KnitMe

New mittens

Winter's Eve

Festive socks for the festive season, Winter's Eve, designed by the talented Sivia Harding, is the Blue Moon Fiber Arts Rockin' Sock Club December sock. I had the good fotrune to test drive the pattern, and it was an intriguing and fun design to knit. The socks fit beautifully, the beads feel smooth and the yarn is exceptionally nice to work with. I loved both the colour and the handle.

I really like the way the cables separate on the sides and meet on the instep and heel. There is a line of beads that runs down the centre front and back and ends at the point where the cables meet. You can just see it in the picture below, but the colour in this shot is really off. Dark days in the PNW don't make for good photography.

Every few years I get the urge to turn out a fresh crop of tatted snowflakes. This year the urge struck, but somehow I just ran out of time. I did get a dozen or so finished, but they haven't been starched or blocked yet. The ones on our tree were done years ago. When I first started making these, I used sugar water to stiffen them. One year I gave some to a friend whose dog daintily picked them off her tree and ate every last one of them. Fortunately, no harm came to the dog. Now I use a cornstarch mixture instead of sugar.

I joined the Angel Pearls scarf knit along in October. I have knit this scarf before as a Christmas gift and as an item for my Guild sale. It's another of Sivia's amazing designs. It provides the perfect opportunity to work with a luscious yarn, get a lace fix and play with beads at the same time. The beads are hard to see in the photo, but they are strategically placed in the lace along the full length of the scarf. It took one ball of Heavenly (colour 592) Kidsilk Haze on 3.75 mm needles.

These lovely, addictive little heart sachets designed by Vicki Sever first appeared on the Interweave Knits site. The pattern has since been included in the IK Holiday Gifts 2006 issue. Vicki does wonderful things with mitred squares. The sachet makes a lovely small gift or stocking stuffer. Mine are stuffed with lavender, and this year I get to keep one.

Do you remember this from last May? I got 4 oz. of silk/wool and a canary wood Bosworth Featherweight spindle at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. Between May and September, I happliy spindled the fiber. I loved watching the colours go by, and I love the Featherweight spindle.

As I finished each cop, I used my ball winder to wind the yarn over the cardboard core from a roll of toilet paper. I numbered all the cores so that I could maintain the colour sequence. I can see that I'm going to have fun with #4. I used plenty of masking tape to hold the core to the ball winder after that one.

The singles ended up being 80 wpi.

Now I am Navajo plying the singles. I think I might like to make an entrelac scarf with this yarn if it's not too fine. It will likely plump up a bit after it has been washed.

My best wishes to everyone for a warm and joyful holiday season. May you all have time to enjoy your fibery pursuits.

Red red red

Anybody know the little old children's book Ann Likes Red? "Red red red." "'Red,' said Ann."

The color is off a little but you can see that it is very red.

Here is a detail. I have a new camera and was playing with what it can do with no flash - but I couldn't find the white balance button so the color is off here too.

I have 2 balls of yarn left, enough for a hat or scarf. The sweater is blocking now, and alpaca takes forever to dry, so in use pictures will follow next week. It blocked out nicely to exactly the size it was supposed to. The boat neckline turned out to be surprisingly flukey - we shall see when it's worn whether or not I managed to get rid of the flukeyness.

I started the 'Spinners Shawl', Evelyn Clark's new design for Fibertrends, which I was able to find at Two Swans. I had some handspun that I didn't know what to do with, we'll see how it takes to this pattern. I probably should be knitting it on large needles, but I just don't feel like using anything bigger than size 8, and it's my knitting, dammit!

Not so much

Well it seems I knitted like mad all week, and don't have much of anything blogworthy. I finished the back of Marseilles. It looks just exactly like the front. I started a sleeve. It looks pretty much like 4 inches of nothing. I finished another bobbin of brown bluefaced leicester. It's not plyed.

I finished Emily's socks.

She's delighted because they're kind of soft and they're her favorite color. Aside from that, the best that can be said about them is that she will outgrow them by next winter. I hated the yarn - hated knitting with it, hated the blue marks on my fingers that I started to get when I got into the later part of the ball, hated it. I put the socks through the washer before she wore them and it did give them a little more body, but obviously this yarn was a Mistake that ended up on discount. Buyer beware... The leftovers are going into the trash, and I need to waft an apology out to the Knitswapper that I sold a bunch of this yarn to (whoever they are). Sorry! I had no idea.

I started a new sock. This is Fleece Artist (fat version) and the 'Feather and Fan' sock from the old XRX Socks socks socks book.

I think they're going to be really neat looking.

To make up for not having much of anything to post today, here's a shot of the sock tray in my cedar chest.

Really reaching, aren't I??

Socks, and so forth

If you measured in socks, I think I would come out looking like I'd had a productive year.

(If you measured in the cleanliness/absence of dust bunnies under my bed, as you can see, I would not come out looking so good...)

These are the Jaywalker socks in Lisa's Emerald City Sock! and I could not wait to get them on and wear them. The color is just fantastic, it looks great in all different kinds of lighting.

I really did all I could to botch up this pattern. I intentionally narrowed the leg by 8 stitches halfway down, because I knew I needed them to be narrower around my ankles, and I am glad I did. If you tend to have skinny ankles, the 76 stitch circumference will just be too much for you, despite the zigzag.

Then, I unintentionally left too many stitches on the sole. You are supposed to continue the gusset decreases past where you end up with the same number of stitches on each needle again, so that there are fewer stitches in the sole (to compensate for the inelastic and zigzaggy upper). I forgot. I just quit when I had the initial number of stitches on the sole needles, because that is just what you DO when you make socks. I think it turned out ok, because I was already running a total of 8 stitches smaller around than the pattern. Also you are supposed to slip a stitch at each side of the sole, to carry the appearance of the leg down the sides of the foot. I occasionally forgot. But it all looks just fine anyhow.

I have the foot of Emily's second sock to get done but I am already plotting my next socky move.

This is the 'feather and fan' pattern from the old XRX book Socks Socks Socks, and a hank of Fleece Artist sock yarn ('fat' version). I think feather and fan can support a wild and crazy handpainted yarn, and the fatter gauge yarn might help with the general inelasticity of feather and fan stitch. Complaint about the yarn: why didn't they bother to print yardage on the label? or weight? or SOMETHING? Nothing to indicate how much you're getting. I find this annoying.

I finished the back (or front) of Marseilles, and started on the front (or back).

I just love this yarn and it's so cozy to sit down and knit with it at the end of a day.

The pattern has a 'boat neck' with a garter edge, which is part of why I like it: none of that boring crew neck or tall bothersome turtleneck stuff going on here. When you put the shoulder stitches on holders, it tells you to put 11 for the smallest two sizes. I counted off the 11 stitches and thought - that can't be right. The photo in the magazine is labeled as showing the 38 inch size so I looked to see if I could tell where her shoulder seams end, and it is pretty clear to me that there are more than 11 stitches joined together at the shoulders of that sweater. So I put 17 on the holder (the number they tell you to hold for the larger sizes). I like the neck shape but I would like it to be a little more closed up. I think if it turns out that I am not happy with it, it will be pretty easy to change - at the top of the knitted piece, you knit 4 or 5 rows of garter stitch all the way across, then hold the shoulders and bind off the center, so I can always just undo the bindoff and take a few more stitches into it.

I am about 1/3 of the way done with the second piece, and I realize that the sleeves will be deadly boring - no cabling on them, just the simple K1P4 ribbing. I fear progress will slow down significantly once we get to that little bit of deadliness.