Two Socks Begun

And I don’t mean two socks the same – I just don’t work that way!

A bit over a week ago, I was ready to start something new and decided to work on Meg’s socks in Kabam, her wool, bamboo, nylon blend, that she feels is more suited to transitional seasons.  (Who knows they will be done in time for this spring, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.)  These are in a colorway from her last club called Wired.  It’s a very cheerful and lively colorway, and I felt that a simple, rich texture was what was called for.  I looked through my Barbara Walker treasuries and in volume 3 (the charted one) I found a stitch called Nubby Stitch.  I fiddled with some variants, but in the end I decided I liked the original the best.  Here is what I have so far:

It’s a pretty simple stitch (3 stitches, 4 rows and two of the rows are straight knit) but I think it’s got a lot of impact, and I feel that it suits this colorway perfectly.  (The blue is a bit more green in real life but the depiction isn’t too bad.) However, before I embark on the heel shaping, I want to show this to Meg and get her take on it.  So this one is resting (until Sunday, when we’re going to have dinner with them.)

The other skein I had sitting around was a skein of Intrigue, a colorway in which I’ve already made a pair of socks for Meg and a shawl for me, this time in Tasty, her fingering-weight Merino / Cashmere / Nylon blend.  It’s a pleasure to knit anything in this yarn.  I decided this was going to be a pair of socks for me.  I thought a wavy pattern would be fun, so I grabbed my copy of Ripple Stitch Patterns by Jan Eaton.  I found a stitch called Welting Fantastic.  That stitch is an 11-stitch, 12 row pattern.  It has 6 rows of knit shaped sections, using K2tog and K2tog tbl as the decreases and knit front and back for the increases, and this is followed by six rows of all purl (once you’ve converted the flat pattern for knitting in the round.)  I switched it to be a 9-stitch, 10 row pattern.  My version has a nine-stitch shaped section using K2tog and SSK for the decreases and YO for the increases followed by a nine-stitch purl section.  There are only 4 rows of purl and 6 of the shaped sections.  The patterns interlock a little.  And the pattern really doesn’t look similar at all.  So I kind of think I’ve unvented a little pattern stitch here, to use Elizabeth Zimmerman’s great term for this process.

Here is the start of the sock, photographed flat.

I think that stitch is a lot of fun, especially in self-striping yarn.  I also took a shot of the sock on one of my foot dummies.  It doesn’t look nearly as cool, but I think a lot of that is the photo.

I find that I’m thinking about what else the stitch pattern would be good for.  It really needs to be knit in the round in its current incarnation.  I think it would make a really cool muff.  Or a double-thickness cravat, with this stitch on both ends (maybe a diamond on each end?) and a narrower stockinette tube for the center.  With some form of slot worked in, perhaps.  At any rate, I think I am going to enjoy these socks!

And, by the way, I did make it to urgent care last night – and almost nobody was there, so it only took an hour from leaving the house to getting back, and I got my prescription for anti-inflammatories, aka steroids, which is what usually gets rid of my coughs.  So here I am, starting another week of vacation together with medications.  I hope it will work out and I’ll be back to normal by the end of the week.

Another Shawl and a Pair of Socks

Around April 5, I finished a pair of socks for Meg with one of the colorways from her last club called Intrigue.  This delicate colorway contains pink and a lovely pale denim blue.  This pair of socks has two texture patterns, sand stitch and moss stitch.  The stitch pattern changes when the color changes, and the pairing of stitch with color is reversed in the two socks.  Here is a picture of the pair.  (I always feel that a photo of the pair is necessary to prove that I really did make it through the second sock.)

The difference in the pattern stitches was probably not as dramatic as it should have been – the contrast really doesn’t show up any better in real life than in this photo.

Late last week, I finished knitting my second Daybreak, which I find by looking at Ravelry was started early last July.  This is made from some yarn that (for once) was not dyed by my daughter Meg (of Twisted Fiber Art).  This was yarn we picked up in Columbus at Knitters Connection.  It was dyed by Kimber of Fiber Optic in her Merino / Cashmere / Nylon blend yarn.  We picked it up to try out when Meg was still deciding whether or not to carry it.  (She does – it comes in fingering weight, called Tasty, and heavier, somewhere between sport and worsted, called Yummy.  I love it.)  The colors of the Fiber Optic yarn are just delicious.  I made a pair of socks for myself in the yarn which I managed to finish in about ten days – here’s how the socks look.

I started this Daybreak, the second I’ve made, just after I finished the socks (in July, as I mentioned above) and I finished knitting it last week.  Then this week I actually blocked it.  And here’s how it looks on me.

I find that I enjoy this style of wearing it quite a bit – again, it stays put.  Here’s another way I tried that isn’t too bad.

I don’t know that it would stay in that configuration, but I do think it looks elegant.  The shawl was really designed for Meg.  Hopefully she will want it.  She has a real talent for wearing shawls in interesting ways, and I hope this one will inspire her.  At her request, I added one additional increase line on each end to the pattern – I haven’t had an opportunity for her to try it out yet.

Next post I will show you two socks, one for Meg and one for me, that I have started recently.  I think both of them are interesting.  We’ll see whether you agree!  My current plan is to go to urgent care when I get home from work tomorrow, so I may not get around to posting tomorrow at all.

Herbivore and Ziprelaxagon

I am going for interesting pattern names, apparently.  My Herbivore in Dazzle Arial is now blocked and I have been wearing it around some.  As always, I haven’t come up with great ways to arrange it, but some aren’t too bad.  I messed around with a feature in Adobe Photoshop Elements that apparently I’d been misusing before, and I came up with this floating Herbivore shot.

Next I just need to figure out how to give it a background.  But as is you can get an idea of one way it can be worn.  And here’s an actual modeled shot:

I look pretty bad, but the shawl looks cool this way, I think.  The multiple triangles do add to the interest once you can get it arranged well, anyhow.  I hope to see whether Meg can come up with some good ways to wear it.

And I’ve also finished the first of the Ziprelaxagons.  Since I have two balls of yarn (either of which is big enough to make the pair, probably) I felt fine to go ahead and do the cuff now.  So here are some shots of the sock modeled.  First the bottom of the sock.  This shot used flash – there were problems both ways.  You can see how smoothly the sock conforms to the foot.

Here is a non-flash shot of the side of the sock.

This shot was originally way too dark, and lightening it gives some inaccuracy, but not all that much.  I think this shows the shaping quite well.

I love this pattern.  It’s fun and different, and it fits so well!  The details in the pattern are just amazing.  Thanks for the great job, Kirsten!

I Didn’t Actually Fall off the Earth

Sorry I’ve been so silent lately.  After I finally went to urgent care for my cold on March 18th, I worked my way through my medication (which lasts a week) and my cough was just fading away when boom!  both Franklin and I got a second cold.  And I’m still feeling exhausted and draggy and my cough is worse than ever (whine, whine!)

I have managed to get some knitting done through the period, though.  Firstly, I managed to finish the knitting on my Dazzling Herbivore some time ago.  Here’s what it looked like when all knitted but not blocked.

The colors are gorgeous, and this shot doesn’t do too bad a job conveying them.  The curling is pretty bad – it looks great blocking but of course the proof will be in the wearing.  Here’s a blocking shot:

The geometry of the pattern is a whole lot more dramatic at this stage.  I’m really looking forward to seeing how it works on.  I’m going to try it on myself as well as Meg and Hazel and see what it does for each of us.  I really don’t know what to expect!

I’ve finished knitting two more things and made some great progress on my Ziprelaxagon socks.  I’m saving those for some more brief posts in the coming week.  And I’ve started another pair of socks for Meg that I’m feeling very enthusiastic about.  So I hope to have quite a bit more for you in the near future.

Embellishments (Wildcard)

I don’t have any thoughts on today’s Blog Week topic, which is what you plan to learn / accomplish in the next year.  Instead, I’m choosing another topic which I don’t have too much to say about, but at least something.  What embellishment have I done?  Not very much (unless you count the beads and I already used that for something else) except for the occasional attachment of some flowers, etc.

I have two examples to offer.  First of all, I made a hat for Hazel for Christmas out of the Octarine colorway.  I chose to make it top down, starting with the yellow-green of the Evolution.  The other end of the colorway is pink, and partway through the knitting I decided that I wanted to make some flowers in that color.  Which I did – here’s a shot that shows the flowers pretty well.

I love how that came out.

Another project with an embellishment is a doll outfit I made which also includes a hat with embellishment.   Here it is:

This remarkable little doll is only about six inches tall, and she’s “Earth Mother” shaped.  Here’s a picture of her in a bathing suit to show that, so that you will understand why the coat makes her “look fat” – I don’t really think it’s out of scale.

So that’s my experiment in embellishment.

A Twisted Fiber Art Rainbow

Socks to Keep

In February of 2008 I knit a pair of socks that I was really looking forward to making.  I had made a swatch for my daughter Meg of Twisted Fiber Art in this colorway and pattern and decided I really wanted to have a pair of socks after this model.  As I knit these socks, I wrote down the pattern and it was published in March of 2008 as Show-off Stranded Socks (Rav link).  Since then, there have been 461 other pairs of these socks knitted and recorded on Ravelry.  So this is, by my lights, an extremely successful pattern.

And the socks themselves – I love them.  Here’s a photo:

If you look closely at that picture, you’ll see that the gussets on these socks are a bit different from the standard style.  Also, I knit different patterns in the gussets of the two socks, because I wanted to offer choices and thought it would be good to have photos of the various choices.  The socks still feel lovely and look very fresh.  They’re among my favorite socks.

A couple of years ago, Meg and I made a trip to Columbus, Ohio, to attend TNNA.  We stayed in a nice hotel and had a most interesting and busy trip.  When I unpacked after I got home, I discovered to my horror that my Stranded Teacake socks were missing. I was horrified.  Any pair of handknit socks would be a huge loss, but this particular pair was one I really didn’t want to lose.  So I phoned the hotel – which is the sort of thing I really, really hate doing.  I was delighted to hear that they knew exactly what I was talking about and would mail them to me as soon as I sent them enough money for postage, and they’d even accept the money electronically.  Within a surprisingly short period of time, my socks and I were reunited.  I’m glad every time I wear them that I went to the trouble of getting them back!