cwBlog

So you've seen just about everything I have on the needles, with the exception of the New Durasport sock -- a pattern from More Sensational Knitted Socks. I need to knit a mate for the blue sock and a mate for the pink sock. (Interestingly enough, after spending time knitting a cotton-nylon-wool blend and a soy silk-wool-nylon blend, the wool-nylon blend Regia socks I'm knitting for Jason feel really wooly. I like that.) Once that's done, I have nothing planned, and I want to figure out what I'm knitting next -- my plain-socks phase seems to have mostly worn itself out, and this time with complete pairs.

One project that I won't mention here is a possible birthday present for my father. Not mentioning that one until it's done, since he can click on my email signature line just like anyone else can.

Another possible project: I bought three bags (30 balls) of dark navy blue and gold marled cotton yarn -- Debbie Bliss Cotton Denim Aran at the Webs tent sale, figuring I'd make myself a basic sweater with it. (30 balls is waaaaaay more than enough to make me a basic sweater, I think -- my yardage fu is accurate with alpaca and okay with wool, but I've never tested it with cotton. But it is a discontinued color, and I was worried that 20 would not be enough. Better to have twice as much as I need, after all, than to be a few yards short in a discontinued color.) I have a (store-bought) cotton sweater that I like a great deal, and this yarn is about the same weight as the yarn in that. But I haven't started it yet, beyond the first swatch, because it's been so @#$% hot here. Which might be a good thing, because this Knitpicks pattern for a cardigan hoodie might be just about perfect.

I also owe my mom a sweater. I was going to knit her St Brigid last year for Christmas, but due to a gauge and math catastrophe (someday, but not now, I will blog about that) with the first sweater I knit for my dad for last Christmas, time ran short. So I put the yarn in a box, with pictures of the finished sweater as knit by other people, and a big note saying "SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED." Well, I had the best of intentions, but lace ate my brain, and I wound up knitting her the Feather & Fan Shawl from A Gathering of Lace instead, and by the time that was done it was way too hot to knit a sweater.

I also took Viking Patterns for Knitting down from the shelf to look up some stuff in it, and never put it back. It's been sending me subliminal messages about how nice it would be to have a sweater, knit in Bartlett sport-weight undyed, with tasteful cables here and there and some kind of textured stitch, like seed stitch or moss stitch, everywhere else. This is a bad idea. I will be standing on the ledge screaming about purling and tension before I get to the finishing, and the nice young men in the clean white coats will have no idea who Bartlett is or why I'm cursing him. Seed stitch, at 8 stitches per inch, on a sweater for a person my size? I must be out of my gourd.

So I've been listening to Ann & Eugene Bourgeois's Fair Isle Sweaters, Simplified instead. I am not sure I like the idea of steeks. Hell, I am terrified of the idea of steeks. You want me to cut my knitting?!? And I like shoulder shaping too. (At least when it's not shoulder shaping rendered the wrong size and not-easily-fixable due to a math catastrophe. But I said I wouldn't blog about that here.) Some of the sweater patterns in there are breathtaking, and I've been considering adapting the colorwork to a flat-knit sweater pattern from Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns. That, however, will probably wait until Rhinebeck; last year I saw a yarn vendor there selling beautiful Shetland yarns in lots of colors, but I didn't buy any because I didn't have a project in mind and couldn't justify buying one or two hanks of yarn that would just languish in my stash.

(The hanks and balls and skeins of sock yarn are not languishing, they are maturing before being knit. Happy to clear that up.)

So I'm musing.

(Those of you paying attention may note that all the major options I'm considering so far are sweaters. This is not accidental; I like the process of knitting, but unless the end result is something useful, it feels like a waste of time. My mother loved her shawl, and it was amazing to knit, but she'd get a lot more use out of a sweater, so that's the direction I'm going in now.)

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.

Sorry, all, I've been on the road, visiting my parents, and that's not conducive to photographing. I promise pictures of the Knitivity socks, and of the blue pink socks in the next day or two.

I really like red. I have a pair of Red Sox socks, made from Briggs and Little Tuffy, in the Red Mix and Ecru colors. The Knitivity socks (yes, faithful readers, I still owe you a picture) have a lot of red in them. I have several as-yet unknit handpainted sock yarns with a lot of red in them. So a few months ago, I was really pleased to find Tofutsies, a sock yarn I had been hearing about, in a beautiful red and white colorway. I brought it home, divided it into two toe-up balls, tossed it into the knitting bag for a future project when I had freed up a set of 2mm needles, and forgot about it.

Well, I finished the Knitivity socks. There was a set of 2mm needles freed up. And in a burst of responsibility, I ripped out a sock heel that I had put on far too early. I'm not sure quite what I was thinking; perhaps I was subconsciously anticipating a horrible accident in which I lost the front half of my foot. Whatever the reason, I had knit a sock that was about two inches too short to go on my foot; but once I ripped out the heel, knit a longer foot, and reknit the heel, I had enough momentum to finish it; and there was another set of 2mm needles freed up.

So yesterday I pulled the beautiful red and white Tofutsies out of the knitting bag, only to find that it had gone all pink. I think it was hanging out with some mostly-blue Schaefer Anne and forgot its original purpose. But maybe I was beta-carotene deficient, or under the influence of Mercury in retrograde, or just slightly off in my color perception that day. Regardless, there is no denying it: the yarn is pink. Screaming, rich, remind-you-of-the-1980s pink.

So far the reaction has been, "those are for you?! But they're pink!"

@#$% it, I'm knitting these socks, and I'm wearing them. If anybody makes a fuss, I shall feign red-green colorblindness and pretend to be shocked that they are not a calm blue; if that does not work, I shall stab the offender repeatedly with an 8-inch long, 2mm diameter nickel-plated steel dpn until he bleeds on the socks and they cease to be pink.

That should show him.