Yardage

I think I may have a wee problem here.



Left to right: Half of a skein of Colinette Jitterbug, in the Bright Charcoal colourway; what remains of the other half; the sock in progress.

I suspected the yardage might be a bit short for these socks (apparently I'm neither the only one with this problem nor the only fan of this colourway), so instead of doing the 3 Chart A repeats in the pattern I did 2.5, thinking I could adjust the foot a bit. Doing 2 repeats would have made life much easier but at the same time...eh...the leg would have been a bit too short for my taste.

I'm at the heel gusset now, and the yarn looks awfully low. The new scale and the old scale both insist that slightly less than half of the yarn remains, and since half of the stitches will now be stockinette part of me wants to think that will be just enough. But then I look at the used ball, and I look at the unused ball, and the other part of me starts freaking and saying hey, that does not look like slightly less than half of the yarn left in the ball, that looks like I'm going to RUN OUT OF YARN, I had better take out that 0.5 repeat of Chart A...but then the leg will be too short for my taste...oh dear.

Waffling over this has distracted me a bit from worrying about how I'm going to tweak Chart B. Have you seen Chart B of this pattern? Cookie A. threw in an adjustment factor to compensate for the pattern not being square, and I just can't visualize how to apply it when one starts the chart halfway up at what would normally be the right edge of the pattern (the K2tog tbl on row 12 in Chart A). Do I still add something on at the left of the chart, or do I now add it on to the right? Ack!

Other than that things are going well.

Excuses, excuses

I'm still here! Between work and life I just haven't had the time to post anything, and even now putting up photos is a bit of a stretch. So, here's a mostly photo-less summary of the last few weeks:

1) Despite the cat's best efforts, I finished the cowl neck on my tank top and started on the ribbing around the armholes. It turned into a slightly painful lesson on the importance of reading through the entire pattern before knitting. Last year I had knitted a tank top from a pattern that included slipping stitches at the edge of the armhole for a tidier look, so I thought, "Hey, I know this new pattern says to knit but I'm going to try that slipped stitch thing". Unfortunately, it turned out that later on I had to pick up 140 stitches along that edge, which meant picking up 2 stitches per slipped stitch, which resulted in a really tight edging on my first try. I decided to use larger needles to pick up the stitches on the other armhole and re-do the first one if this tactic worked.

The good news is that the second armhole is indeed looser...but that means now I have to rip out and re-do the first edging!

2) The Knit from your Stash thing also isn't going so well, unless I'm allowed to loosen the definition of "stash" to include yarn that has been in my possession for less than a day before I start knitting with it.

3) I finished my rainbow socks!

Yarn: Socks that Rock, in the "Fire on the Mountain" colorway
Pattern: Wendy's Toe-up pattern, with ribbing on the legs.

Still knitting

I finally finished the back of my UFO tank top!

...and I'm about 1/3 of the way through the front. With luck this thing might be done before summer.

I also finished a couple of socks. True, they're not from the same pair, but that just keeps life interesting.
This one is made from Socks that Rock yarn in the "Fire on the Mountain" colorway. I may lengthen the leg a bit.

And this one is from a merino/tencel blend purchased at Mind's Eye Yarn in Boston.

The Bayerische sock is past the heel. That may become my next UFO project.

The cats continue to hang out and beg for food.

Weather predictions

Happy Groundhog Day!






Do you think Groundhog Day will ever fall victim to the holiday decoration craze? Imagine yards filled with large inflatable groundhogs and klieg lights beaming from rooftops. Neighbourhoods could award prizes for the most shadow-free yard or the most artistic lighting.

The socks in the photos are former UFOs that I finished for the UFO Challenge. They were made from Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock Yarn (Purple Iris colourway) in the Knitpicks Mock Croc pattern, and I'm pretty sure that if it weren't for this challenge I would have had a hard time finishing them, because the pattern and color combo wasn't really to my taste. The groundhog liked the colours but thought the socks were too big.

More stray bits

1) To the couple who got engaged in front of our neighbours' house on Saturday afternoon: Congratulations! I hope the sound of our car failing to start didn't disrupt things too much.

2) I finished the second Jitterbug yarn sock on the plane. Doing Kitchener stitch at the toe was a bit tricky, thanks to some questionable logic that led me to equate the idea "maybe I shouldn't bring a darning needle in my carry-on bag" with "maybe I shouldn't bring a darning needle at all," but somehow I was able to carry on. Here is the pair in a place of honour:

Yarn: Colinette Jitterbug in the Toscana colourway. It looks a lot greener in real life than on-line. (Correction: greener than in the official yarn sample photos. The yarn in real life looks about this green on my monitor)
Pattern: the one on their ball band.

3) I finished the first Anemoi mitten over the weekend!


Yarn: Jamieson Shetland DK in Natural White and Seaweed (1 ball each)
Pattern: Eunny Jang's Anemoi Mittens.

Load of croc

This must be the fastest pair of socks I've ever knitted. I loved working with the yarn (Artyarns Supermerino)--it didn't split, so I could zone out while knitting, and because of the thickness of the yarn it took about 1.5 weeks to knit a pair, compared to my usual month or so.

I think the socks looked uneven because of the way they were lying.

In the spirit of Socktoberfest, I decided to give the Lorna's Laces yarn-with-an-identity-crisis another chance. So far this attempt has been working better, except for a brief frogfest at the start when I did 5 rows of p1-k3 rib instead of p1-k3-p1.

Pattern: Mock Croc socks from Knitpicks. You'll have to scroll past the list of available yarns to get to the pattern download link.
Yarn: Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock, in the Purple Iris colorway.

I'm a bit behind on the Socktoberfest questions/postings. Since I'm not at the point where I can post a knitting-related tutorial, I'll pass the time by answering a couple of questions Lolly posted last week:
1) Do you have certain patterns planned for some of the yarns? Do you buy yarn and then choose a pattern?
I tend to buy most of my sock yarn on impulse and figure out what to do with it later. The exception, probably, was the Baby Ull I bought for the Christmas stocking, and even that was only one-third premeditated (I had bought two of the colors earlier for something else, then changed my mind).

2) Does a certain sock yarn you have in your stash take you back to a certain event? (where you were when you bought/received it? what was going on in your life at the time!)
Kind of...sort of...yes and no. I usually remember the store where I bought the yarn, but not much of what was happening with life at that point.

Not sock related
Here's the latest on the blanket. I can't help wondering if somewhere there is a country in need of a garter stitch flag. If it ever comes knocking, at least I'll be prepared!


Meanwhile, the tabby will stand guard behind the stuffed animals, flash his eyes, and send his best to Charlie.

Whale-spotting

A bunch of us went whalewatching today. It was really amazing! Sure, it rained most of the time and we were soaked in ways I didn't think possible (my jacket with its alleged Gore-Tex was suspiciously water-absorbent), but it was worth it to see whales in person, and in their natural habitat, for the very first time.

I also managed to have some quality time with my sock-in-progress on the drive up and on the boat to and from the whales' feeding ground. As with my other pairs, the second sock is taking way less time than the first; I've reached the gusset in about 1/3 of the time it took for the first sock (hopefully the sock fairy isn't tempted now to add a mistake in row 5, or eat the rest of my yarn, or something). I did have a slight project delay yesterday during the transition to the smaller needles, when I discovered that the smaller needles had vanished, but fortunately I had another pair in that size.

Here are some pics from today:

Still at the dock in Gloucester, MA.


A whale surfacing and blowing air.


It's a bit hard to see in this photo, but 3 humpback whales (including a mother-calf pair) were hanging out at the surface.


A whale diving.


A nice look at a humpback whale's fluke as she dives. Ocean Alliance, the group that works with this whalewatching tour company, catalogs and names the whales they see. The educators on board said individual humpbacks can be identified by the unique patterns on their flukes. I think this one was named Echo.


At one point there were 6 whales and 2 whalewatching boats in the area (the boat in the distance was just passing through). Unfortunately our camera doesn't have a zoom lens so the whales are hard to see, but I think they're between the three boats.

Sock saga

I've been kind of improvising a sock during the last two weeks, using one of the balls of Regia that I bought at the WEBS tent sale. It started as a knit 2 purl 1 rib, but the effect was so oppressively stripey that it eventually became an 11-stitch chevron pattern. I discovered later that elann.com has a pattern that is pretty much identical, but theirs starts from the toe and I began from the leg.

This evening marked a great milestone in sock creation: the turning of the heel.

As I started the heel, I could think of only two things: 1) I needed an even number of stitches, and 2) for some unknown reason, I wanted a multiple of 3. Unfortunately, neither thought occurred to me until I had nearly finished the first row, so instead of pausing to consider the effects I simply slipped a few extra stitches onto that needle and continued on my merry way.

Note that in the above photo, there is not only a reinforced heel but also the short-row bit that comes after. I was ready to pick up stitches down the side when I noticed something odd:


Side #1--heel overlaps the yarnover bit.


Side #2--heel does not overlap yarnover bit.

Yes, those stitches I had so casually included in the heel had completely thrown off its symmetry.

Upcoming trips to the frog pond: 1
Tina Shawls snickering nearby: 1