cwBlog

So the last few weeks have been very busy, and I've been too lazy to take out the camera and take pictures of socks. I'll update you all on the life stuff later, but I have some promises to keep first.

I finished the Knitivity socks. I'm quite pleased with them; I bought four more hanks, and added them to the stash. Haven't knit any of them up yet; they're resting comfortably in the stash. This is after I've worn the socks a couple times (ye gods, I finished them nearly 3 weeks ago, bad blogger), and washed them a couple times, and they're wearing well and the colors are just as bright as when the yarn first arrived.

I've been in a mood lately where I have wanted to knit mainly plain socks. The sock on my left foot here is a sock I started a while back as a sock to stick in my pocket and knit when I had a few minutes in line. But I worked the heel too early and too shallow, and set it aside for probably four or five months because I really didn't want to rip out the heel and reknit it. Well, I was in the right mood a couple weeks back, and I ripped out the heel, and finished the sock very quickly. It's Lang Jawoll, their cotton-wool-nylon blend sock yarn; I bought three bags of ten 50g skeins of it at the Webs tent sale last year -- all marled, one in shades of dark and medium blue, one in shades of blue and white, one in shades of black and white. I like it quite a bit; once I've made a pair of socks from it, I'll probably trade the rest somehow. (Maybe by then I'll be on Ravelry.)

The sock on my right foot is in the red and white pink and white Tofutsies colorway I mentioned before. I really like the visual texture of the marling: the yarn itself is a three-ply, and each ply rotates through about a half-dozen colors. This makes the finished sock visually very interesting. I also found that, despite the tiny appearance of the ball -- honestly, the 100g ball, though it weighed 100g, looked about the size of a 50g ball -- I had plenty of yarn to finish the first sock, and I wound up actually finishing the sock long before I ran out of yarn. I was a little bit irked that there were two spots in the first half-ball where one of the plies was broken and one knot in the half-ball I knit for the first sock, but nobody else I know of seems to have had knot problems.

(Update: there was another knot about a yard into the second half-ball, which wasn't a problem; there was also a knot about 10 rounds from the end of the ribbing, and another one just past where I needed to cut off the yarn for the sewn bind-off. Four knots in a single ball! But just as with the first sock, I had quite a bit more yarn than I needed for the second sock in the pair, too.)

And finally, the current sock pair, intended for Jason. After I put the Knitivity sock yarn in my stash, I told him the next pair of socks I knit would be for him; he could pick any yarn in the stash, and if it was self-patterning he'd get a plain pair, and if it was plain and he wanted to choose a pattern he could do that too. He chose some Regia Strato-Color, colorway number 5747, "Flanell," which is black, dark red, red, mint green, white, and tan, and looks like it might be colors for flannel. (Webs got a lot of Regia Strato-Color last summer, and I bought at least 2 balls of each colorway I liked.)

This is the second pair of socks I've knit back to back recently, which is very unlike me. I thought I had lost my little black book for a few days, so I wanted to knit the second sock in the pair while I remembered what I had done on the first one -- in particular, the mistake design choice I made by making the heel 47 stitches wide when it should have been 45 stitches wide, and all of the math ramifications that fell out of that. The second sock is on the needles right now, and I haven't gotten to the heel, so it was not quite available for the picture.

(And yes, that is his foot in the picture!)

It's been a busy couple weeks for socks.