Booties

I have been knitting on. Not a whole lot, but I managed a pair of booties and a scarf these past few weeks:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Regia 4-Faedig Jubilee Color, 75% wool, 25% nylon, color 5471
Needles: size 2
Size: newborn to about 9 months
Started 10/4 and finished 10/12/ 2008

Pattern: own
Yarn: Opal Hundertwasser, 75% wool, 25% nylon, color 19956 (Hundertwassers Werk 650, “Der Blaue Mond”)
Needles: size 3
Size: 4.5″ x 73″
Started 10/12 and finished 11/1/2008

I have also put in a respectable amount of work on Mystery Stole 2008; I’m halfway through clue #4. I have resisted the temptation to look at any finished pictures so I can enjoy the mystery as I go along.

This coming Friday is the staff craft sale at my work and I am attempting to organize for it today. My computer is being fussy today so it’s slow going. I have participated in this sale every year I have worked at this place and it’s how I fund my annual trips to Stitches West. However, something has come up this Friday that means I won’t be able to man my table, so I’ve asked a co-worker and friend, The Kneedler, to man it in addition to hers. So today I’m trying to pare down the pile to something more manageable to not saddle her with too much stuff, yet I want it to be enough that it generates enough Stitches West income. Decisions, decisions.

We didn’t make a jack o’lantern this year so the pumpkin dressed up for Halloween:

Next week it will be soup! The pumpkin, not the scarf.

Wow. I do try to post more frequently but every once in a while life gets in the way. I’m glad I ran out and snapped photos yesterday evening just before sunset because today the thick fog and heavy wind would have prevented good picture taking.

Last week’s bus booties are finally done. The nearby cafe has those silver tables you frequently see my knitting posed on, but the fellow there had just packed those up so I made do with an obliging mailbox. I won’t tell you how often the wind skittered those little booties right off the curved edge of the mailbox. Mmm… bright booties in jelly-candy colors:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Zitron Trekking XXL, 75% superwash wool, 25% nylon, color 158
Needles: size 2
Size: newborn - 6 months
Started 7/3 and finished 7/14/2008

This Trekking XXL seems slightly thinner than other Trekking XXL I have used. I usually use size 2 needles, and did for these booties, but for the Jaywalkers I made a few months ago I ended up going down to size 1s. These booties will hit the washer and the dryer tomorrow so they can tighten up a little.

We visted Mr. MmmYarn’s parents over the weekend. They live just outside the same town I lived in until I moved here 6 years ago. That town used to have a yarn shop but that one closed in 1999. By coincidence, I ran into the former shop’s owner at the local farmers’* market on Saturday morning, and as she also ran the knitting group I used to attend and knows how gung-ho I am about knitting in public and with others, she told me about knitting and beer that afternoon in the garden behind a new shop that opened in past year or so. Well, now, I couldn’t pass that up, could I? I couldn’t have any of the wonderful-looking home-brewed beer (driving, you know) on that warm afternoon but did find a consolation prize (Click for big, as usual. This skein is quite pretty):

Plus I got to catch up with 2 people from the old gang. Very nice indeed.

Lest you think I’ve been a lazy knitter, making only a pair of booties since my last post, I did knit an entire scarf out of some of my handspun but it’s too short so I need to frog and re-think the thing, plus I started the Apres Surf Hoodie:

The yarn is Baruffa Aerobic and it’s a very brilliant spearmint green; the dull color here was caused by the sun dipping down below the tops of the buildings a minute too early. That big line on the right sleeve is where I blocked my sleeve/swatch, which turned out to be exactly the gauge I needed so I put it back on the needles and forged ahead.

In family news, the little baby surprise jacket I made of Tofutsies back in March and the matching booties I made in April have a wearer to go with them as of very early Tuesday morning.

* I see this written as “farmers,” “farmer’s,” and “farmers’,” and I never know which one’s right. They all could be, I suppose, depending upon your interpretation of the phrase.

Today’s post is a mish-mash of what I’ve been working on for the past week or so.

The Shetland yarn saga continues. I received the new Jamieson’s Spindrift skein I ordered and worked on swatching some more. The new stuff felt slightly thicker than the old (Mr. MmmYarn did the twist-the-strands-around-each-other trick and I confirmed with my eyes shut that the new stuff is a little thicker) and also worked up to fewer stitches and rows to the inch. But still not what I need. Tonight I measured my swatches and as I write this they are going for a swim so I can measure them after blocking, too. Perhaps one of them will turn out to be the gauge I need. Obligatory swatch photo:

I also swatched with the Black Water Abbey yarn with hopes of turning it into a Must Have Cardigan. Here is the blocked swatch:

Neither yarn is working up to the needed gauge exactly, which means either more swatching or more math. Or perhaps I Must NOT Have this cardigan. At least not with this yarn.

On Saturday, Mr. MmmYarn and I went to my stepsister-in-law’s baby shower. I knew I was going to give her the Tofutsies Baby Surprise for the little guy but had to whip up another pair of matching booties quickly on Thursday. She liked them and the sweater, too:

Pattern: own
Yarn: South West Trading Company Tofutsies; 50% superwash wool, 25% Soysilk fibers, 22.5% cotton, 2.5% chitin
Needles: size 2
Size: newborn to 6 months

Last Saturday (gads, 11 days ago already) Mr. MmmYarn and I went to the open house at A Star Alpacas. I have to say it was a long drive for not much bang. The drive was 2.5 hours each way and we were done there in about 30 minutes but stretched it to about 45 with the bit of shopping. The animals were lovely and the owner allowed us to get up close and personal with the females and youngsters in their pen. I counted 29 but they kept moving around, so give or take a few:

One female and one male were not shorn yet. They were scheduled to go to a show, but the owners heard of an illness going around so the alpacas stayed home and will be sheared in the next few weeks sometime. Here’s how fluffy an alpaca is when not sheared:  

They were generally more interested in food than in us:

One approached me and touched her nose briefly to my hand but when I lifted my hand in an attempt to pat her side, her ears went back and I took that as a warning and stepped back. The owner explained they don’t really like to be petted. That was OK, as I am OK with going along with whatever makes an animal comfortable. Pretty much I held still and watched them and Mr. MmmYarn worked the camera and watched his back:

This one is a mother-child photo. The owner explained to me that usually when they breed a white female with a white male they get white offspring, but with the other colors it’s sometimes a surprise:

The male alpacas were in separate enclosures on the other side of the barn. They came up to the fence but did their best to stay just out of reach:

All of the animals were a little eager to get out of their areas as they usually go to pasture for part of the day, but because of the expected human visitors they were kept in their pens. I was a little disappointed by the open house, or by my expectation of an open house. I definitely enjoyed seeing the animals and I still am enjoying sticking my hand in the bag of fiber I bought, but I had hoped for something more. What, exactly, I’m not sure. Perhaps information about their daily care or what goes into selecting who goes to a show, or some walking around the farm. The owners were both very available to answer questions but I wasn’t sure which questions to ask.  

California gold country is pretty, though, so it made for pleasant scenery for about the last 45 minutes on the way there and the first 45 minutes on the way home. I haven’t been there since I was a kid.

Non-alpacas:

On the road:

This week on the bus I am knitting on yet another purse to be felted (sorry, no photos, as this is the one I hope to get published eventually) and I also worked on ply 4 of my planned 4-ply merino and silk yarn. What a busy week!

I really don’t want to bore my tiny audience of readers by constantly showing the same project rendered in a different color, but the past week dictated small, portable, mindless projects so you will need to suffer through yet another pair of booties. These are the ones I started during jury duty on Monday:

Pattern: own
Yarn: South West Trading Company Tofutsies; 50% superwash wool, 25% Soysilk fibers, 22.5% cotton, 2.5% chitin
Needles: size 2
Size: newborn to 6 months

The colors pooled a little at the tops but I find the way the colors are blended makes interestingly variegated pools.

I got back to working on the green fuzzy sweater I began in late January. I let it languish for a few weeks for two reasons.

(1) I was neurotically obsessed with making baby items when I heard we are going to have two new babies in the family. Now that I’ve come to my senses and realized I have months to go (and have made 3 baby sweaters already), I am back to working on the WIP pile.

(2) I had to do sleeve calculations and for some reason any step requiring calculations causes me to think yick and throw a project aside. It makes no sense. I am not afraid of math; got the Math Award in high school, even. I think it’s more a fear of making something not fit and having it be my fault. If someone else (as in a published pattern) has done the math then I can’t go wrong, right? The calculations took all of 5 minutes one evening and I started my sleeves.

The barely-visible-in-this-photo white threads you see where the sleeves begin are my lifelines, in case I need to rip back:

And I am very glad I put them in, as I have used the right one twice already. I finished the right sleeve a few weeks ago… after knitting and frogging it twice. On the first go I picked up the stitches and knitted away, cursing how hard it was. After at least 90 painfully slow minutes, I noticed the stitches were rather a lot smaller than they were in the sweater body. Yep, I used a smaller needle to pick up the stitches and forgot to switch to larger ones on the next row. Rrrrrip.

Second go, I knitted down to the end of the skein and thought, “wow, that sleeve sure is narrow.” I had calculated that I needed to decrease 20 stitches total, so 2 stitches every 10 rounds. Somehow my brain converted that to “1 stitch every 10 rounds, but I’m decreasing 2 each time so 2 stitches every 5 rounds” even though on the paper in front of me I had it written down correctly. What a doofus. Rrrrrip again. If it weren’t so long ago, those Math Award people might show up on the doorstep and strip me of that honor.

Last night I managed to bring the left sleeve down to the length of the right one without mishap. Whew! Perhaps I do have the minimum amount of intelligence required to knit. Right now the sweater is hanging on a chair so those sleeves can grow all they want before I put in the last couple of inches. Berroco Memoirs is such a light yarn that the swatch did not stretch but past experience with mohair means I don’t trust this yarn not to grow once it’s worked up in sweater size.

Jury duty ran pretty much all day yesterday. Oddly, they called in the bulk of the potential jurors rather early on, but for the remaining 7 of us it was just sitting around and listening to the nice folks say “we don’t need you yet” every couple of hours. By lunchtime I finished a quarter of my book and had this:

By the time my group was finally excused at 3:20pm I had finished more than half my book, finished the dark teal booties, and had another bootie more than half done. The finished ones look like this:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Lang Yarns JaWoll Superwash; 75% superwash wool, 18% nylon, 7% acrylic; color 83.0088
Needles: size 2
Size: newborn to 6 months

I had hoped to make another lace scarf yesterday but swatching late Sunday night just didn’t work out, so booties it was. I still don’t know what to do with the yarn I intended for the scarf. It is a single 250-yard skein of Louet Sales Kidlin Pixie and because of the linen content it’s stiff so I’m having a hard time deciding what to do with it. I have a feeling nothing is going to look too nice until it is washed and blocked. It’s going to go back in the stash for now.

As far as the blog is concerned, the time change is great. It means I can take photos of finished and in progress items after work and not only on weekends.

I made these washcloths on the fly while riding the bus during February:

Patterns: own
Yarn: Louet Sales Euroflax Originals, 100% linen, black is color 18-2223-17, pink is 18-1234-1
Needles: size 4

The patterns are one of each color in knit-purl 4×4 basketweave, one black in garter stitch with a yarn over edging (that doesn’t show at all in the photo), and one pink in garter stitch with knit 4, yarn over, knit 2 together every other row.

I had mentioned before how the linen is tough on my hands. It’s amazing how much softer and pliable these washcloths got after running through the washer and dryer. I sent the striped scarf through, too, to make it more attractive to a recipient/buyer. All of these items needed a steam blocking afterward as they were a bit rumpled.

It makes me wonder whether in future I should send the linen hanks through the washer and dryer before trying to knit with them. That would be easier on my hands, I should think. I frequently send hanks of cotton through both cycles (after securely tying them in 8 places and putting them in a lingerie bag) before knitting with them. Linen can’t be any different, but please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

Also done this week – purple baby booties:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Brown Sheep Wildfoote, 75% washable wool, 25% nylon, color Sy-17 Purple Splendor
Needles: size 2
Size: newborn to 9 months

We had cold rains again just a week ago (I got soaked walking to the car at Stitches West) but this week the magnolia (?) tree in the park seems to think it is finally spring:

Spring means maybe getting a new short-sleeved shirt. Neither of these is appropriate for work, but I really want a YARRRN t-shirt and I need to restrain myself as I just bought a spinning wheel t-shirt. Not to mention buying all the Stitches West goodies last week. Fortunately, the YARRRN folks are out of my size, making it easier to resist.

So very cute, as usual. Anything for wee feet tends to be cute:  

Pattern: a little smaller than my usual bootie pattern because I did not have enough yarn
Yarn: unknown sock yarn scraps I got from a friend, feels like Regia; probably 75% wool, 25% nylon
Needles: size 2
Size: newborn to 9 months

These cut it close. I have only a few inches of yarn left. It wasn’t even enough to make the little ties so I fished out some black sock yarn and made ties with that.

Mr. MmmYarn and I went to lunch yesterday in this well-known building

which houses Cafe Zoetrope

which I recommend highly. They make a mighty tasty pizza!

We walked around the North Beach neighborhood a while and found an orange cone that seemed to express a desire to have us out of Washington Square Park:

However, since Coney was near a nice green bench which provided a great background for the latest round of baby booties, we risked overstaying our welcome:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Zitron Trekking Color, 75% superwash wool, 25% nylon, color 103
Needles: size 2
Size: newborn to 9 months

The second sock for my mom is halfway done. Since she picked three different brands of yarn for her three pairs of socks, I am hoping to have one of each pair done by next week so she can try them on.

Mr. MmmYarn and I got back from our honemoon/vacation last night. We had a fantastic time. We went to London, England, for two days, then took the train down to Dover and boarded the Marco Polo for a cruise down the Iberian Peninsula. The cruise ended in Barcelona, Spain, where we spent three days before coming home.

I did not knit very much on the trip. Our flight there left in the evening after work and I had the unusually good fortune to sleep for most of it, daytimes we were busy roaming about various cities, and evenings aboard ship were geared toward entertainment and had generally dim lights, dim enough to rule out using a chart and in some cases so dim I had no hope of finding a dropped stitch in something as simple as booties. 

I also did NOT (brace yourself) buy any yarn at all. We found only one open yarn shop, and I use the term loosely, in La Rochelle, France. The shop had about 5 varieties of eyelash novelty yarn and a couple of super-bulkies. The rest of the floor space was devoted to ribbons and sewing notions. I found yarn shops everywhere else except in London and Barcelona, and they were all closed, either for vacation or for siesta. Ah, well. Next time.

Some baby booties saw a bit of Brugge, Belgium, and also spent a day on deck while we were at sea. Here’s a typical view:

Glorious, isn’t it? We had great luck with the weather.  

I finished them the day we went to La Coruna, Spain, and photographed them in the first square we found:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Filatura di Crosa Baby Zarina, 100% superwash merino wool
Needles: size 2
Finished size: newborn to 6 months

I started a pair of socks for me, the first lace pattern I’ve ever worked in socks, but haven’t even gotten to the heel on sock #1. I worked about half of this on the bus to the Alhambra palace in Spain and the rest on the flight home. Blurry bus knitting in Spain: 

You may have noticed the wooden needles, a necessary departure from my usual metal ones. My past experiences with Heathrow airport have taught me that the Brits are more strict about inidividuals toting certain things onto an airplane, and British Airways’ customer service could not give me a definite answer on the subject, so I decided not to risk it and procured wooden needles for potential in-flight knitting.  

On board the ship I worked some on the Myrtle Leaf shawl from Victorian Lace Today. More frogging than knitting took place. I blame the swells. I’d love to blame the booze, but I rarely mix lace with alcohol, and it’s even more unlikely when the lace pattern is all action rows (no plain knit or purl rows to make life easier). I worked only 3 pattern repeats before abandoning the shawl in favor of reading. It’s not looking like much yet, so I didn’t take a photo. Also, I can’t photograph it as it’s currently residing in Mr. MmmYarn’s suitcase, which decided to board the wrong plane at Heathrow and is having fun without us in parts unknown. Heck, the layover ended up being something like 20 minutes and WE made it to the plane. What was the suitcase thinking, prolonging its vacation like this, and without us? Thank goodness for more advanced luggage tracking and barcodes; it is supposed to be delivered to the house tonight.

On board the ship, I only saw 3 other ladies knitting and one doing cross-stich. The cross-stitcher almost always had a beer…or two…or three, sometimes all at once. How on earth did she count stitches with the ship bobbing up and down while also drinking??? One of the three knitters happened to be the wife half of the couple with whom we shared our dinner table every evening. Her stash sounds much bigger than mine.

The ship part of the trip was pretty good. I only had one day of seasickness (the Bay of Biscay can get rough), meals were ample (”Food! Glorious food!” (see Ice Age 2 if you don’t understand this reference)), and the ship’s staff did a great job. We were in the possibly 2% of passengers under 60. There was one other couple in about our decade and some young college-age women who were there with either their parents or grandparents. Bingo, shuffleboard, and various card games were big draws on our days at sea. We went on only three arranged shore excursions. I was concerned about the first one as it was labeled “strenuous” and I’m not in the best of shape right now, but it was easy, even slow, going. I learned afterward that the average age of a cruiser on this type of cruise is 72 or 73. This changes the meaning of the word “strenuous”!

The other days Mr. MmmYarn and I wandered around the ports of call on our own, foraging for lunch (not easy in Spain or Portugal) and seeing the sights within walking distance of the ship.

One final thought, and I can’t stress this enough: a whole bottle of wine with your lunch is a very good thing.

Back to work tomorrow. 

P.S. on 9/17: the suitcase is here, so the Myrtle Leaf shawl is back in my possession. Hooray!

The latest little booties are done:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Fleece Artist Nova Socks, 100% merino wool, color: Sea Storm
Needles: size 2
Size: 6-9 months

This yarn is thicker than my usual sock yarn so the booties ended up larger than usual even though I used the same size needles and essentially the same pattern.

I fell off the wagon a little more last week and bought two bundles of merino, two bundles of Jacob, a bundle of Spinderella’s Creations Thrums mixed fiber, and a needle felting tool that’s been interesting to experiment with. Knit From Your Stash did permit spinning fiber… but I also picked up one sale skein of Brown Sheep Nature Spun in a beautiful teal. Yay!