cwBlog

So I've been remiss in blog posting. Alas, I have nothing interesting and public to say right now.

It's been in the mid 70s to high 80s in Boston for the past week - gloriously sunny. Unfortunately, this means that it is officially way too hot to work on sweaters. The Irish Moss needs 2 more repeats of the central motif on each shoulder saddle - that's 32 rows of approximately 17 stitches, if memory serves, and so it's really less than an evening's work. Then it needs to be pieced together, and the collar knit - maybe two evenings' work, though mattress stitch always goes faster than I expect. But when it's 80 degrees out when I get home from work, picking up a sweater is the last thing I want to do when I get home.

On the other hand, the second blue sock is about 20 rounds away from being done. I've been knitting on the T. If you see a male sock knitter with a shaved head on the Red Line or on a bus near Davis Square, say hi.

There was a thread on Socknitters this week about the tiresome parts of knitting socks. Some people hate toes, others hate heels, others hate ribbing. I've determined that what I hate is change -- I never mind the toe when I'm a bit into it, I never mind the heel once it's started, and I never mind ribbing after the first row. But I've had socks sit for weeks before because I got to the point where I needed to start the heel, or start the ribbing, or start the toe, and I just didn't feel like doing it.

Go figure.

In other news, one of the goals for the weekend is to get my current projects photographed and on Ravelry. I meant to make it to a knitting circle this week, but I went to a board game night instead. I'm also trying to find a knitting shop in Boston that sells metal glove needles in sizes 00 and 000. More news as it happens.

So I'm almost two weeks into the new job. Not much knitting news; I joined the Boston SnB Yahoo group, and I'm going to try to make it to at least one knitting circle next week, but if it goes anything like this week I won't have the energy. The job is working out well so far, though there's a BIG deadline at the end of next week and so everyone is a bit fraught; I'm the new guy (or, at least, one of the new guys), and I've been concentrating on trying to be useful and not increasing other people's workload. So far I seem to be succeeding.

I've knit in public a lot, too. My commute means I take the 88 bus along Highland Avenue to Davis Square, then the Red Line to Alewife (the opposite direction from most commuters!), then a 50-yard walk to the office. On a good day, that's 12 minutes of butt-in-seat time; on a bad day, that's also 15-20 minutes of waiting time. Which isn't so bad, if it means another 2-3 rounds on a sock. Nobody has seemed to notice ro care, except for a bus driver earlier this week who peered at what I had in my hands, then grinned at me and gave me a thumbs-up.

Oh, and I guess I lied about the knitting news. I made it onto Ravelry! I'm cwilbur there, go figure. Feel free to say hello there, if you want.

And the Elsinore sock pattern is currently a casualty of the work stress; I hoped to get it done last weekend, but I spent the time sleeping instead. Maybe this weekend.

Okay, I'm much better at making a couple blog posts in a day than at making one per day.

So if you look back at one of the things that inspired me to kick off this blog, you see this pair of socks:

So when I met the Yarn Harlot, she complimented my socks and put a picture of me in her blog. The estimable Linda Walsh emailed me to ask if the pattern was available anywhere, and (thinking quickly, since I wanted to make sure the pattern made sense to people other than me) I said, "hm, you want to test knit it?" And she did, while she was on vacation in Guatemala, and took pictures.

She also offered some really good commentary on the pattern, which I've been incorporating into a revision, and I've also been working on a PayPal shopping cart. However, I'm about to move and start a new job, so I'm not sure when I'll be able to get it up -- but I'm hoping I'll have enough time to get it done by next weekend.

First, HWMBO and I went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix last night, and the suit that Dolores Umbridge was wearing was almost exactly the same overall shade of red pink as my Tofutsies socks, and what looked like a very similar texture. They were immediately dubbed the Dolores Umbridge socks.

(A refresher: I can't find the digital camera, so I can't take a picture of the finished socks, but this is the most recent picture. It was taken at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, about a week and a half ago, just before we packed up and left. You can see the first sock here, as well.)

One of the irritations in knitting those socks was that there were four knots in the ball. I emailed the very nice people at Tofutsies and asked about that, and they told me that they had been working on their manufacturing processes to reduce the number of knots in a ball, hopefully so that most balls have no knots in them, and they've improved them. I'm definitely going to knit more Tofutsies socks; even the knots weren't that bad, because the yarn is marled and has a natural variation in color and texture, so you can't tell without a close examination where the yarn was joined - it was a little bit annoying when I found a knot, but it wasn't the disaster it would have been in something like a faux-Fair Isle Sockotta, where taking a foot or two out of the repeat means that you have a very visible break in the socks.

Also, I would recommend seeing at least some of the colors in person before buying. The colorways range from the fairly conservative to the fairly bold, and the difference between a bold orange and pink colorway that suits you and a bold orange and pink colorway that does not is not always the sort of thing you can tell from a picture on a computer monitor.

Bloggers live on comments. If you're reading this and you like what you're reading and you want me to continue, please leave a comment. So far I've gotten dozens of spam comments enticing me to buy all sorts of pharmaceuticals (which I won't name here, since it only encourages them), and a grand total of seven knitting-relevant comments -- and three of them are from people I know face to face, and one's a reply from me!

One person did mention in email that comments didn't work. If you find that that's the case, email me at cwilbur@chromatico.net and I'll see what I can do about it. The blog software I'm using does encourage you to sign in, but you can post anonymously; the only issue is that I need to approve all anonymous comments.