KnitMe

Year of the sock

This really has been the year of the sock. I think that I've made 6 pairs this year (including Emmy's neon rainbow socks and these):

This was Knitpicks sock yarn in a discontinued color called 'Hydrangea'. It didn't knit up quite like I expected, but I like it. This yarn is a tad heavier than some sock yarns, so these are very cushy.

I like how the pooling at the instep sort of mirror imaged itself - not the shape so much, but the pool of pink is on the outside of both insteps.

Of course I started more socks right away. The is the beginning of the Cable and Rib sock by Nancy Bush from the Fall 2005 Interweave Knits.

Mmm I love Mountain Colors Bearfoot. I couldn't wait any longer to knit with it. The advantage of it is that it works up fast - the gauge is just a tad larger than standard sock yarn. This time I will take better care of it - the socks I finished last December in this yarn look a tad messy now because I just washed and dryed them like all my other superwash socks, which I think was a mistake. I loved that color and it's discontinued - if anybody has a hank of Bearfoot in 'garnet' lying around I would be happy to take it off your hands and put it on my feet.

I started spinning a little bit of tussah silk in a lilacs colorway, which Sam brought me in May as a hostess present. It's only 2 ounces so I am trying to spin it very very fine. This is 2 hours' worth of spinning:

Then the dilemma will be: how do I ply it? I don't think I'm getting it fine enough to navajo ply, so I will have to contend with the problem of plying silk from a center pull ball, which is rather a recipe for throwing the whole thing in the trash. At the rate I'm spinning this, I won't have to worry about that problem till maybe around Halloween.

Better Late Than Never...

I am late posting this morning and I was last Monday too. Somehow it seems that the Javascript buttons on the MT pages (they do important stuff, like "Save") won't work until later on in the morning. Why would a firewall screen out Javascript until after 9:30? It's a pain in the butt.

Anyhow we are here now...

I finished my 'Treasure' bluefaced leicester this weekend. Gosh I love this stuff.

(The colors are a little washed out in these photos, they are more saturated than this picture indicates.)

I think that my first hank was a little teeny bit lighter weight than the rest of them - now I'm thinking this stuff should be knitted at a worsted gauge. I don't know if I want to work from two balls when I knit it, like I do with most handspun, because I think I want to preserve the colors as they run in the skein. I don't know precisely how much yardage I have but I think about 900. Perhaps I will try to make this.

I have been puzzling about this a little, though. I will have to figure out exactly how they want the stitches worked to get the biasing effect. Before I figured out about combination knitting and how to knit into the leading edge of a stitch no matter where it was actually lying on the needle, I used to unintentionally twist my stitches. I wrap my yarn clockwise for a purl and counterclockwise for a knit, and I understand that the ordinary way is to wrap your purls counterclockwise as well. I did not learn that way. So in stockinette, I would knit into the front of each stitch as it came along, even though it wasn't really the leading edge, and end up with a twist (and the wrong side of my stockinette work totally "rowed out" - the rows paired up in ridges). Nothing I made by knitting this way EVER biased. I suppose I should knit a swatch as I'm sure the designer intends - wrapping my purls counterclockwise and knitting into the back of my knits - because I think if I went back to my first style of knitting I would be twisting in the opposite direction of what the pattern intends me to do.

Venus is coming along, I'm almost up to the armholes on the back. This is a bit tedious to knit but I really want to see if I can make this yarn work and the finished sweater will be very wearable so I'm pushing myself along.

My railroad rib socks are not done yet. But I'm down to the foot so it should be soon.

I am not sure what to do next. I want to make the Cable and Rib socks from the Fall 2005 issue of Interweave Knits, because they are designed for Bearfoot and I have 2 skeins of that. But I want to start knitting Lisa's Emerald City Sock! right away too... Having all my good sock yarn sitting in a glass-front cabinet right in front of me whenever I'm knitting is like trying to eat a bologna sandwich in a candy store...

Do-overs

While Melanie and Jan were entertaining you with wedding shawls and gigantic silk worms, I was repeating myself. I finished Tilia.

But - wait:

Ewww. Should have listened to self about knitting a facing in a cotton yarn. No amount of steaming made that hang right.

After pondering for a couple of days, I realized that I could just frog the neckline facing and apply another neckline treatment, without having to undo anything else. So I pondered the alternatives while frogging. What sweater do I have, that I really like the neckline treatment? The answer was Celtic Dreams, which I knitted about 3 years ago and which has a lovely narrow garter stitch neck border.

Ah, much better. So - if you make this, even if you use the actual yarns specified, be prepared to not like that facing. I think it's just risky as a neckline that is supposed to be elegant and scooped. But maybe that's just me.

I worked on this from July 13th until September 4th and used just over 10 balls of Knitpicks Shine in sport weight. I shortened the length of the body by 2 or 3 inches and shortened the sleeves a little. Even so, they were a little long and I ended up setting them in with a little bit of the sleeve inside the seam - kind of like the facings you do on Nordic sweaters from Dale, in case you've ever done that - so as to take up a little of the length. I think this will be a very wearable sweater come fall weather, it's smooth and not too weighty.

Emily liked the color of this yarn so much that we had a brief show of temperament that I was not knitting somethiing for her with it. When that subsided, she gave me another idea of what she would like me to do with my leftovers. What might this be, do you suppose? (Pencil included for scale.)

If you guessed some sort of small garment, you're about as close as anyone could come without having been to visit us. Hm, waist 6 inches, rise 2 1/4 inches, inseam 2 inches... someone has a problem figure!

Pinky has pants.

This was a very easy knit of just a couple of hours, along the principle of a glove. Round and round for awhile, then essentially make 2 glove fingers. The one-row Elizabeth Zimmerman buttonhole for the tail was an on-the-spot inspiration. Everyone who sees these acts as if they must have been so hard to knit. Hah.

OK so this left me with one sock on the needles, and I even wanted to scrap that when this came in the mail:

It's a hank of Lisa's Sock! in that Emerald City colorway that has swept the world since I bugged her into making it. I just want to drop everything and knit this. (This color is SO hard to photograph, in an effort to keep it from being all blue I seem to have made it not blue at all. Trust me that it is fabulous and look at Lisa's site for the real look of Emerald City.) But I have to get my other sock off the needles no matter how dull it suddenly seems.

I wasn't really feeling sure what I wanted to knit next. So I decided to give this another try.

Does this look familiar to anyone? This is 'Venus' from an old Jaeger book, and my handspun 3 ply Cormo. This is the project that went down in disaster about a year ago due to grist issues. We're trying again. It is really not a very interesting pattern to knit, and I know that the yarn would have been so much better if I had spun it this year, but I really want this sweater in this yarn so another shot is in order.

In other poor-planning news, I finally located one of those old 70s stereo cabinets I've wanted for awhile, the kind with the tinted glass door that pops open and shut and the lid that lifts up for your turntable... brought it home in triumph, pulled all my stereo components out of their rickety old cabinet... and they were all half an inch too wide for the new cabinet. Erg. I didn't want to spend another hour driving out and returning it to the poor innocent people who sold it to me, so I left it sit in the dining room overnight while I thought what I could do with it. Here is its final purpose:

Now, my good sock yarn stash is not sitting in plastic bags on top of my work table needing to be moved whenever I want to wind a ball of yarn, and my good sock knitting books and patterns are not scattered in 3 different places. Let's hear it for the sock cabinet.

Silk from Scratch

Hi! I'm Jan; I live in northern North Dakota. I'll be posting occasionally about my fibery adventures. This summer I had a real adventure raising caterpillars of two of the North American silkmoth species. Cecropia and Polyphemus ('Poly' for short) are cousins to the famous silkmoths of Asia, and like their Asian counterparts, they end their caterpillar stage by spinning cocoons of pure silk.

In a little over a month the caterpillars eat enough tree leaves to grow from hatchlings a quarter of an inch long to gentle, giant caterpillars bigger than a man's thumb. My job was to house them safely and deliver apple branchlets to them several times a day. I hauled a lot of apple this summer.

I raised them individually in plastic wastebaskets, covered with landscape cloth to keep out predators.

This cecropia felt secure enough to stretch out and show his collar of orange knobs and tiara of blue ones.

This Poly, on the other hand, decided I was a predator when I peered in. It froze motionless with its feet tucked under its chin. It was trying its best to look like a twig.

Pretty soon it forgot me and went back to munching everything within reach.

No morsel got missed. This cecropia went way overboard.

Finally, after five weeks of diligent eating on their part and obedient branch hauling on mine, I was rewarded one morning by a cocoon of shining silk -- during the night the first of the Polys had spun.

The Cecropias spun about a week later. Cocoons of golden amber silk, as big as a hen's egg.

Suddenly alll the munching and hauling was worth it. They'll spend the winter in the fridge. Next spring I'll let them hatch, mate, and lay eggs, and I'll process their discarded cocoons into silk for my hand spindles. A pretty nice win-win, for sure.

Sarah's Wedding Shawl

The shawl is finished. I had hoped to show you photos of the bride modelling the shawl, but the final dress fitting has been postponed until next week. In the meantime, here I am in Sarah's shawl:

The shawl was knit to my own design (thank you Barbara Walker!) on a 3.25 mm needle, and used about one and one half skeins of Suri Elegance, 100% alpaca. When I tried the shawl on before blocking, it felt a bit scratchy, so I gave it a good soak in hot water with hair conditioner before blocking. That seems to have worked because it feels nice and soft now.

I have Hyrna Hergobar from the Three Cornered and Long Shawls book on the needles now, and have also cast on Starmore's Fern. I don't know how Fern will work out. I did a gauge swatch, and I am actually a bit under gauge. From the few inches I have done on the back of the sweater, however, it looks like it will be too big. Way too big.