Socks

I nearly always have multiple projects on the needles, some easy and some requiring more thought. Things don’t get much simpler than a garter stitch scarf:

Pattern: what pattern? it’s all garter stitch
Yarn: 2.5 skeins Trendsetter Yarns Horizon, 70% cotton, 30% nylon, color 8
Needles: US size 10.5
Size: 5.5″ wide x 78″ long
Started 3/25 and finished 4/4/2010

Garter stitch is perfect for knitting on the bus. The coloring reminds me of Neapolitan ice cream, except a little pale for that. The yarn is old, not in Ravelry or Yarndex. I’d guess at least 12 years old: it’s leftovers from an old friend, sent to me in February via a mutual friend at Stitches West. Horizon is an interesting frayed-looking woven ribbon:

My complicated project was a pair of lace socks for me. With all the ripping and re-knitting, these took nearly two months to complete. Fortunately, so much repetition meant I memorized the stitch pattern very quickly so these were good bus knitting whenever I was on a roll on a particular section. They blocked quite nicely:

Pattern: own
Stitch Pattern: Little Arrowhead Lace (from Barbara Walker’s first Treasury, page 193, except I added a second purl stitch between motifs
Yarn: 2.25 ounces (skein is 4 ounces) Fearless Fibers sock yarn, 100% superwash merino wool, rainbow-dyed colorway Robin’s Egg; white reinforcement thread at heels and toes
Needles: US size 1
Started 2/11 and finished 4/9/2010

Fearless Fibers is a dyer I found on Etsy; in fact, my first Etsy purchase. She has terrific customer service. I don’t know what her sock yarn base is. It’s quite a bit thinner than what I’m used to working with. Her skeins are 550 yards to 112g (4oz) and most commercial yarns I’ve used are around 425 yards to 100g. This meant I had to work with size 1s instead of size 2s, not a big deal.

Mmm… pretty blue close-up:

In cooking news, I used the bread machine to make whole wheat pizza dough a few weeks ago. Brilliant! I don’t know why I never thought of it before. Since I was at it, I made enough for two pizzas. Here’s the result, pizza #1 on the left, hot from the oven, and #2 waiting to go in.

Yes, I cannot make a perfect circle unless it’s a shawl or hat crown.

I took today off work to try to regroup a bit mentally and found it’s actually warm outside. So I went for a short walk in the park and it felt so strange to not need a sweater or jacket. While I was out, I noticed a lot of green on the other folks out and about. All the kids in a large school group outside the Conservatory of Flowers were wearing shamrocks. Aha, mystery solved. I had completely forgotten today is St. Patrick’s Day. I did not wear green but last night’s and this morning’s knitting were a swatch for the Colette Cardigan [Ravelry link] with the Brooks Farm Four Play:

Dark and horrible photo despite the sunshine streaming in. Yarn is quite lovely in real life.

See, you don’t need to pinch me, it’s green! It’s also a nice, big swatch. I optimistically cast on the entire width of the back and worked the first 6 inches so I could see what the yarn does. It goes so quickly on size 8 needles; my other current projects are on sizes 1 and 4. Since it’s warm inside, too, (75 degrees!) I washed the swatch and am letting it dry to see what the blocked gauge is. It will probably actually dry today instead of in 4 or 5 days. While I wait for that, I set up my Excel worksheet that will recalculate all the numbers in the pattern. All I have to do once it’s dry is to re-measure, then stick my stitch gauge in cell C12 and my row gauge in cell D12 and I’ll have my calculations all the way through. I just hope I have enough yarn for this one.

Speaking of enough yarn, I most certainly do NOT have enough to magic a baby blanket out of the Creatively Dyed Yarn Fatima. This is what I have:

It’s 36″ wide, about standard width for a baby blanket. But only 5″ tall with the current tier unfinished and I stuck the remaining yarn on the scale and learned I have used over a third of it already. Unless someone near and dear delivers a baby snake (unlikely, right?), this isn’t going to work. I also don’t want to buy 4 more balls of this yarn because I don’t want to make a $200 blanket. Back to the drawing board. The yarn is wonderful, so perhaps a little kimono-style cardigan.

Socks are coming along slowly, with lots of cursing as I re-knit the heel of sock one 3 times trying to get it the right width to fit me:

I stuck my name in an online anagram generator a long time ago and learned my first name rearranges to spell REKNITS. Fitting, isn’t it? I guess I was destined to be a perfectionist knitter.

Today was all about errands and dough. Besides the usual weekend errands I ran an extra one to pick up buttons for the fuchsia sweater that I finally, finally did the finishing work on this morning and heel reinforcement thread for my socks in progress. Here’s the sweater, unblocked, with buttons not yet sewn on:

The pink and purple buttons ImagiKnit had didn’t quite work so I went with yellow ones that pop nicely. And even though Stitches West is next week and I’m saving my money for that, I ended up not leaving the shop without a bit of yarn. It went with me to the bank and the library, then posed for this photo:

That’s Malabrigo Lace for those of you who were wondering.

I realize you’ve been seeing a lot of green, blue, and brown projects here lately. I didn’t even notice I was doing this until I saw all my projects lined up in Ravelry. So for a change of color, I’ll show you the little socks that also got done this week:

Pattern: own (I cast on 28 for the smaller sock and 36 for the larger one, then made a sock)
Yarn: Zitron Trekking XXL Sport, 75% wool, 25% nylon, color 1454
Needles: US size 1
Size: infant and bigger infant
Started 1/29 and finished 2/11/2010

There rest of today was devoted to dough. I turned out a loaf of shredded wheat whole wheat bread and made dough logs for chocolate cookies rolled in pistachios and rum spice cookies:

I plan to bake them tomorrow. I have no idea what possessed me to make so many cookies this weekend but they freeze and keep well so it’s not a problem. The chocolate ones are supposed to be sandwich cookies with a chocolate frosting between them but for the sake of my girlish figure I think I’ll stick with plain cookies. Plus I’ll have twice as many that way.

Tonight I have to work on my Stitches West homework. It won’t take very long.

The Jolly Green Giant will not get his socks because I have unraveled and started again, this time using a modified version of Little Arrowhead Lace, a pattern that I have also seen called Gull Wings. The sock and I went to the park today and looked at the garden of absent dahlias:

It was warm today, I’d say close to 70 even though the forecast was for 62. And there I was inappropriately warmly dressed because it was still only 61 indoors so I assumed it was colder outside and I couldn’t take off my sweater because what I was wearing under my shirt didn’t work. Sloppy dressing, even on the weekend, isn’t a good idea. So I took my 1.5-hour walk and took a shady break a couple of times to admire all the turtles out in every body of water. I only saw one turtle swimming; the rest were all sunning themselves on rocks and logs. They are probably just as happy as I am for a break in the rain. There was a huge crowd buying tickets outside the Academy of Sciences today so I didn’t go in. I was really looking forward to sitting and knitting in front of the coral reef tank but I don’t like to go when it’s super-crowded. Ah, well. Next time.

The sock and I walked over to see the poppies more closely instead:

Then we went home and relaxed with a beer and watched the biathlon and luge events on TV.

It’s been a while. And the reason for that is that here at MmmYarn I have had a whole bunch of knitting failure. Go figure. All these years of experience and this is where I am, at total knitting system collapse. It’s discouraging.

All right, before I get into all that, I guess I did do one thing right in the past month. I finally brought myself to finish the little hat that Mr. MmmYarn started last May, when he asked me to teach him to knit when he was practically crawling up the walls with boredom being cooped up all the time. I had him make a garter stitch band and then work in the round up the body. Last week I finished the last 7 rounds of the body and the crown and sewed that little seam at the band.

Pattern: Mr. MmmYarn’s own
Yarn: Mountain Colors Weaver’s Wool Quarters, color: Huckleberry (how very Nelson Munz)
Needles: size 6
Size: infant
Started 5/5/2009 and finished 2/2/2010

Matt always did have great taste in yarn and colors and his stitches are wonderfully even. He wanted to donate this to the hospital as a chemo cap but they won’t take this where I inquired so I am going to add it to the Afghans for Afghans pile. He would be OK with that.

How bad can the rest of it be, you ask? Here is the list.

The secret fuchsia pullover project is still in progress. Yes, still. I can’t believe it, either. I wove in all sleeve and body ends and made a neckline with facing. 4 times! The first time I had the decreases and increases reversed, increasing where I should have decreased and vice versa. So rip rip rip it went and I started again. And made the same mistake a second time. Gah! So out it went and this time I got the shaping right. Only now I had too many stitches on the neck and not enough on the body and everything was weirdly askew before I even noticed the problem. Out one more time. Do you want to see what I ended up with? It looks pretty good with its solid fuchsia lining:

So I guess not a total failure, but definitely a time-suck. Now it’s in the procrastination pile because I dislike putting buttonhole stitch around buttonholes. I am hopeless. That kid is getting bigger by the minute.

The little brown and blue double knitted hat that was coming along so slowly suddenly got faster when I got out of the double knitting part. The problem is my gauge toward the end of the pattern chart, where only a couple of stitches were in the pattern and the rest were all one solid color or another, is completely off the rest of the hat. It looks ridiculous and is sitting in the pile of things that need to be ripped and re-worked. I am only going to rip it to the point of major gauge change. The rest will come out in blocking.

Next up is sock failure. The first Froot Loop sock looks pretty good here, right?

Well, way way way too small for my foot. I worked about 6 inches of cuff before a try-on and that cuff will not go up over my heel. Or really anywhere near my heel. So I’ve cast on again with more stitches so I can put a separate purl stitch between each motif but the half inch I have done looks so big that I believe it might clothe the Jolly Green Giant. While he will look smashing in robin’s egg blue socks, I do want these to be my socks. I’m going to slog along for another couple of inches and if it’s still huge, I’ll redesign it to have a purl panel on the back of the leg. Or I’ll say the heck with it and make another sock with the gull wings pattern I’ve used before. We’ll see.

Bag failure is up next. The black Origami Bag is defying all attempts at being sewn together properly. It needs two little 5″ straight seams and my seams are crookeder than the squirrelly part of Lombard Street. Perhaps I’ll try drawing lines with a ruler and tailor’s chalk and see if I can manage to follow them. Or perhaps I will throw the darn thing in the garbage chute.

Non-knitting has been busy, too. The other things that kept me from writing here are more bank stuff (closing accounts for someone who is deceased is a long-term project) and I became an iPerson. I switched over to using our Mac computer because my little Windows computer is having several aggravating-but-not-fatal hardware problems that are more pricey to fix than the computer is worth. I do have Windows XP as a VMWare instance so I can keep Sweater Wizard and some of my card games and continue to play online Scrabble with my mom. There is a learning curve with the Mac: I keep using the wrong keyboard shortcuts and doing things I don’t mean to do. I will figure it out.

Oh, one more small thing is done. I managed a tiny sock. Yep, just one. It needs a mate. Sigh.

2009 is sure wrapping up quickly. I don’t really want to greet 2010 without Mr. MmmYarn but the cosmos don’t exactly give a person a choice in these matters, so I put the champagne in to chill and bought a bottle of crème de cassis so I can make kir royale, my New Year’s Eve drink of choice. And the eve after and at least one more after, if not two, because there’s only so much booze I can drink in a sitting whether I’m trying to keep track of a pattern or not.

Now, Stollen, on the other hand, is something I can eat a lot of in one sitting. I did make my Stollen the other day and it turned out well. Here is half of it:

The key to its great flavor is to soak the raisins in rum for a week before baking your Stollen. My raisins soaked for a month so they were super-tasty. This year I added a bit of orange zest left over from the San Diego Sunshine bread and it added a subtle new flavor that went wonderfully with the rumminess:

Lest you think this has become an alcohol-fueled blog (sheesh, I had Glühwein in my last post, now champagne and rum in this one), I have to tell you I did get my exercise and vitamins yesterday. I trekked to two different drug stores, searching for contact lens solution to use up the last of my FSA dollars for 2009. The second (and final) one I went to was on Clement Street. The ethnic markets there always yield some interesting items. The market I went to had dragon fruit again so I picked one up as a treat:

So very tasty for my well-deserved snack after walking at least 6 miles, nearly half of it with a full backpack. And beautiful, too; the interior contrasts nicely with the exterior:

I don’t know how the Vietnamese (my fruit came from Vietnam, its little label said) eat their dragon fruits, but I use a spoon to eat the white parts out of the peel.

Today I’ve been cleaning up my filing cabinet. Did a lot of paper shredding. I also scrubbed my bathtub yet again, something I’ve been doing probably twice a week out of pure enjoyment since I made my own scrubby stuff. Last month I checked out “The Urban Homestead” from the library and while many of the suggestions I can’t implement where I live (no garden or chickens for me), I can use the natural cleansers. I followed the instructions and mixed baking soda and liquid castile soap into a paste, then added about half a teaspoon of peppermint extract from the baking shelf. My tub is minty fresh and sparkling clean when I’m done. My hands are minty and don’t have that horrible dry feel I get after using commercial cleansers. Plus the scrubbing part is far easier, requiring much less labor than I needed when using my usual generic Ajax/Comet-like stuff. I’m sold! Yes, the rest of the place is in the same mess it’s always in. I guess if I were to have a visitor I’d have to show the bathtub last or else it will show up everything else.

Anyway, you didn’t come here for culinary exotica or cleaning tips. This blog is about yarn and I have been knitting.

First up, a hat for a good friend who’s going through a rough time. She made herself one of these hats, then remarked to me in November that she had bought some black yarn to make a second one but wasn’t looking forward to slogging through 40″ of ribbing. I volunteered to be the slogger and she gave me the yarn.

I guess I don’t need to buy a hat form if the 8-pound exercise ball doesn’t mind being a model.

Pattern: Esprit Chemo Turban by Ann Cannon-Brown
Yarn: 2.33 skeins Cascade Fixation, 98.3% cotton, 1.7% elastic, color 8990
Needles: size 7
Size: adult
Started 11/17 and finished 12/6/2009

It was an interesting knit because I rarely use an elasticized yarn. I started with size 9 needles and my gauge was far too small. I also didn’t like the feel of the yarn on needles that size. With too small gauge you usually go up in needle size to correct the problem. However, I know my knitting style so I went down to size 7 and found that got me bigger gauge and was more comfortable because I was no longer fighting with the yarn. Go figure. She says the hat fits her perfectly and I delivered it right in time for her to wear it to a holiday party.

Next up, the latest brown socks for my mom (must get better photo in daylight when I next visit):

Pattern: Sam by Cookie A., as published in Sock Innovation
Yarn: Cascade Yarns Heritage Hand-Painted Sock Yarn, 75% merino superwash, 25% nylon, color 9931
Needles: size 1 (ugh)
Started 10/28 and finished 12/12/2009

I picked this pattern because my mom wears short shoe-like hiking boots and therefore can wear socks with a heavily-textured pattern on the cuff. Any stitch pattern up the ankle would probably be uncomfortable on someone with tall hiking boots. I hear she is the envy of her hiking friends, having seamless and custom-made socks.

Pattern modifications… maybe. I don’t really know. I worked the cuff pattern as written, then stopped reading the pattern and did my usual heel and foot.

The last item for today is the Noro scarf I had on the needles for ages, modeled by Sancho Panza:

Pattern: garter stitch with a yarn over row every 5th row
Yarn: Noro Kureyon Sock Yarn, 70% wool, 30% nylon, color S102
Needles: size 3
Finished size: 7″ x 68″
Started 11/9 and finished 12/18/2009

Absolutely love the highlighter pink and yellow in this scarf. I am tempted to keep it; for now, it will go in the sale box and we’ll see if I fish it out of there.

Up tomorrow: hats!

Sunday warmed up a lot after I posted the blocking photos and the shawl dried very quickly so I took it for a walk in the park in the afternoon. The weather obliged by being almost perfectly still most of the time and the clocks hadn’t changed yet, making for some great light.

We took a short walk around the area in front of the Academy of Sciences:

And continued on the walkway around the Music Concourse:

And stopped at a park bench on the way home so you could get another good look at the crocheted bind-off edging:

Pattern: Peacock Feathers Shawl by Dorothy Siemens, available from Fiddlesticks Knitting
Yarn: 2/3 skein JaggerSpun Zephyr Wool-Silk 2/18 lace weight (2/3 of 150g ball, 1665 yards), 50% merino wool, 50% tussah silk, color: Peacock (what else?)
Needles: size 4 Addi Turbo lace needles and size E crochet hook for border
Finished size: 78″ across top, 41″ straight up the middle, 56″ each side
Started 10/2 and finished 10/25/2009

For the sake of accuracy here, I looked up the Cervantes statue that’s in Golden Gate Park, the one I use for hat photos sometimes. I always call it the Cervantes statue even though I know only the disembodied head at the top of the sculpture is the man himself. I wanted to know who it was kneeling at his feet. I give you Don Quixote with his buddy Sancho Panza. Don is the one cross-dressed for a night out:

I got some amused looks from passersby when they saw me staging that one. The wind had picked up and I took about 45 shots trying to get one that didn’t have the shawl flapping in the breeze so I was there a while.

The pink blob grows, slowly, slowly, on the bus. I had to wad it up to make it an unrecognizable blob for its photo shoot (recipient views my Flickr feed):

I don’t know if I have enough yarn to finish this. Pout. Which means I’m working on it more slowly, as though I don’t want to find out for sure that I don’t have enough yarn. I frequently find myself doing this when it looks like I’m fighting a losing knitting battle. I know working more slowly makes the yarn last longer, calendar-wise, but doesn’t make it go any further in a project. It’s my irrational knitting thing and the reason there are 5 sweaters in progress for me in the apartment on which I have not made any progress in months or even years.

Yardage surety is a great thing: the last (or perhaps I should say latest, in case she decides she wants more) of a series of hiking socks for my mom is also underway:

It has been warm here this week. Even bordering on hot for this time of year with temperatures going up into the high 60s, such a relief after weeks of shivering in our apartment. This means I have great light for photographing finished knits. Mr. MmmYarn and I went for a short walk in the park yesterday and this was my view:

These socks are bright and crazy, just like I like them:

Pattern: own
Yarn: nearly 1 full skein Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks That Rock lightweight, 100% superwash merino wool, colorway: Rockstar
Needles: size 1
Size: women’s size 9.5
Started 9/12/2008, unraveled and re-started several times so real start date for this version of the pair is 12/22/2008, and finished 1/12/2009

This is my first and only skein of Socks That Rock and the yarn does rock: it’s soft and comfortable, easy to work with and feels sturdy even though there’s no nylon content. I hope they wear well. Do these look like the feet of a Rockstar to you?

I tried a brimmed 3×3 spiral rib hat and I like how the folded-up brim slants in the opposite direction of the body of the hat:

Pattern: own
Yarn: about 4/5 a skein of Cascade 220 Quatro, 100% Peruvian highland wool, color 9440
Needles: size 5
Size: adult small
Started 1/14 and finished 1/16/2009

The Quatro yarn is interesting: each of the four plies is a different color. To my eye it reads as a dark pink/purple overall when I look at it from far away, but the plies are fuchsia, salmon, lime green, and dark purple.

Spinning is coming along slowly, as usual. I have one more singles of purple to finish before plying:

And I unraveled the yoke of my Icelandic pullover this morning, hoping to focus on fixing that this weekend, because I know it will get cold again.

The bright blue socks are done. After all the unraveling and reknitting, and I really and truly did not have enough yarn to finish the toes the first time around, I have a bit of JitterBug left over:

Go figure. Anyway, I like these a lot. JitterBug’s color variegation obscures the Railway Stitch pattern a little, but I enjoyed making them and found they were worth the effort.

They fit Mr. MmmYarn perfectly:

Pattern: Gentleman’s Sock in Railway Stitch by Nancy Bush, published in Knitting Vintage Socks
Yarn: 1 skein Colinette JitterBug, 100% superwash wool, color 16
Needles: size 1
Started May 16, 2008 and finished June 4, 2008

This is the first pattern I have used in Knitting Vintage Socks. I like how the pattern is written. Some sock patterns use the numbered needle system, giving all instructions in relation to needle #1, #2, and #3 (and sometimes #4). I don’t number my needles so I find those kinds of instructions bewildering. This pattern uses the “work x number of stitches” approach which is what makes sense to me.

The instructions call for 81 stitches for the cuff and some leg decreases. After three starts, I reduced the enormously huge cuff to only 63 stitches, then decreased down to 60 for the leg. I had initially worked the pattern’s leg shaping in the first sock but that made the leg way too tight, so I ripped back to the cuff and made the leg without the shaping. I used my usual knit 1, slip 1 heel and ended up working the foot on 60 stitches. Hey, whatever it takes to make the socks fit the recipient properly.

I am sorry to say this project is for a family member:

Pattern: Knit Chemo Cap and Scarf by Berroco, Inc.
Yarn: nearly 1 skein Berroco Chinchilla, 100% rayon, color 5567 (Note: the pattern states 2 skeins, but you need only 1 for the hat. The other skein is for the scarf in the pattern.)
Needles: size 9
Size: 19″ around and 7.5″ tall
Started 5/27/2008 and finished 5/28/2008

The yarn took over a week to get here and I felt guilty about the delay, especially as the recipient had gone hat-shopping recently and it was a bust, and I finally had something I knew I could do that would be useful to her. Seven local yarn shops, and none of them carry it. The yarn arrived Tuesday and I swatched and cast on that night, then knitted the whole thing save the bind-off round on the bus yesterday. I mailed it off to her this morning. I hope it fits. She is doing pretty well, but the circumstances still mean she will need a hat (or a few hats) for a while yet.

While I wait for her to receive hat #1 and comment on its fit, I put in some work on re-knitting Mr. MmmYarn’s socks. Sock #1 is nearing the toe, then I need to unravel sock #2. I won’t bore you with photos as they look nearly exactly the same as they did a few days ago when you last saw them.