First a Kitty

Musette. That's not her tail, it's a mushed up kitty pi. That makes a total of 3 knitted items in which she is nesting. The red thing, knitted by the illustrious Laura, is a sweater which I've altered but still need to reknit the button band. Hi Laura. The rainbow thing is the circular blanket. This had to happen. All the little packages finally got the upper hand. It was like the scene in the first Harry Potter where all the letters are shooting in through the fireplace and the mail chute and flapping around trying to get attention. I need to tie a needle gauge to it.Oy. I'm working on this now. It's going to be a stole. The pattern is Swing Stitch from Barbara Walker #2, p. 264. I spent a good 2.5 hours knitting tonight only to end up having knit one more row than when I had picked it up. Counting Fail. Lifeline Win! The lurid green highlights are due to having messed with the color values to get the knitting to be this shade of purple. I think it's pretty accurate. It's interesting that the color of the unaltered picture was pretty close to the pictures in the online stores. Maybe I'll get another skein after all.These are finished. I finally located the original pattern! I had to have help from the Patterns forum on Ravelry. They are called Rise and Shine socks. The author is Tikru who blogs at Made By Myself. Forgive me for posting so many pictures of them. I love them so. I'm working on another pair. If I don't watch myself carefully I'll frog the plain one and reknit it as a Rise and Shine sock. Maybe I'll make the zigzags further apart.

I'm invited to a wedding, but I need your help. Chicken, fish, or vegetarian?

Baby Set Finito

Yarn: Socks that Rock medium weight in the color, Downpour; about 1.75 skeins--I don't know what happened with the color in the photo. There is no greenish cast to this yarn. Sorry about that. The color is correct in the pictures from 2 posts back.

Size: I was shooting for 6 months to 1 year. Most people think it looks big. The baby is due in October and I figure he will be big. His dad is well over 6 feet tall and strong like ox.

Needles: 2.75 mm/US 2, combination of circular and dpns

Sweater Pattern: Combination of Joelle Hoverson's Placket Sweater from Last Minute Knitted Gifts and Elizabeth Zimmermann's percentage system. I used the measurements and the decreases for the raglan from Hoverson. I was proud of how I managed the placket. I picked up 5 stitches from between the 6 stitches at the edge and held them to the back. I knitted a couple rows in stockinette for a smooth placket bottom before I switched to garter. The waist band rib is a 2x2 garter rib (row 1:k2,p2; row 2; knit). The sleeve cuffs are 2x2 simple ribbing and I extended this toward the elbow by adding more and more plain rows between ribbing rows. I added a couple of long short rows in the upper back a la EZ.

Hat Pattern: Jewel by Sock Pixie. Thanks to S. Pixie's excellent instructions, I actually managed to count the decreases correctly without stitch markers. I used 11 little mitered squares. Again, I probably made the hat too big. What can I say? I'm surprised there aren't more of these in the Ravelry gallery. This hat has a beautiful shape though I had trouble laying it out for the photo. The mitered squares will flatter many types of yarn. I'd make one for myself if I wore hats that squish a person's hair. The pattern is such that even though it is written at 7 stitches per inch, I think it would work with any yarn up to worsted so long as you knit the strip of mitered squares until you reach the desired head circumference, pick up the stitches in a multiple of 10 and make a reasonable guess as to the length to knit before beginning the crown shaping. Kudos to Sock Pixie on this elegant design. It is elegant in both the scientific and artistic senses.

Sock Pattern: None. Worked toe-up on 32 stitches. Short row heels from memory. I'm getting better at short row heels. Seiding should be proud. She helped me learn. Of course it's easier on 16 stitches than on 30 or 36.

~~~

All in all this has been a great knit. I am glad I finished the sweater 3 times because I can be satisfied with the end result knowing that I've explored my limitations and the characteristics of the yarn and pattern. Tomorrow is the shower. I'll go to my lbs (local bookstore) and pick up a sweet little storybook of some kind to throw in the box and I'm good to go! I hope there will be good food at the shower. No matter what, I expect cake, but if the mom to be's mother is involved, I am looking forward to a Polish food extravaganza.

Sock Yarn

There has been a failure of the software that I have been using to edit my digital photos. So I thought I'd try Picasa, a Google program. I've made an album of my sock yarn stash. To be sure, there is more, but I photographed everything that isn't involved in any WIP socks right now and that isn't hiding. I think I got most of it. I didn't count non-sock yarn that I bought with the intention of making socks or sock yarn that I bought to make something other than socks. Minus all that, I came up with 27 pairs of potential socks. The impetus was to get it on Ravelry. I can't do that yet because I'd still have to upload it to Flicker first. You have to use Flicker. Well, here's a link to my photo album on Web Album. Link

I've made an agreement to make Molly from CelticSwanForge a pair of socks. They will have a bit of color work on the tops with blacksmith symbols--Well, blacksmith tools. I told her about the dark green yarn I had leftover from Packer Fugarama and she requested a lighter green to go with it. To that end, I did a little playing with color this weekend. I may not be done tweaking the color. The actual color turned out brighter and less minty than it appears here, but the picture is really not that far off. Maybe I will learn to like Picasa, though I am dissatisfied with the sizing options.

In other sock news, I've finally made it past the legs on the secret socks I'm making for my Knitty sock pal, Fschmom. They've been taking forever. It is partly because they have special features!!! which I cannot discuss right now and partly because I wasted a lot of time trying to master the short row heel. I, um, didn't master it.

Post #50 Woo Hoo & La Di Da

I did a little experiment with pooling. I'm making a pair of socks out of Art Yarns Super Merino that I got on sale. The colors are bright pastels if that makes any sense. At first I was going to make Thuja socks when I found out that they used the exact brand and type of yarn. But mine is much brighter and differentiated than the original so I wasn't really satisfied. I had remembered the Crusoe socks because the yarn was also bright. They used a slip-stitch pattern. I assumed the gauge would be too small as my yarn is a light worsted and I knew they were made of Koigu which is smaller than worsted. I cast on the 44 stitches called for in Thuja and was almost finished with the one by one top ribbing when I was perusing the Knitty Gallery and was inspired by KnitKass and her post of some finished Crusoe socks to revisit the pattern and guess what? lt has a cast-on of 44 stitches! Thank you, KnitKass!(Turns out it would work with any multiple of 4.)

The top of Crusoe has a rolled edge and I already had a ribbed top, but I kept right on. I don't care for rolled tops on socks. As I got going I saw that things were looking very good. The colors were coming through in the design. This is good news as I had already tried 84 different things with that yarn. At about 2 inches of pattern I saw that the colors were forming a secondary pattern of nearly horizontal stripes around the sock. I had really wanted a true variegation with no detectable color patterning, but I'm not unhappy with it at all.

Apparently unable to leave well enough alone, I began to wonder how it would have looked in stockinette. Would it swirl or zig-zag or make splotches and puddles? So just for curiosity's sake please examine the pictures. Each is a different view of the same sock. On the right of each is the ribbed cuff section. The middle has the slipped stitches from Crusoe and the left end, next to the needles is stockinete. You can see that there is pooling on the cuff and in the stockinette section, while the center section of slipped stitches is making light and dark stripes that swirl slightly diagonally. You can see from the pooling in the stockinette and ribbed sections that these socks would be different depending where the dark and light sections ended up in the finished sock. The slipstitch patterning saves the sock. I'd use it again.

In other news, here is a picture of the red potholders. They are made of 3 scrap yarns, one cotton worsted, one cashmere dk, and one wool sock weight, held together and knit on size 5 needles. Garter stitch was used throughout. One was knit horizontally, while the other was knit vertically to make the ribbing go in different directions. Yes, I'm up there with the big designers. While they were a work in progress, they were literally a pain in the arse as they and their 3 balls of yarn kept invading where I was trying to sit to knit other things. Insistent is what they were. Uses: 1; Number of near burns: 1; Having the couch back? Priceless.

Well, gosh darn it.

Sock Alert!

Sock Alert!

I finished my Jitterbug Socks--over a week ago. Are not they pretty? (I love how thin I look from the ankles down.) They feel reallynice: soft and warm, but firm and springy. The heels could be a little deeper, but the fit is not distracting. Let's take a closer look:Now from another angle:

Hold the phone! What's that on the left heel? My plan (insane laughter) to take over the entire sock drawer is thwarted!

More Cold, More Knitting

Here is a view of the last several feet before my back door. Solid ice, minimum three quarters of an inch thick. I have been trying to break it up. Attacking the ice with my booted feet has always been a sort of hobby/guilty pleasure. It's so satisfying to get a big crack. You can see the cement where I've made a little progress at either end. This is just way too thick to take care of the fun way. Of course, I haven't gotten out there with an ice-breaking-up-tool. See the doormat? I've managed to break up enough ice from that so that there's a spot of safe territory. But last time I worked on it, I tried to pry it off the ground and it ripped. Oops. I think, this is a deferred maintenance problem it's because I need a new roof. The water melts off the roof and settles there because there is a lowish spot. I don't actually get puddles there when it's warm. It's not that low. So until there is no snow on the roof or the weather warms up, more ice will form whenever a little snow melts off the roof. It's an adventure in walking. So far I haven't fallen. Whee!

When I finished the happy fuzzy big success angora luxury socks, I knit a bit on a few things. I ripped back all the way to the color bar on Niko's Manly sweater because I had started the vee-neck way too low. I think I frogged 6 or seven inches. I've knit about 4 or 5 back now I think. I'm not sure because I haven't picked it up in a while. I knit a couple of rows around on the quilty baby blanket. I'm thinking about picking up on the ends and adding some length before proceeding around again.
I think I saw something somewhere on how to knit log cabin style without picking up stitches. While I could figure something out, I'm sure the instructions are much better than my clumsy finagling will be. I think I saw the instructions on Yarnival. Yarnival is new to me. It seems to be a magazine-like compilation of particularly good blog posts. There are links to the blog posts rather than having them on the blog where the table of contents is. I've added it to my Favorites menu under knitting magazines. I'm looking forward to reading the articles (posts).
I also knit a beanie with a 2x2 edge as a demo for my knitting class. But I impusively gave it away to somebody on a really cold day. She wasn't cold or in need or anything. That is what I mean by impulsively. I was working on a dog sweater for one of my students in Wool-Ease to see how the pattern worked up that I modified from the Internet .

The last few days I've been working on my Jitterbug socks. I had started these quite a while ago but I had trouble with the heel and so I put them away. I was trying to make a flap heel from a new pattern in the Winter Knitty. I didn't trust the directions and thought I was screwed. I e-mailed the designer and she got back to me right away, but it was too late. I had fizzled. Now that I picked them up again, I'm just going for the basic afterthought heel. In the pictures the reddish yarn is my temporary place holder for the heel stitches. It is actually my other color of Jitterbug yarn. I had a lot of trouble settling on the design for the cuff of the sock. I tried all manner of diagonal ribs, like Knitty's RPM and my own (except not any lacy ones) and a couple of zig zags. The first picture shows the last zig-zag attempt. I had wanted to try and break up the striping. Those stitch patterns did break up the stripes but not enough to warrant the difficulty of keeping the pattern going on small, dark yarn. It was too hard to see and they weren't pulling in.

For the hell of it I thought to try a plain old 2x2 straight rib, et voila! Not only is it easy, the yarn likes it and it feels very nice. It looks good, too. Go figure. The stripes are a little wider and slightly helixical (izzata word?).