cwBlog

Today was the New Hampshire Sheep & Wool Festival. After spending what I did a couple weeks back at Gore Place and the Yarn Harlot's event at Webs, I didn't think it would be wise to risk being that close to that much fiber. But then yesterday I figured - hey, I just had a birthday, I can buy myself yarn as a present!

Oddly enough -- well, perhaps not oddly, as it started a couple weeks back at Webs -- I didn't really feel like buying yarn. Don't get me wrong -- there was a lot of beautiful yarn at the festival. But when I looked at a beautiful handpainted sock yarn, the Little Voice said, "But you already have all that yarn from Knitivity that you haven't knit yet." When I looked at some lovely lace yarn, the Little Voice said, "What about all that 16/2 alpaca/silk you have from Webs that you need to knit this summer?" When I looked at some beautiful Irish yarn from The Irish Ewe, the Little Voice said, "OMG ARAN WEIGHT IRISH WOOL 8 OUNCES FOR $12," and then took a deep breath, and continued, "but we already have enough wool stashed for five sweaters, and it doesn't make sense to stash more." I did run into a vendor selling Bartlett Sport for $15 per cone, and the Little Voice started to comment that we bought 5 pounds of Bartlett Sport at Gore Place. At that point I told the Little Voice to get stuffed, because $15 a cone is more than 50% off, and 50% off is enough to rationalize the purchase even of yarns I don't like. I got a nice rich heathered mulberry purple cone and (finally, you think this would be a staple color) a beautiful rich dark not-quite-navy blue.

Oh, and I got two books. First, I saw a book specifically about knitting ganseys, one that I hadn't seen before. (Of course, once I bought it, I saw it at every vendor, though it wasn't on sale anywhere so I didn't need to kick myself.) And, in an amazing bit of serendipity, this week, someone on Ravelry recommended The Sweater Workshop by Jacqueline Fee. (I can't be more specific than that, because the only record I have is in my little black book, the notation "Sweater Workshop, J. Fee.") Well, in one of the booths, I came face to face with Jacqueline Fee herself, who cheerfully sold me an autographed copy of her book.

But neither of those is risky, or at least it isn't a new risk. I've been known to lose my sense of budget in yarn stores and bookstores before; with yarn in particular, making sure I see my stash at least once a day tends to mitigate meltdowns. There was a lot of beautiful fiber there, in the form of raw fleeces, cleaned and dyed fiber, and roving. And then it jumped out at me: the Learn to Spin Kit from Nancy's Knit Knacks. And whoops! just like that, there was a guardrail near the slippery slope, and I just vaulted over it.

So far I've produced about four yards of yarn. It's nothing to write home about, but the fourth yard is much more even than the first three, so I'm making progress. But I get the scary feeling that by the time Rhinebeck comes around, I'll be shopping for a spinning wheel. But please, no matter how rational I sound -- someone, please, stop me before I buy a sheep, OK?

So, as noted in prior posts, one of the things I picked up two weekends ago at Webs was Cat Bordhi's newish book, New Pathways for Sock Knitters, Volume 1. And one of my new projects is a Coriolis sock.

I had heard of the Coriolis pattern, but the pattern I found online when I googled for it seemed to involve knitting with two strands of Trekking XXL and doing odd things with each loop. I liked Trekking XXL, but I didn't want to have to deal with substituting fine sock yarns, and so I passed on the pattern.

(I don't remember why the double strand was important, but I remember that it served an important purpose that couldn't be substituted away. I think that in that pattern, instead of knitting into the front and back of a stitch, the instructions were to knit into each strand of the double strand. If that's the case, I clearly wasn't paying enough attention.)

Well, I have now knit two Coriolis feet and one-and-a-half Coriolis heels. Thank you, gauge denial. But I think I've learned something about socks.

See, the Coriolis pattern is simple. It's actually very similar to the Gibson heel I described in this very blog a little under a year ago. You start toe-up, you knit a tube for the foot; at a certain point, you start increasing; when you have enough stitches and the foot is long enough, you separate the instep stitches, the gusset stitches, and the sole stitches, and you short-row down on the sole to make a rounded heel; then you knit across, and back and forth on the heel, and you slip the first stitch of each heel row, and you ssk or p2tog at the end of each heel row. Eventually you've decreased back to the right number, and you resume knitting in a circle.

This is freaking brilliant. I don't know if it was original with Judy Gibson or not, but it just captures the essence of toe-up socks with a heel flap.

Now, the principal differences between the two:

The Coriolis sock benefits from a toe you can rotate. A lot of the traditional toes - the flat toe, the round toe, the short-row toe - all have a definite instep and sole side. Cat Bordhi recommends a Windmill toe, which is a cousin to the Round Toe but is rotationally symmetric. See, the band spirals around the foot, and if you knit a toe that can't be rotated, depending on your gauge, your band might crash into the side of the heel flap, never to be seen again. If you knit the toe so it can be rotated (or plan ahead well enough, and work out the whole sock ahead of time -- something I'm not averse to doing, but I didn't do it this time), you can avoid this problem and continue the spiral up around the ankle.

The increases on the Coriolis sock are what give it its character. For instance, on one of the two versions of the sock you place a marker two stitches before the end of the instep. Every round you work a kfb in the stitch following the marker; every third round you knit a k2tog a certain number of stitches in front of the marker. This increases 2 stitches every 3 rounds, as opposed to the Gibson heel's increases of 2 stitches every 2 rounds -- so you have to start the increases earlier.

(And you notice that "a certain number of stitches in front of the marker"? Well, it turns out that if you make that certain number 11, you can, in the words of the Yarn Harlot, "whack a cable down the middle of it." So I did, and the cable twining around the foot and ankle is striking. I think I may write it up as a pattern for sale -- comments welcome.)

Oh, and there's a complicated resetting-the-markers round that coincides with the last increase round, so that you rotate the sock so that the band can spiral over the top of the heel. Of all the instructions in the book, this one was the hardest for me to follow until I understood it.

Another big difference is that in the Gibson heel, after short-rowing down, I pick up the wraps and knit them as separate stitches. Cat Bordhi's heel doesn't -- she has you pick them up and knit or purl them together with the stitch they wrapped, in such a way that they're completely invisible from the outside of the sock. Once you've done that, the rest of the heel is just the same in either pattern.

Now, if you've read this far, you may think I'm saying that Cat Bordhi just copied Judy Gibson's sock pattern. That's not really what I'm saying.

Sometimes it takes a genius to look at something we all take for granted and see it for what it really is. Judy Gibson did this, and gave us her "You're Putting Me On" sock pattern, then generalized it for all sizes and gauges. Then Cat Bordhi did it and gave us the Coriolis sock.

Why don't we all look at things we take for granted more often?

So this weekend I'm going to be at a Red Sox game, and I'm either going to score the game or I'm going to knit. I think the latter is more practical.

And I may even be knitting some Red Socks, if I can get one of the current socks on the needles done in time....

So last night at my new knitting group --

First, a digression. Back before I moved, I went to a knitting circle every Monday night at the Barnes & Noble in Holyoke, MA. It was a good group of knitters, ranging from novices and people who were happiest knitting St st scarfs to people who were actively looking for new things they hadn't tried before and downloading patterns off the scary Internet. Officially it ran from 6 pm to 8 pm; practically, it ran from whenever the first knitter showed up until the B&N staff chased the last knitters out, and even then, sometimes on warm summer nights we just settled down out in the parking lot to continue. It was one of the things I missed when I moved away.

So two weeks ago I finally stopped putting it off and went to a knitting circle that meets locally, in the West Branch of the Somerville Public Library, right near Davis Square. It was a bit of a nerve-wracking thing to go to a new knitting group: sometimes they're friendly, sometimes they're cliquish; sometimes they like having men around (for variety?), sometimes they feel threatened by men intruding into a women's space; sometimes the talk is about knitting and sports and cats and pets and where to go on vacation, and other times the talk is about boyfriends and husbands and how horrible men are. I had experience of both the positive and negative sort with my fellow knitters, and especially after my prior knitting circle, I was worried about the karmic payback -- I was sure I'd have to look long and hard before I found another good knitting circle.

Well, I'd like to note for the record that I was wrong.

Anyway, on to the story:

I noticed last night, when we were all sitting around the table in the children's room of the library, that there were really two threads of conversation. About half the knitters there were women of a certain age; one was knitting a sweater, another a hat for charity, another a scarf, another was swatching for a project. The rest of us were in our 20s to mid-30s: knitting squares for a blanket, socks, more socks, a festively loud overcoat sweater knit on huge needles with a tripled strand of worsted weight. The older women were talking about children and grandchildren, and sales at A. C. Moore and Michael's; the rest of us were talking about Rhinebeck, and Webs, and where to get good self-striping sock yarn. Periodically the conversations would converge, and we'd talk about cats and ice cream.

Now, this divide isn't universal. But I think it's an indicator of how knitting has changed. For instance, charity knitting: there are people out there who spend a considerable amount of time knitting socks and hats for people in need. But if you consider just the time and effort involved, this doesn't make any sense -- you can get beautiful wool socks at L. L. Bean, superwash merino ragg wool, for $8 a pair. Does it make sense to buy sock wool, which is likely to run at least $7-$8 for a pair's worth of sock wool, and then spend hours knitting it for a stranger? If the main goal is to keep other people's feet warm, no! But this is a recent development. Until comparatively recently -- within living memory -- the only way for people to get good socks was for somebody to knit them.

(Of course I realize that the act of charity knitting has spiritual and emotional benefits for the knitter and for the recipient, but none of them are tangible; and being a practical sort, I prefer to focus on things I can measure, like the warmth and comfort of wool socks compared to the warmth and comfort of no socks.)

Knitting has changed from something people did for practical reasons to something that people do for creative and expressive reasons. And it's made that change within living memory, and you can see the record of it if you pay attention.

I never thought it would happen to me.

So I mentioned Bartlett being at Gore Place last weekend. I think I also mentioned that I bought a bunch of sport-weight yarn. (Is 3 pounds enough for a gansey? Let's hope. That's 3 miles of yarn.) And I picked up Cat Bordhi's New Pathways for Sock Knitters at Webs. You can probably see where this is going: I felt so virtuous about finishing two socks on Monday that I immediately cast on another sock -- a Coriolis sock.

The book has several tables in the back that are based on the size of the foot and the gauge you're getting with that yarn on those needles. Somehow I remembered getting 8 spi with Bartlett on 2.75mm needles, so I didn't bother swatching. You can probably predict the rest of this story.

I measured my foot. Ten and a half inches around. So I looked up those two numbers, got the magic numbers I needed, and cast on. The toe seemed big; the foot seemed bigger. There was no way it was going to fit snugly. So I checked my gauge -- against the Bartlett socks I knit a couple years ago, not against the sock I was knitting -- and verified that it was, indeed, 8 spi.

Well, obviously, the size of my foot was wrong. I considered my usual socks, in which I cast on 80 stitches at 10 spi and they fit. So completely on instinct I ripped back to where the toe had 72 stitches, and st.arted the foot over again on. It seemed a little loose, but I carried on.

(Astute readers may note that all the gauges in here are measured off long since completed socks, or come from vague memory.)

So I got to the point where I started thinking about the heel turn, and did the back of the envelope math to figure out how much longer I had to knit before turning the heel. At an estimate, it would have been finished about four inches past the back of my foot. There was nothing to do but go get the ruler.

And it turned out that I was getting seven stitches per inch in the Bartlett sport. (And my other socks were closer to nine stitches per inch than 10. The math worked much better that way.)

It is a testament to the quality of the Bartlett yarn that it ripped out so cleanly. I need to sleep on the question of whether I'm going to cast on the yarn on those needles (with fewer stitches) or on smaller ones (which means actually measuring *gauge). And I'm not sure the pattern works well in the dark yarn I chose: the cable I was putting on the Coriolis band was subtle, possibly too subtle, and would work better in a lighter colored yarn.

It's not that gauge didn't work - it's that gauge only works if you aren't in denial.