I'd heard about the yarnover issue (the two yarnovers in different places being different sizes because they are made with different surrounding stitches), I plowed right into it, figuring I'd just do whatever and it would be fine.

And that did not work so well, not least because a) I'm pretty sure I've been doing yos wrong, and b) I'm not sure that I will be able to pick a way of doing it (1/2 wrap vs 1 1/2 wraps) and stick with it. At least without writing it down and looking at the explanation every time. However I did the first round of the pattern resulted in half of the yos being functionally non-existent. So I ripped, and googled, and found this post on the Lime & Violet* messageboards that clears up some stuff but still leaves the issue unsettled. I swear I read somewhere how a knitter did the yos a certain way to make them symmetrical...

So... I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet. I got the yarn the pattern calls for (Rowan 4-ply soft in a dark reddish shade #382) at a very nice discount, and got it specifically with this pattern in mind. I've never done a lace sock before, and haven't even really done lace before^, so this is a bit of an adventure.

Which is to say that I'm not frogging and forgetting about the whole thing yet, but that maybe I had better eat before I snap all my size 1 dpns in half.

*Having recently gone in search of knitting podcasts (because if you can't be knitting you might as well be listening to people talk about knitting), I found these guys. Very fun. Highly recommend.

^Oh, but, yeah, um, I better grow some mad skilz soon, because, ah, I might have purchased one or two skeins of sea silk that will drive me to distraction with guilt if they don't get turned in to some fancy knittin' soon enough after they arrive. Or I might just wind them into balls and hang them up in a glass display case. I would get points for decorating, too!

Update! After some poking around on the internets, I found this linked in Lickety's comments on her post about her own Hederas. And it's a great explanation of how to even out the yos. And I actually had come close to un-venting it, but was twisting the yo that was facing the wrong direction, when I should've been knitting into the back -- that's, I think, why they were disappearing. Anyhow, it should be good at this point.

Blow up yr TV/throw 'way yr paper/move to the country/build you a home

Ay. So, I am here for this fiction reading, and I thought it was at 7, but it's at 8. So I have an hour to kill. Which I could kill by grafting the toe of the second sock of a pair you-all haven't seen yet, and which I do not have pictures of yet, and I will probably do that. Unfortunately, though, I will probably also kill the time by killing the old credit card a bit, using the blunt instrument of handmaiden sea silk. And the oh-so-stabby dollar-freaking-ninety-nineKnitpicks Crayon, which I need about four tons of for my baby blanket factory. And Etsy. Don't even get me started on Etsy.

On the sea silk front, this is completely ridiculous, because I have little-to-no interest in wearing a shawl. Or knitting a shawl, really. Or silk. And yet I am so torn between the cornflower, wildflower, and melon colorways that the thought that I should just buy all three seems almost rational.

Help me.

There is 45 minutes until go-time. Can I possibly be expected to hold out?

effed oh: Basketweave Scarf

Yarn: Plymouth Encore
Pattern: Mom's Scarf, Stitch 'N Bitch Nation
Needles: Size 8 straights
Modifications: scrapped the row of k/p stitches between repeats

Pre-blocking shot:



Post-blocking shot:


I worked on this here and there for a couple of months, and I'm glad it's done. It's supposed to get chilly again next week, so I may actually get to wear it before summer comes.

Yipes, seven days!

It has been too long since I posted. I am sorry. I would prefer all my favorite knitbloggers posted about three times a day, so posting once a week is not exactly keeping up my end of that implied bargain.

The weather is a lovely spring gray and may stay like this for a while, so it's not really worth photographing any of my partially-complete WsIP anyway. If you're dying to see them, imagine that the bamboo sockscarf and the basketweave Plymouth Encore scarf below look exactly the same only longer. Ditto for Ufserud. I've also finished knitting sock #1 in some Claudia's handpaint (plain stockinette), and cast on for a stretchy cotton hat in black Cascade Fixation for Other.

I have been getting together with a friend (yes, sorry, should have warned you - I do have a friend) to knit and drink beverages. There has also been ice cream afterwards, which really cannot hurt the goodness of any day that includes knitting in public.

FO: Roza's Socks

Yarn: Brooklyn Handspun in "Minty"
Pattern: Roza's Socks by Gumperina
Needles: size 1 Crystal Palace bamboo dpns
Modifications: substituted stockinette between rib and pattern rounds (because the garter makes it look a bit unfinished or inside-out, which is fine, but my wardrobe tends dangerously in that direction on its own)
Why the Weird FO Shot: I'm taking a page from the book of Ashley, with the "requisite pattern shot" thing she did with her chevron scarf. And this is similar enough to the pattern photos to be recognized as an homage (anyone?), and I already had the lacy white skirt, and so why not?

I bought the Minty from Brooklyn Handspun before I had a pattern in mind, and then Grumperina's post about the socks she had designed inspired my first purchase of Interweave Knits. Which I'm probably going to have to subscribe to here soon.

I'm very happy with how they turned out. I'd been looking for a green like the green in my first socks, and hadn't found anything close to it until Minty. The color is complex, with bluer parts and yellower parts, lending some nice interest to what are basically solid-colored socks.

You might be able to see this a tiny bit here:



So I'm 4 for 7 of having a week's worth of handknit socks. Onward!

Ufserud In Progress

I will updated later with some pics of a finished pair of Roza's socks. For now, though, here is a shot of Ufserud. You can actually see that there's a pattern! And yeah, I'm aware that that's the point of stranded knitting, but I didn't have much faith in my ability to actually make it do that. And the knitting isn't the most regular I've ever produced, it's okay and might be getting better.

May you never find your own handknit lying in the road.

This entry is back-dated because I couldn't get the picture uploaded when I originally wrote it, and didn't post it until a few days later.

I have a problem with bags. I carry around a 32-oz water bottle, small sterilite container (with knitting project, usually a sock), digital camera in its (small) case, my journal, and occasionally a course notebook. My hemp messenger bag is the right size, but it's falling apart, not easy to get stuff in and out of quickly, and not good at holding anything but the aforementioned items.

Which is, I believe, how one of my Hurry Up Spring armwarmers ended up spending several days in the road/parking space that I found it in. I was aware that righty was not with lefty, but, because I'd gotten worried several times recently only to find an armwarmer jammed under my camera case, water bottle, or knitting container, I decided not to worry about it. If not for the telltale bright bits of color, I wouldn't have recognized the soggy lump at all.

At first glance Mr. Armwarmer looked pretty bad. But even though I find the Noro Kureyon to be pretty scratchy and think that in anything but direct sunlight the darker colors are indistinguishable from one another -- and also kind of think that the nice branch/leaf pattern, rendered in this yarn, makes me look like my arms have Hulk veins running up and down them -- I wanted to at least try to revive him. This was my first project on double-pointed needles, and also, I believe, my first project using cables. They have served me well in the chilly office many times.

So I rinsed and rinsed and rinsed both of them ("gentle squeezing" - I've felted with Kureyon many times, and know how fast that can go) and then, once the mitt was no longer giving up road dirt, dust, and bits of leaves, gave them a nice Eucalan bath.

And as far as I can see, feel, and smell, they came through just fine.

Yarn!

From left to right: Cascade 220, Claudia's Handpainted (in Bearded Iris), Naturwolle (in 116 Gloria), variegated Karabella (color 11), Rowan All Seasons Cotton (in a discontinued color that I would love to find more of), and Jo Sharp in light and dark brown.

I wish I could knit all of them right now. But instead I'm about to start the heel flap on Roza's Sock #2, and still plugging away at the scarves.

Sock & Sun

*

I should finish the toe of this bad boy tonight, and have been doing an average of one row of Ufserud a night. Both scarves-in-progress are coming along, and looking like more of the same, so I have no dramatic progress shots.

*Also, if this looks lumpy and weird, it's because the reskeined component of the yarn containment system is jammed inside in an inaccurate approximation of my foot.

Taking pictures of yarn and not dead things since 2005

I'm knitting away on Roza's Socks. I've decided that if knitting keeps me from wanting to go to bed at night, it might also be able to get me up in the morning. And that's kind of working. If I could somehow remember that I want to get out of bed to knit a bit before work a little earlier, then I could partake and still be on time, rather than 10 minutes late, which is anyway better than the 40 minutes late I usually am. So, yeah. Kind of working.

The archives of licketyknit have been keeping me entertained these days. The ongoing drama with the penguin, it kills me.

Anyway, Lickety (heh) mentioned at some point how much she likes seeing beautiful pictures of knitting on blogs, and I really do too. And of late, my pictures have been sucky, despite the fact that I have no fewer than four lights pointing at whatever I'm taking the picture of. Really, though, if I waited until I had good light to take pictures, you could expect them about once a week, and then at the peril of weather and motivation. So, apologies.

Today I made an effort to get outside before the sun had set too much, and so the picture seems to show the color pretty accurately. And it shows my positively idiotic system for dealing with 415 yards of yarn, which is to wind most of it into a ball, reskein the rest, and only work on it at home until there's enough used up that I can wind all of it. Because I would rather do this than cut the yarn and weave in more ends than is absolutely necessary (which for a single sock is two).

We all make our choices.

Anyway, I got good light but have no nice kinds of background to speak of. You got concrete instead of swampy backyard, dead garden, cheapy beat to hell lawn furniture, or dead bird.

Frog Pond City

I've cast on for Grumperina's Roza's Socks, in this issue of Interweave Knits, which I ran out and bought on the day it hit newsstands.

I like how it's working up in this "Minty" superwash sock yarn from Brooklyn Handspun. Unfortunately, the yarn is on the thin side, and while I've never used Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock, which is what the pattern calls for, I suspect that it's different enough to be the reason why this is coming out a teensy bit too snug. So in the way too long amount of time it took that picture to load, I have frogged and re-cast on in one size bigger needles, of which I have slightly the wrong number of needles and which also kind of sucks because I bought the smaller ones specifically for this project. D'oh. Oh, and also I have to remember not to put these needles in my mouth, because they have been dropped on some terribly disgusting floors, and this, people, is sadly harder to remember than you might think.

Other was kind enough to send in my eight hats to the Muppethead contest, and they are on schedule for an under-the-wire arrival of today. I'm proud to have done my part to have Boston (or Boston's postal service workers, at least) groaning under the weight of several more skeins's worth of fun fur hats.




This:


is the beginnings of the sock-weight stockinette stitch scarf that I achieved this past weekend. Its sole purpose is to be mindless but pretty, and it's doing a great job.

I used to wonder at the Yarn Harlot's need to knit a few rows to "take the edge off," as she says, but today I was positively jonesing. That's why I've used uploading pictures to my knitblog as a puny excuse to put off driving for awhile so I can sit somewhere that isn't my house and read a textbook that I really honestly do not have any desire to read, and sit and knit some instead.

Okay. Everything's up. Sigh.

FO: Belize Socks

Yarn: Regia Bamboo
Pattern: my own
Needles: Crystal Palace size 1 dpns



These socks were started in July, when I flew to Belize. They're simple stockinette with ribs of different lengths at the top, picked up here and there for months. I liked the unexpected sheen of the bamboo yarn.

FO: Casey's Coat

Yarn: Cascade 220 Superwash
Colors: olive-y green and dark turquoise
Pattern: Casey's Coat (from Stitch 'N Bitch Nation)
Needles: size 8 boye straights, size 8 clover circ, and I think there was a size 7 in there too
Modifications: none on purpose, although I didn't end up with the right number of stitches after the series of decreases (had significantly more than I should have) and couldn't figure out where I'd gone wrong (and also checked the errata, which didn't mention any such problems), so I just threw in a few more decrease rows.

I've avoided seaming dilligently up until this point, so the seam on this puppy is both crappy and the result of my third or fourth attempt.



Mr. Bunny so lacks the right proportions to pull this off, but I had to put it on something and the intended recipient is 2 hours away.



And, finally, I cast on for the basketweave scarf:



which grew by a couple repeats as I waited for all of these pictures to load.

FO: My so-called scarf

Yarn: Malabrigo Kettle-Dyed
Color: Verde adriana, 117
Pattern: My So-Called Scarf
Needles: Brittany Hardwood dpns, size 11, with a rubber band on one end
Modifications: CO a bit fewer stitches, BO

I bound off as normal, and it looked really bad. So I bound off in purl, still looked really bad. Then I slipped the first stitch, *k1, bo1, k2tog, bo second stitch, k1, bo the k2tog. Worked very nicely.

Calorimetry

Yarn: Artyarns Supermerino
Color: 136
Pattern: Calorimetry
Needles: Size 8 Crystal Palace bamboo circs (not the type called for, but whatever, it worked
Modifications: no purposeful ones



Because of my own staggering inability to estimate or count, getting this going took forever. First I got toward the end of casting on and ran out of tail to cast on with. Then I cast on for two fewer stitches than were called for, and realized it at the end of the first row. Then I couldn't execute a double rib to save myself. Once I got past the first two rows, it was fine, but that took way too long. The pattern itself is clever and easy to follow.

The pattern calls for a yarn that will happily bounce back into shape. And while I read every day about the behavior of specific yarns, I really had no idea what kind of yarn to choose for such a goal. So I went with the Artyarns Supermerino, in a colorway I'd had my eye on for a long time, and it turned out to be a really great substitution. This is like no yarn I'd ever worked with before - it really has a mind of its own, by which I mean it was rather stiff (while still being soft). When I was trying to count my cast-on stitches, some fell off the end and sproinged right out of the loops. (This might be why I ended up two short.) There was no pooling, flashing, or any other variegated-yarn-problems.

I wore it all day today (I work in what might as well be an iceberg), and though I felt a bit silly sporting any kind of fashionable anything, it did keep my noggin nice and toasty. It's not as warm outside as a hat would be, though.

If I ever knit this pattern again, I will probably cast on fewer stitches and adjust the number of pattern repeats accordingly.

Mom's Disaster Scarf

This is Mom's Disaster Scarf, v.2:


Specs:
Pattern: My own (co 168 st, double rib, change colors after 3 rows)
Yarn: Lion Brand Homespun, held doubled
Needles: Clover 13" bamboo circs

This scarf started out as "Mom's Scarf." She pointed out to me a scarf she had seen on one of the soap operas that she watches (this one mostly for the knitwear, as she's not finding the storylines too compelling) and asked if I could make it. It was very long, and looked like it was made sideways in a double rib pattern. So, over winter break, I got down to work.

My conception of a side-to-side scarf is that the basic limit is on the length of the scarf, and this one needed to be long. So, I should cast on as many stitches as I possibly could. Cleverly, though, I was able to just about double this number by taping two 29" circular needles together. Mom helped. We held the tips of the ends of each needle together, overlapping up to where the point stopped, then wrapped them up together in saran wrap. Then we taped over it, keeping saran wrap between the tape and the actual needle. It was not elegant, but it worked.

I cast on about 250 stitches. I didn't count or anything - why should I for a scarf? The idea of a swatch didn't even cross my mind. Again: scarf.

So I knit and knit and knit and knit. Simple pattern. It went pretty fast. When I sat down to cast off, it took forever. Oh man. I would look down and think, okay, about a fourth done. Then I would look down and think, hmm, that looks good about right there. And then cast off some more. And think, hmm, it would be good if the scarf stopped right there. Wow, there sure are lots of stitches left to bind off. And then: GOOD FREAKING GRAPES HOW MUCH MORE DO I HAVE TO CAST OFF? That was after about an hour.

And, surprise: the scarf was twelve feet long. I am not kidding about how long the scarf was. I could hold it at the mid point with my arm stretched as far into the air as it would go, and the ends would brush the floor. While this would work for someone who is 6'3", neither of us is 6'3". When Mom wrapped it around her neck twice, the ends dragged. D'oh.

Hence v.2. Using the original twelve-foot scarf as a gauge swatch (oh, that hurts), we determined that the ideal number of stitches to cast on for the length Mom wanted was 168. It probably only took a couple hours of knitting.

I know I could've steeked the original and chopped the extra length off, but really the idea of knitting an entirely new scarf was much more appealing than the idea of trying to use a sewing machine to make a hacked-off end look presentable. And of course, because it was knit side-to-side, there was no way to tink back to any sort of acceptable length.

Moral: don't underestimate super-bulky yarn in double rib for a side-to-side scarf.