Everybody Loves Saturday Night

i like socks

As much as I love having the option of air conditioning, I love not using it even more. The weather here has been lovely lately, a full 20 degrees cooler than last week. The AC is off, the windows are open; it's very pleasant.

Time, then, to show you what I've been doing with wool.

First, the finished Marigold socks (Ravelry link).

My camera has apparently lost its focus ability (either that or the socks are working their Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting soft focus look). It's an old camera and should be replaced. This can't happen for a while yet, so bear with me.

Let's try this shot:

Better. You get the idea, anyway.

I dig these socks. These are, believe it are not, the very first Koigu socks I have made for myself. Surprised? I am too. They really feel amazing.

These socks get a lot of credit for turning me around on a couple things. Previously I hadn't been an ardent fan of wearing lace socks. Knitting them has always been fun and rewarding, but I wasn't, up until now, really keen on wearing lace on my feet. (I've said as much, somewhere, but I'm not looking for that post right now.) But I love wearing these socks, and it's not just the Koigu factor.

The second thing...well, my sock knitting mojo has returned. I started another pair of lace socks, and I think I'm going to love these even more.

This is the Södera pattern (Ravel it!), worked in Regia Silk 4-ply. Also working the mid-80s soft focus look. I took this picture on June 12, after I'd reached the heel. Here's where I am now:

My legs are . . . well, I like them. I do. Got no bone to pick with my legs. But as a New York pedestrian, my calves are fairly well developed. In trying this sock on repeatedly to determine where to place the increases for the calf shaping, I've discovered that my ankles slope ever so gradually into my calves, but once my calves start, they bloom. Significantly. You can't tell from this photo, but I started the calf increases after 25 pattern repeats, then worked 8 rows before doing the next set of increases. And after a mere two rounds, I need to increase again. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, just noteworthy in that way that only other sock knitters may get.

I started these socks thinking that with any luck they'd be done in time for crispy fall weather. At the rate I'm going though, they'll be done by July. The pattern is super easy to memorize, it's a cinch to figure out what row to do next, so I've been able to work on them everywhere from the subway to the couch. Of course, now that I've hypothesized an end date, the second sock will languish until mid-November. 2009.

Haven't decided whether I'm going to go with the ribbon at the cuff. I like the look, but I'm not sure it's really me. If I do, though, it'll be black ribbon.

this right here

is a hot yarny mess.

But hey, it only took 2.5 hours to get it to this:

Sheesh.

hey, I finished a sock!

Today's post is brought to you by the color purple and KnitPicks, who knew I needed to get something good in the mail.

I started a lace project at the beginning of this week, but it wasn't going well. The yarn was too thin even for my 3.00mm needles. I have had this trouble before, and compensated by doubling the yarn. This time I decided to bend to the yarn's will instead of the other way around, but this required new needles.

I turned to KnitPicks, and given how slippery laceweight yarn can be, opted to go for the Harmony despite my general preference for metal needles. What you see above are 40" Harmony needles in sizes 2.00, 2.25, 2.5, and 2.75. I figured it would be wise to cover all bases, and wise to get the 40" so when I'm not knitting lace they can be used Magic Loop-style, and wise-ish to buy four needles for a little over the price of one of the Addi Lace needles.

And then I couldn't pass up the chance to get free shipping, especially since I could buy a sweater's worth of yarn and only just push my total over the free shipping mark. I am aware that I probably shouldn't be buying yarn at all in the first place, but you know, I wanted the yarn therapy (hat tip) and whatever. I justified it somehow. It's not like I'm buying Koigu cashmere. Onward.

I perused my Ravelry queue and came up with Thermal, so that skein on the right is Gloss in a new color: Cosmos. I had a hard time deciding between that and Parsley, flirted with the idea of getting both for the additional shopper's high, then rationally opted for only getting the yarn I knew would be used. And I do love the color, and I believe I have the buttons already. I also know that I'm going to start this sweater as soon as Dollar and a Half is done (I'm nearing the armhole shaping on the back).

On to the sock. Yes, I finally finished the ONE sock I started ONE MONTH ago.

Would you guess that this is Koigu? Look at that striping action going on! I didn't even realize how uniform it is until Juno pointed out that Koigu doesn't usually act like this. At least, not typically. Or are we both wrong on that?

At any rate, I started the second sock and have a sinking feeling that it's not going to turn out the same way. But the pattern is absolutely delightful. Again, it's Flint Knits' Marigold (Ravelry link to free download). Super easy to memorize, though there is a spot on the foot where I forgot to do a purl row, so it looks like an extra-wide band. Because of the color changes it's less noticeable, not that I would've ripped out and reknit had it been glaringly obvious.

mustering mojo

I was faced with actual subway riding time over the weekend (how rare!) and was still not feeling the love for the still-yet-unfinished Anastasia socks, but in the mood to try a new pair of socks, to attempt to regain a little bit of sock knitting mojo.

I think the problem with the Anastasia socks...well, there are two problems. One is that I can't seem to concentrate on the pattern and keep making mistakes. It's a very simple yarn-over pattern, and I'm on the second sock already, so the fact that I keep messing up is ego-bruising. And I have one way of dealing with ego bruisings. I run away. The second problem is that, much as I am still in love with the colorway, it strikes me now as too dark and gloomy for the early months of spring. The blues are still blue, in other words, when I'm ready for leafy green and sunshine yellow and lilac and rose.

And I just so happen to have a leafy green/yellow/lilac/rose kind of sock yarn, from the Koigu family. No surprise there. But what kind of pattern?

Once again, I turned to Ravelry and once again, spent the better part of a day searching for possible patterns. My Rav friends may have noticed an uptick in number of sock patterns queued that day, because in a fit of indecisiveness, I simply queued anything that looked like it might work with Koigu.

Like Cookie A's BFF socks, for example. Gorgeous ... but more a wintry sock pattern, I think. For Mojo-Generatin' socks, I wanted something light and breezy, even if the socks themselves would be warm and toasty.

There have been a couple excellent looking slip-stitch patterns that would work well with Koigu, like Anne Campbell's Show-off Stranded Socks (Ravelry link--it's a free download either way) and Knitfreak's Aquaphobia socks (fear of pooling. Clever!). But again, for springtime socks, I felt something frilly and lacy would be in order (despite my ambivalence about lace on my feet). Something to wear with a really cute skirt. (I have some STR that I plan to use for Aquaphobia, later).

What I love most about Ravelry (well, one of the things I love most) is that I can look at all the different incarnations of a particular pattern. What I've noticed about the knitting community is that there are a lot of people out there who have, at some point in time, knit a particular sock pattern originally intended for a solid color yarn in variegated or self-striping yarn, with varying degrees of success (and these degrees are entirely subjective). (The converse is also true, but with slightly more predictable results.) So when I came across the pattern for Flint Knit's Marigold Socks, I knew that by checking on the 67 people who have started and/or finished them, I could see how the pattern works with variegated yarn (completely forgetting that I've already drooled over the modified version Veronique attempted with Vesper yarn).

I was sold. It's a lace pattern that stays relatively closed up, so there's no danger of getting lost in the color changes, and the single purl round lends definition and the appearance of stripes even if the yarn itself isn't striping. But mine seems to be. Imagine that.

I started with a Turkish cast on for the toe, which has become my preference in working toe up socks. It's easy and fast and there's no fiddling about with provisional cast ons or short rows. And I think I've found my magic number for how many wraps to make around the needles (which is the first step in the cast on): 12. And now that's been recorded for posterity, should I forget the number but remember which blog post it's in. (ha.)

I may go in for a picot bind off to boot.

So yeah, sock knitting mojo risin'.

 

it was worth a shot

The naysayers were right: the keyboard doesn't work. So it's off to the Apple Store I go . . . or would be, if it weren't for this crap weather and threat of illness. Yesterday was gorgeous: hours of snow, full-bodied flakes alighting softly on my red coat as I walked home, accumulating on sidewalks, prompting the sweet sound of someone else shoveling, creating the illusion of absorbing all activity and noise and bringing, at long last, a winter's peace.

This morning it's raining. AGAIN. It'll take away all the loveliness of yesterday. If you saw this outside your window, would you want to go out?

Yuck.

Getting pictures up here is a two-computer process. I want to save the pictures to my Apple, but I can't resize them (need the keyboard to enter numbers) or rename them. So I save them, load them up on a flash drive, and bring them over to the laptop, where I can use Cellsea's rather excellent photo editor to resize and save. From there I can load them into Flickr and Typepad, but this is what I mean by it being a pain in the ass. Still, the blog needs pictures, so until I'm in possession of keyboard #3, this is how it'll have to be done.

By the way, I crocheted a pair of slippers the other day. You cannot deny their cuteness:

Plus, they're made of Jo Sharp's Silkroad Ultra, a wool/silk/cashmere blend, so they're as soft as they are dense and they are doing an absolutely brilliant job of keeping my feet cozy and warm.

Crocheting a sock-like structure had occurred to me before, but it always seemed complicated. Finally I realized that it couldn't be any more complicated than shaping is for a knitted sock; i.e., it wouldn't be complicated at all. I have a fondness for telling tentative knitters fearful that they won't be able to turn a heel or what-have-you, "it's just knitting. You know how to do that, you can do this." Turns out, same thing applies to crochet. I know how to single crochet--I can do this.

Didn't realize I could do it in a single day, so that was a bonus.

I basically followed this pattern for Mary Jane Slippers (Ravelry link), with several modifications so they'd fit my feet (my first attempt at a toe resulted in a tiny cup that only fit one of my toes). Interested parties can look at my Ravelry project page to see my notes (which won't make sense without the pattern). And then, clearly, I opted not to do the straps on these. The way the pattern is written, the straps are done separately and then sewn on. Too much sewing. So I went with a basic contrast single crochet trim. I love them, though I made them just a tad too big. I'm working on a second pair right now, to experiment more with sizing and a different way to do the straps.

let's try that again

Here's the sock I wanted to show you yesterday:

I am about to start the ribbing, so I should have a finished sock by the end of the day. Provided no crises occur . . .

how things are made

Yesterday I took a trip to a printing facility in Pennsylvania. Job related, but it felt like a field trip because I've never seen how magazines and books actually get printed. And it's really cool, too, with robots and everything.

OK, not robots as in "I, Robot" or the Terminator series or even Lost in Space, but still--machines that are programmed to perform tasks and do so in a fraction of the time it would take a human or group of humans.

If you subscribe to or purchase the upcoming edition of People Magazine (Heath Ledger is on the cover--someone stayed late at the People Mag office on Tuesday to do the obit and cover layouts), then I saw your copy being put together. It's a really fascinating process, not least because I now know why sometimes I get a magazine that's missing pages, or has pages that aren't cleanly trimmed, or has pages that still have the little color bar thingy at the top.

I brought my spiral sock along for the trip, considering that I was going to be a passenger for a total of 4 hours. I didn't get much done, but I am almost at the ribbing point. Just about an inch and a half to go.

[This is where the picture would go if I could upload it, but Typepad seems to be experiencing some kind of glitch.]

In the back of my mind I'd thought I'd be finished with the pair by the end of the month . . . if I focus solely on the sock for the next week I should be able to pull that off.

projects

This morning, just before I woke up, I could tell I was dreaming about hexagons.

When I get to H in the 2008 ABC Photo Project I will know what to do.

One of my resolutions (for lack of a better word) this year involves 52 Projects. I picked up the book a while ago, thanks to a commenter's recommendation on a post where I bemoaned the loss of my creative verve. And then the book hung out on my shelf all year. I started reading through it on January 1, 2008 and even before I got to the section of actual project ideas, my mind was racing with all sorts of possibilities. I started to feel better about a lot of things that had been getting me down lately, too. Interesting.

So far I have a couple long-term photo projects that I've started working on. The view from my office window, for example. I love the tree outside my window and I'm looking forward to documenting the arrival and departure of its leaves. Every morning, first thing I do when I sit down to my computer, is take a picture of what's out the window. I may not post the pictures here every day, but I will today:

Taken at nearly 9:00 AM. I slept in a bit, due to a very late night last night. A wonderful late night! We went to see Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll at the Jacobs Theater--it's excellent, by the way--and then popped into a bar for drinks. The caucus results were in and it was nice to see most of the patrons crowded around the TV watching CNN, and not the football game on the TV on the other side of the room.

Speaking of the caucus . . . well, I feel very celebratory today.

The ABC Photo Project (if I don't call it an "-along," I have a better chance of following through) is another year-long project that sounded interesting and fun, so I signed up for that.

My camera is going to get quite a workout this year.

~~~~~

Yesterday's knitting, done solely on the three subway trips I took--to and from the UES, and to the restaurant we went to before the show:

I really like the way this is turning out. I could not ask for a better striping pattern, and I hope I didn't just jinx myself right there.

disappointing sock

I needed a mindless sock to work on while commuting, in line, at boring meetings, you know the drill. I settled on Lorna's Laces Camouflage that I picked up at Rhinebeck a couple years ago--in honor of the restashing of yarn this year's Rhinebeck will produce.

I aspired to knit knee-highs--just simple, stockinette knee-highs with a wee bit of ribbing at the top. Camouflage colors demanded it.

So I pulled out my Addi US1 long cable to magic loop the first sock, going toe-up using the Turkish Cast-On, which incidentally is my favorite cast on now. It is incredibly easy and less fussy than the crochet cast on I used to use for toe-up socks. There's a wonderful tutorial on the Web--I'm sure you've seen it already--written up by FluffyKnitterDeb.  And yes, it is just as easy  if not more so to work this cast on with the magic loop method.

Where was I? Yes--I chose the US 1s because I had great success with them in knitting the purple/green Lorna's Socks--the stripes came out really well, no pooling.

I did not take into account the possibility that three colors would not behave the same way as two. I got through the toe and was not pleased with the result. This is one side:

I know, it's just the toe, but it doesn't get my hopes up for what the foot and leg will look like. And even though I know I could make this the heel side and hence completely unseen, this is what I would be left with as the top:

It starts out OK at the top of the toe, but then splits into two camps: the black/green and the brown/green. Me no likey.

I have two choices: try it on 0s (which I would need to buy) or find a pattern that will disrupt the pooling.

I am completely taken with the Rainbow Socks pattern in the latest Magknits. How do you think the short rows will look with three colors, instead of self-striping multi-colors? I think I'm going to have to experiment.

It will involve math (sidenote: anyone remember Murphy Brown, and that one guy who was dumb as a post? One of the very few exchanges I remember from this show is "Let me ask you a question." "Does it involve math?") if I want to attempt to adapt this pattern to my original desire, knee-highs. Except short rows eat up yarn, don't they. Hmm. Well, let's see what I can do.

And as I teased you earlier with the tip of Scout's tail, here's his better side:

He looks thoroughly bored.

so what's new?

I finished Kew. Flew through the second sock in less than a week, then knit up a toe chimney (if you're as kitchener-challenged as I am and you haven't heard of the toe-chimney trick, hie thee hence, because it will change your life) and didn't quite feel up to actually grafting, so I let it sit. For a week. While I didn't blog. And then the completely finished socks sat around, waiting for me  to have the time to take pictures and all that so I could give them their due.

I do love them. It's a simple thing, but one of my favorite things about knitting is when a pattern pulls an edge into a scallop shape. I did toy with the idea of working a picot hem instead, but I'm glad I opted to stick to the pattern.

And now I'm in the midst of birthday knitting. The Michael has one coming up, so he's getting the requisite ginormous socks. Making OK progress on them; almost past the heel on sock 1.

Before Michael's comes Colleen's, so I've returned to a project I'd started back in February or so: the Endpaper Mitts:

I have a long, mostly unblogged relationship with this pattern. I bought Knit Picks' Palette a while back to make a pair of mitts for myself, and struggled with the first real Fair Isle + tiny dpns while visiting Juno back in...goodness, who knows when. The "click" moment finally happened, I am happy to report that I am now able to work fair isle two-handedly, and I finished my first mitt relatively quickly. Problem was, it was waaaaay too small. I planned on starting over, but then Colleen came over, saw the mitt, fell in love, and I promised to make her a pair to match the new winter jacket she'd bought.

I ordered the yarn--Rowan Soft 4 Ply in *mumble* and *cough*--and got to work when it arrived, but for whatever reason I did not use the Italian tubular cast on. I got all the way to the end ribbing and put it away to work on other things. I returned to the mitt just last week, finished, and then wondered what possessed me to not go for the tubular cast on. Was it because I couldn't figure it out? But it doesn't look that hard. Was it because it would've taken too much time? Probably.

Thing is, once I got how to do it, it doesn't take long at all. In fact, it seems to take less time and effort than any other cast on. So I started the second mitt with the tubular cast on, and that's what you see up there--finished. Tubular cast on = no problem at all. Tubular cast off, on the other hand, is a serious pain in the ass.

I should be able to get the second mitt done in two weeks, and I don't think I'll need to rip out that first mitt to make the second.

Fair Isle may be the next obsession for me. It's got a wholly different rhythm than regular knitting and it's a beat I can dance to.