cwBlog

So it's been an eventful past few weeks, and I haven't blogged. Bad me.

The Webs Tent Sale

The weekend after the New Hampshire Sheep & Wool Festival was the Webs annual Tent Sale. Years ago, in May, an optimistic woman started a yarn store in Amherst, and the endeavor that grew into celebrates each year in April and May. The high point is the Tent Sale, where they have a tent with six or seven long tables of yarn that's even cheaper than their usual closeout prices.

My acquisitions were many. It turns out that the Cascade mill misspun two huge batches of yarn: one, a rich dark charcoal grey, was meant to be Cascade 220 but was spun at a DK weight instead of a worsted weight, and another, a beautiful natural-colored yarn with Donegal flecks, was meant to be Cascade 128 but was spun at a worsted weight instead of a bulky weight. One of them -- I'd have to dig out the receipt to be sure, and I'd rather not do that because then I'd remember just how much I spent, was $15 for a bag, and the other was $20. So I got three bags of the tweedy Donegal and two bags of the charcoal, figuring that at $40-$45, I could worry about precisely what it would be later.

They also had this beautiful Ironstone yarn on sale, worsted weight, 95ish percent wool and 5ish percent acrylic. I got a bag each of two colors, one a nice patriot blue, one a naturalish white. I figured they'd make a good colorwork sweater or two, plus possibly gloves or some such. (Selbuvotter!)

Beyond that, I got two spools (totalling a kilogram) of 40/2 linen for the Rose of England tablecloth and a half-dozen balls of sock yarn.

With me that day was my friend and fraternity brother Lynne from college, a crocheter. She actually got to the sale a little bit earlier than I did, and she found a box of yarn before I showed up. She summarized the day beautifully with her description of the yarn: "It's a beautiful color, and there's a lot of it. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it, but it's 80% off."

Halcyon Yarn

So on Memorial Day weekend we went to visit Lynne and her fiancé Mark. On Friday, Mark was still at work, so Lynne, Jason, and I went off to Halcyon Yarn, which is an old yarn store in Bath, Maine. It turns out that when I was living in Bath, I drove by Halcyon twice a day, but never realized it. It's a fairly unremarkable building.

But it's full of yarn, with a warehousey area of sport and fingering weight yarn (obviously aimed at weavers, but they didn't ask what I was doing with it when they sold it to me), spinning fiber, and knitting yarns. They also had an extensive book section: they do a lot of mailorder, and so all their books are right out there on display where they can find them to ship out.

In the end, I wound up with a one-pound cone of Jaggerspun Maine Line 3-ply in a beautiful red, two two-ounce cones of Jaggerspun Maine Line 3-ply in white and navy blue, a cone of Harrisville Shetland 2-ply (which is a good fingering weight), and a one-pound batt of beautiful green wool.

Then on the way back to Lisbon, Lynne wanted to go to Staples in Brunswick, and we noticed a yarn store on the other side of the parking lot. It was a small shop, but well-stocked, and I found the old Harmony Guides 2, 3, 6, and 7 there. There was a lot of beautiful sock yarn, but the Little Voice had recovered (it apparently had laryngitis for the Tent Sale, and got lost in the complicated intersection in Bath that's around Halcyon Yarn) and said, "but we just bought sock yarn!" Still, it was a charming little shop, and I'm glad we found it.

Then there was a weekend off, and then....

Knit Camp

One of the lists I'm on tried a Knit Camp last year in Bennington, VT, and it was so much fun that they decided to do it again this year. The two hosts, Sadia and Ann, live near a hotel that has conference facilities, and they're friendly with the owners. So they get an event rate for a block of rooms, and they pay the fee to use the conference rooms, and people congregate.

This year, there was a field trip on Friday: a trip to the Green Mountain Spinnery, in Putney, VT, for a tour; to Golding Fiber Tools in Saxton's River, VT; and to Webs, in Northampton, MA. (Some of the knit campers came from Montreal and northern Vermont, and so for them Webs was not on the way to knit camp.) I fell down hard in each place; the Green Mountain Spinnery had some beautiful hanks of wool-mohair blend, in rich washed-out blues and reds (this was the theme for the day), and tweedy wool in deep rich navy blue, forest green, and cranberry red. I had looked at the spindles online -- after the impulse buy of a spindle and some fiber at New Hampshire Sheep & Wool, I was a lost cause -- but while the hand-carved and custom-painted spindles were more striking online, the solid wood spindles were more appealing in their minimalism. I bought three, in different weights and woods. Then, to Webs. Remember that I was there just three weeks ago? They had some new sock yarn, Valley Yarns Huntington, and it seemed to me like it would be perfect for a project I have in mind. And right next to it they cunningly placed some Louet Gems in sport and fingering weights, and some Trekking Pro Natura bamboo blend yarn in beautiful washed-out reds and teals. (Some of this may have been there before, but I did not see it because I was buying other stuff.)

Then I spent two days knitting and learning, but this post is long enough that I'm going to save that for another post, probably tomorrow. I've also got a few interesting things in the works that I want to blog about too....

Today was the New Hampshire Sheep & Wool Festival. After spending what I did a couple weeks back at Gore Place and the Yarn Harlot's event at Webs, I didn't think it would be wise to risk being that close to that much fiber. But then yesterday I figured - hey, I just had a birthday, I can buy myself yarn as a present!

Oddly enough -- well, perhaps not oddly, as it started a couple weeks back at Webs -- I didn't really feel like buying yarn. Don't get me wrong -- there was a lot of beautiful yarn at the festival. But when I looked at a beautiful handpainted sock yarn, the Little Voice said, "But you already have all that yarn from Knitivity that you haven't knit yet." When I looked at some lovely lace yarn, the Little Voice said, "What about all that 16/2 alpaca/silk you have from Webs that you need to knit this summer?" When I looked at some beautiful Irish yarn from The Irish Ewe, the Little Voice said, "OMG ARAN WEIGHT IRISH WOOL 8 OUNCES FOR $12," and then took a deep breath, and continued, "but we already have enough wool stashed for five sweaters, and it doesn't make sense to stash more." I did run into a vendor selling Bartlett Sport for $15 per cone, and the Little Voice started to comment that we bought 5 pounds of Bartlett Sport at Gore Place. At that point I told the Little Voice to get stuffed, because $15 a cone is more than 50% off, and 50% off is enough to rationalize the purchase even of yarns I don't like. I got a nice rich heathered mulberry purple cone and (finally, you think this would be a staple color) a beautiful rich dark not-quite-navy blue.

Oh, and I got two books. First, I saw a book specifically about knitting ganseys, one that I hadn't seen before. (Of course, once I bought it, I saw it at every vendor, though it wasn't on sale anywhere so I didn't need to kick myself.) And, in an amazing bit of serendipity, this week, someone on Ravelry recommended The Sweater Workshop by Jacqueline Fee. (I can't be more specific than that, because the only record I have is in my little black book, the notation "Sweater Workshop, J. Fee.") Well, in one of the booths, I came face to face with Jacqueline Fee herself, who cheerfully sold me an autographed copy of her book.

But neither of those is risky, or at least it isn't a new risk. I've been known to lose my sense of budget in yarn stores and bookstores before; with yarn in particular, making sure I see my stash at least once a day tends to mitigate meltdowns. There was a lot of beautiful fiber there, in the form of raw fleeces, cleaned and dyed fiber, and roving. And then it jumped out at me: the Learn to Spin Kit from Nancy's Knit Knacks. And whoops! just like that, there was a guardrail near the slippery slope, and I just vaulted over it.

So far I've produced about four yards of yarn. It's nothing to write home about, but the fourth yard is much more even than the first three, so I'm making progress. But I get the scary feeling that by the time Rhinebeck comes around, I'll be shopping for a spinning wheel. But please, no matter how rational I sound -- someone, please, stop me before I buy a sheep, OK?

So, as noted in prior posts, one of the things I picked up two weekends ago at Webs was Cat Bordhi's newish book, New Pathways for Sock Knitters, Volume 1. And one of my new projects is a Coriolis sock.

I had heard of the Coriolis pattern, but the pattern I found online when I googled for it seemed to involve knitting with two strands of Trekking XXL and doing odd things with each loop. I liked Trekking XXL, but I didn't want to have to deal with substituting fine sock yarns, and so I passed on the pattern.

(I don't remember why the double strand was important, but I remember that it served an important purpose that couldn't be substituted away. I think that in that pattern, instead of knitting into the front and back of a stitch, the instructions were to knit into each strand of the double strand. If that's the case, I clearly wasn't paying enough attention.)

Well, I have now knit two Coriolis feet and one-and-a-half Coriolis heels. Thank you, gauge denial. But I think I've learned something about socks.

See, the Coriolis pattern is simple. It's actually very similar to the Gibson heel I described in this very blog a little under a year ago. You start toe-up, you knit a tube for the foot; at a certain point, you start increasing; when you have enough stitches and the foot is long enough, you separate the instep stitches, the gusset stitches, and the sole stitches, and you short-row down on the sole to make a rounded heel; then you knit across, and back and forth on the heel, and you slip the first stitch of each heel row, and you ssk or p2tog at the end of each heel row. Eventually you've decreased back to the right number, and you resume knitting in a circle.

This is freaking brilliant. I don't know if it was original with Judy Gibson or not, but it just captures the essence of toe-up socks with a heel flap.

Now, the principal differences between the two:

The Coriolis sock benefits from a toe you can rotate. A lot of the traditional toes - the flat toe, the round toe, the short-row toe - all have a definite instep and sole side. Cat Bordhi recommends a Windmill toe, which is a cousin to the Round Toe but is rotationally symmetric. See, the band spirals around the foot, and if you knit a toe that can't be rotated, depending on your gauge, your band might crash into the side of the heel flap, never to be seen again. If you knit the toe so it can be rotated (or plan ahead well enough, and work out the whole sock ahead of time -- something I'm not averse to doing, but I didn't do it this time), you can avoid this problem and continue the spiral up around the ankle.

The increases on the Coriolis sock are what give it its character. For instance, on one of the two versions of the sock you place a marker two stitches before the end of the instep. Every round you work a kfb in the stitch following the marker; every third round you knit a k2tog a certain number of stitches in front of the marker. This increases 2 stitches every 3 rounds, as opposed to the Gibson heel's increases of 2 stitches every 2 rounds -- so you have to start the increases earlier.

(And you notice that "a certain number of stitches in front of the marker"? Well, it turns out that if you make that certain number 11, you can, in the words of the Yarn Harlot, "whack a cable down the middle of it." So I did, and the cable twining around the foot and ankle is striking. I think I may write it up as a pattern for sale -- comments welcome.)

Oh, and there's a complicated resetting-the-markers round that coincides with the last increase round, so that you rotate the sock so that the band can spiral over the top of the heel. Of all the instructions in the book, this one was the hardest for me to follow until I understood it.

Another big difference is that in the Gibson heel, after short-rowing down, I pick up the wraps and knit them as separate stitches. Cat Bordhi's heel doesn't -- she has you pick them up and knit or purl them together with the stitch they wrapped, in such a way that they're completely invisible from the outside of the sock. Once you've done that, the rest of the heel is just the same in either pattern.

Now, if you've read this far, you may think I'm saying that Cat Bordhi just copied Judy Gibson's sock pattern. That's not really what I'm saying.

Sometimes it takes a genius to look at something we all take for granted and see it for what it really is. Judy Gibson did this, and gave us her "You're Putting Me On" sock pattern, then generalized it for all sizes and gauges. Then Cat Bordhi did it and gave us the Coriolis sock.

Why don't we all look at things we take for granted more often?

So this weekend I'm going to be at a Red Sox game, and I'm either going to score the game or I'm going to knit. I think the latter is more practical.

And I may even be knitting some Red Socks, if I can get one of the current socks on the needles done in time....

So last night at my new knitting group --

First, a digression. Back before I moved, I went to a knitting circle every Monday night at the Barnes & Noble in Holyoke, MA. It was a good group of knitters, ranging from novices and people who were happiest knitting St st scarfs to people who were actively looking for new things they hadn't tried before and downloading patterns off the scary Internet. Officially it ran from 6 pm to 8 pm; practically, it ran from whenever the first knitter showed up until the B&N staff chased the last knitters out, and even then, sometimes on warm summer nights we just settled down out in the parking lot to continue. It was one of the things I missed when I moved away.

So two weeks ago I finally stopped putting it off and went to a knitting circle that meets locally, in the West Branch of the Somerville Public Library, right near Davis Square. It was a bit of a nerve-wracking thing to go to a new knitting group: sometimes they're friendly, sometimes they're cliquish; sometimes they like having men around (for variety?), sometimes they feel threatened by men intruding into a women's space; sometimes the talk is about knitting and sports and cats and pets and where to go on vacation, and other times the talk is about boyfriends and husbands and how horrible men are. I had experience of both the positive and negative sort with my fellow knitters, and especially after my prior knitting circle, I was worried about the karmic payback -- I was sure I'd have to look long and hard before I found another good knitting circle.

Well, I'd like to note for the record that I was wrong.

Anyway, on to the story:

I noticed last night, when we were all sitting around the table in the children's room of the library, that there were really two threads of conversation. About half the knitters there were women of a certain age; one was knitting a sweater, another a hat for charity, another a scarf, another was swatching for a project. The rest of us were in our 20s to mid-30s: knitting squares for a blanket, socks, more socks, a festively loud overcoat sweater knit on huge needles with a tripled strand of worsted weight. The older women were talking about children and grandchildren, and sales at A. C. Moore and Michael's; the rest of us were talking about Rhinebeck, and Webs, and where to get good self-striping sock yarn. Periodically the conversations would converge, and we'd talk about cats and ice cream.

Now, this divide isn't universal. But I think it's an indicator of how knitting has changed. For instance, charity knitting: there are people out there who spend a considerable amount of time knitting socks and hats for people in need. But if you consider just the time and effort involved, this doesn't make any sense -- you can get beautiful wool socks at L. L. Bean, superwash merino ragg wool, for $8 a pair. Does it make sense to buy sock wool, which is likely to run at least $7-$8 for a pair's worth of sock wool, and then spend hours knitting it for a stranger? If the main goal is to keep other people's feet warm, no! But this is a recent development. Until comparatively recently -- within living memory -- the only way for people to get good socks was for somebody to knit them.

(Of course I realize that the act of charity knitting has spiritual and emotional benefits for the knitter and for the recipient, but none of them are tangible; and being a practical sort, I prefer to focus on things I can measure, like the warmth and comfort of wool socks compared to the warmth and comfort of no socks.)

Knitting has changed from something people did for practical reasons to something that people do for creative and expressive reasons. And it's made that change within living memory, and you can see the record of it if you pay attention.

I never thought it would happen to me.

So I mentioned Bartlett being at Gore Place last weekend. I think I also mentioned that I bought a bunch of sport-weight yarn. (Is 3 pounds enough for a gansey? Let's hope. That's 3 miles of yarn.) And I picked up Cat Bordhi's New Pathways for Sock Knitters at Webs. You can probably see where this is going: I felt so virtuous about finishing two socks on Monday that I immediately cast on another sock -- a Coriolis sock.

The book has several tables in the back that are based on the size of the foot and the gauge you're getting with that yarn on those needles. Somehow I remembered getting 8 spi with Bartlett on 2.75mm needles, so I didn't bother swatching. You can probably predict the rest of this story.

I measured my foot. Ten and a half inches around. So I looked up those two numbers, got the magic numbers I needed, and cast on. The toe seemed big; the foot seemed bigger. There was no way it was going to fit snugly. So I checked my gauge -- against the Bartlett socks I knit a couple years ago, not against the sock I was knitting -- and verified that it was, indeed, 8 spi.

Well, obviously, the size of my foot was wrong. I considered my usual socks, in which I cast on 80 stitches at 10 spi and they fit. So completely on instinct I ripped back to where the toe had 72 stitches, and st.arted the foot over again on. It seemed a little loose, but I carried on.

(Astute readers may note that all the gauges in here are measured off long since completed socks, or come from vague memory.)

So I got to the point where I started thinking about the heel turn, and did the back of the envelope math to figure out how much longer I had to knit before turning the heel. At an estimate, it would have been finished about four inches past the back of my foot. There was nothing to do but go get the ruler.

And it turned out that I was getting seven stitches per inch in the Bartlett sport. (And my other socks were closer to nine stitches per inch than 10. The math worked much better that way.)

It is a testament to the quality of the Bartlett yarn that it ripped out so cleanly. I need to sleep on the question of whether I'm going to cast on the yarn on those needles (with fewer stitches) or on smaller ones (which means actually measuring *gauge). And I'm not sure the pattern works well in the dark yarn I chose: the cable I was putting on the Coriolis band was subtle, possibly too subtle, and would work better in a lighter colored yarn.

It's not that gauge didn't work - it's that gauge only works if you aren't in denial.

I had a good night last night. I finished two socks.

What? No, I didn't start them both last night!

One was a sock from Katherine Misegades's sock booklet for [Tongue River Farm] (http://www.icelandicsheep.com) -- beautiful Fair Isle socks. I've written about these socks before. I bought a "sock kit" at Rhinebeck 2006: three 8-ounce (approximately) hanks of Tongue River Farm Icelandic sock weight yarn in three different "colors" -- natural white, natural brown, natural grey -- and the booklet. It wound up being a slight price break on the yarn, which was beautiful and luxurious, and the sock patterns looked interesting.

Well, the first sock pattern was a doozy. Misegades used a heel construction I wasn't familiar with: when you get to the point at which, on a standard top-down heel flap sock, you'd start working the heel flap. Instead, you work a pattern on the instep and heel, and start working a gusset between them. When you get to what would be the end of the heel flap, you short-row across on the heel, working ssk or p2tog at the end of the row to compensate for the gusset increases, and wrapping the following stitch to prevent holes. To add to this, the colorwork doesn't stop at all -- as you're doing all this complicated stuff to structure the heel, you're also doing all this complicated colorwork.

Because I wasn't familiar with the heel construction, and because it was apparent that all this complicated stuff (some of which I didn't understand) was going on at once, I decided to knit the socks at the size they were designed, even though they almost certainly wouldn't fit me. Well, in February I made a mistake on the heel turn on the second sock, and set it aside for a while. Last weekend I decided to fix the heel, and I ripped it back about two dozen rows (they were short rows, so this is not nearly so drastic as it seems), carefully picked up the stitches, and resumed work. Well, when I left for work yesterday morning I had both socks together -- as you may recall from prior posts, I needed to see the mistakes on the first sock so I could duplicate them on the second sock -- and so when I got off the train at my stop for work I had nothing left to do except work the toe.

So I had been meaning to visit one of the local knitting circles -- I've missed the camaraderie since I moved away from my old one. Well, last night I went to the West Branch of the Somerville Public Library, where Ravelry told me that knitters congregate. And I worked the toe there, and finished it. The knitters admired it, and asked who the socks were for -- and that's when I admitted that I had no idea, and they were going to go to the first person they fit. "Like Cinderella!" one of them crowed. Yes, exactly -- although I'm not going to marry the person the socks fit.

And that gave me such a rush that I immediately picked up my Noro socks and knit furiously on them -- I had made it to the ribbing, working toe-up -- until, just before midnight last night, I tried on the sock, decided that 25 rounds was enough ribbing, as it was approaching the bottom of my calf muscle, and I did not want to deal with shaping and ribbing at the same time. So I bound off the last stitch around 12:30, put on the sock, wore it around for a few minutes, and then went to bed.

And boy, after six hours of knitting, did I ever have strange dreams. The Yarn Harlot was in them, filing a restraining order against me. This is what happens when you watch Judge Judy -- my guilty daytime TV pleasure, from my grad school days, now watched a couple shows at a time thanks to the magic of TiVo -- while knitting. Last night's batch was heavy on the restraining orders and relationship stupidity.

And then, when I got in the shower this morning -- and this is almost certainly because the Fair Isle socks used it as a decrease -- my brain informed me that it understood the difference between the sl 1, k2tog, psso decrease and the sl2tog kwise, k1, p2sso decrease. That's something about being a verbal/symbolic and kinesthetic learner -- sometimes the only way to understand things, if they don't make sense to you visually, and you can't analyze them symbolically, is to do them. I understood that about the heel construction on that sock pattern, but I didn't understand it about the decreases.

Dear Yarn Harlot,

I'm sorry I snarled at you yesterday. It was the lace's fault, and I'm sure you understand. You gave every sign of understanding yesterday, but it bothered me, so I figured I'd write this note.

Here's how it all happened.

The weekend started out great. Yesterday morning was the Gore Place Sheepshearing Festival. Gore Place used to be the country home of the Gore family, and dates back to the early 1800s; the house itself is beautiful, and the grounds are still, from what I understand, a working farm, although it's for historical reenactment purposes rather than profit or even subsistence. Every spring, when it's time to shear the sheep, they organize a craft fair and invite yarn vendors. Families come out to see the annoyed sheep and to buy tchotchkes, fairground-style food, and yarn.

My LYS owner had told me that Bartlett Yarns was going to be there, and that sealed the deal for me. Bartlett is a Maine mill that has one of the last working mule spinners in the country. I have only the vaguest idea of what that means, but what I do know is that Bartlett produces beautiful, durable yarns in a wide variety of colors -- and many of the colors are spun so as to be subtly heathered, with rich flecks and undertones. They sell it in three weights -- 2-ply, which is somewhere around worsted weight; 3-ply, which is a heavy worsted weight; and sport, which is (surprise!) a sport weight. I've wanted for some time to get enough of their sport weight for a gansey, and I decided that Saturday was the day.

(Aside: one of the drawbacks with Bartlett Sport is that it is only available in 1-pound cones. One of the advantages is that the 1-pound cone sells for $32, which means that for between 1-1/2 and 3 times the cost of an average hank of sock yarn, you get 4 times as much yarn. Still, I can't help but think that if it were put up in 4-ounce hanks rather than 1-pound cones it would be an easier sell.)

Anyway. I bought five cones of Bartlett sport -- three Oatmeal, for the gansey; one rich red; and one charcoal, with subtle lighter and darker tones in it. They join the three cones of Bartlett I already had -- one dark teal, one forest green, and one cream-colored natural. When I got home I realized that the red I had bought would be perfect for another pair of Red Sox socks, but that was completely unintentional at the time, I swear.

Saturday afternoon was a board game day for the Alpha Delta Phi Society Boston group. It was a lot of fun, and I learned that one of my fraternity brothers had his 15 minutes of fame and won a great deal of money on the TV show Beauty and the Geek. But this is about knitting, not reality television, and so I return to the tale.

Sunday morning I woke up feelng a lot dehydrated. This usually happens to me in spring and fall. So I drank about a liter of water, and felt better. I should have taken that as a Sign, but didn't. Instead I threw four knitting projects (Noro sock, fair isle sock, purple shawl, self-pattering sock), a Webs gift certificate, and a bottle of water into my shoulder bag and set off, my partner driving, for Northampton. Notice the presence of lace and the lack of aspirin or Tylenol or any other painkiller -- that will become important later.

On the road there I chugged along on the Fair Isle sock, and would have finished it, too. Except that I got to a certain point on the foot, and remembered that I had made a mistake n the first sock -- and it was one of those mistakes that could be rationalized as a Design Decision, so I had left it. But I did not remember exactly what I had done, and I did not want the socks to be different, and so I stopped working on the sock. This was annoying.

So my partner dropped me off at the Calvin Theater and said he'd see me at Webs, probably around 4:00. (He had things to take care of in the area.) I sat down, and realized that the Calvin is not conducive to knitting dark lace on dark wood needles. So I pulled out the Noro sock, and worked almost all the way through the lecture, until the Q&A period -- and I realized I had laughed at something and dropped three stitches. And there was not enough light to fix it. Ah, well, only a few minutes -- so I fidgeted through the end of the Q&A session. (An object lesson -- knitting as a substitute for patience.) Oh, and I finished my bottle of water during the lecture.

Then the flock of knitters left the Calvin and walked to Webs. This was a truly amazing sight -- 700+ people all streaming out of the Calvin, a parade of knitters. But it was sunny, and my headache got worse, and I started feeling cranky. This was a sign that I probably should have detoured to CVS and gotten some painkillers. But I didn't - I was being swept along by a stream of knitters, and going to a yarn store, and so I didn't think. Stupid me.

So I got to Webs, and I looked at all the pretty yarns. Kauni, the Opal Rainforest Collection 3, some 70/2 linen that I was considering for the I-must-be-crazy-I-don't-even-have-a-round-table Rose of England tablecloth project. A lot of interesting bamboo and synthetic blends. An explosion of sock yarns since the last time I was in Webs, including Louet Gems Opal. None of it spoke to me, even though I had a healthy budget for the day - since I was planning to be back for the Tent Sale, and I had just bought five pounds of yarn, I decided to only buy yarn that really insisted on going home with me, and nothing (well, with one exception) really did. After a while (getting more headachey and crankier) I got into line to get the new book and get it signed.

The three dropped stitches had been irritating me, so the first thing I did when I got in line was to pull out the sock and fix it. It was easy, with enough light. The next thing I did was stow the sock and pull out the lace. This was my big mistake of the day.

So I started working a row, and realized I had one fewer stitch in the first section than I should have had. I mark the sections with stitch markers -- it's easier to catch mistakes that way, usually. I counted stitches, I picked out about 20 stitches worth of ssks and YOs and k2togs, and counted them again. One @#$%ing stitch short. So I scrutinized the chart and found that the last stitch before the marker was a YO, which I didn't see in my knitting. So I picked up the "dropped" YO and continued. (Experienced lace knitters will have some inkling of what's going on here. It's a testament to my crankiness and mood that I didn't.) So I knit across the second section, and found that I had one stitch too many. (Experienced lace knitters will be nodding here, because they've figured out exactly what the problem was.)

So I picked out the whole first half of the row. Again. I took deep calming, cleansing breaths. I drank the water that the helpful Webs staff people were handing out. I studied the chart. I read my knitting. I counted stitches. I knit across again, figuring it would work out OK this time, because I couldn't see the mistake. And it didn't magically fix itself.

At this point people were watching me nervously as I took my deep cleansing breaths and scowling at my lace. I picked out back to the beginning of the row again, and that's when I saw it. You see, this is one of those lace patterns where all the lace work is done on the right side and the wrong side is just purling back, with 4-6 knit stitches in one of the motifs, just to keep things interesting. On the prior purl row, the stitch marker next to the YO had migrated from one side to the other, and when I purled back across it, I didn't notice.

So then I'm about three people back from the signing table now, and I have finally caught the mistake. So I work back across. sl 1, k3, YO, k2tog, YO, k2tog, YO, (k3 YO)* to 1 before marker (now in the right place!), k1. Except that when I get to the k1, there's an extra stitch there. And it's my turn to have my book signed.

So the estimable Yarn Harlot smiles at me -- she's been signing books and being friendly to strange knitters and lecturing since 10 in the morning, and I know if I were in that situation I would have long since snapped and attacked somebody with a circular needle -- and asks, in her polite Canadian way, "How are you?"

And I brandish my lace, and I scowl, and I say, "I'm going to lie and say, 'Great,' because, to be honest, I CANNOT RELIABLY COUNT TO FOUR!" and shook the lace at her. "I have knit and picked out and re-knit and re-picked-out the same half-row for the past hour!"

To her credit, she understood, and pointed out that that was a very cost-effective use of yarn, knitting it more than once. I'm still sorry I snarled.

And a summary of the rest of the afternoon: I sat in a chair and finally knit the entire row correctly, and the following purl row. I wound up buying only one ball of yarn -- a beautiful discontinued color of Tofutsies, in green and white -- but I got Cat Bordhi's New Pathways for Sock Knitters and Myra Stahman's Stahman's Shawls and Scarves -- the former for its new ideas, and the latter for its well-executed old ideas. (Besides, I rationalized, some of those scarves would look really good in that new Bartlett Sport yarn!) And long circs in 2.75mm and 3.25mm for the gansey knitting, another set of 2.75mm dpns, and another set of 2mm dpns.

It's funny - it was a pretty miserable day physically, since the headache did not go away until I finally got home and took some Aleve. And the lace was the most frustrating part, but when I got home all I wanted to do was knit, and so I swatched for the gansey on my new 3.25mm needles. (They may not work: they produce a very nice St st in that yarn, but when I tried trinity stitch, it was far too open for my taste. Fortunately, I have 2.75mm needles, but by the time I had cast on and worked a dozen rows of St st and a half-dozen rows of trinity stitch, it was past bedtime.) On the T today, on the way to work, the Red Line northbound was delayed (no idea why) but I was happy because I had the first Fair Isle sock to match mistake-for-mistake. And tonight I'm planning to go to a knitting circle I've known about for some time - at the Somerville Public Library near Davis Square - but which I haven't actually gotten to, Mondays being what they are. But I'm not bringing the lace -- it's in time-out.

Recently I was talking online with a friend who insisted that he was only an average knitter, and that got me thinking about what makes someone an average or an expert knitter. It also ties in with some of the annoyance I've been feeling lately towards some of the knitting lists.

This friend -- whom we'll call Mike, because, well, that's his name -- has knit probably a dozen pairs of socks, including a complicated Aran patterned one, and two sweaters. And not just any sweaters, either: one was Alice Starmore's "Irish Moss," and the other was a colorwork sweater he designed himself with the help of Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns and Ann Feitelson's The Art of Fair Isle Knitting.

I thought of this as I cleaned out an archive of mailing list postings. One of the lists I'm on had an extensive discussion about whether a knitter's first project should be a scarf or a washcloth, or something as terrifyingly challenging as a headband or a hat. And the consensus was that new knitters should stick to garter stitch with no shaping for as long as possible, because otherwise they'll be scared off by all the challenging stuff they might be asked to do. Indeed, some of the posters went so far as to advocate discouraging new knitters from trying socks or sweaters until the new knitters were ready for them.

And there are the regular terrified postings on the Socknitters list as a novice knitter knits her (it's almost always a her) first pair of socks and approaches the heel turn, something her knitting friends have told her is incomprehensibly difficult. And more often than not, the difficulty of the heel turn becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the knitter is so terrified of the heel that she makes silly mistakes out of pure nervousness.

And then I think about Mike, who managed to knit four pairs of socks without fear because nobody told him how hard the heel turn was supposed to be.

Indeed, in the online chat, I pointed out that he had knit an Alice Starmore sweater pattern from start to finish. Many knitters, when faced with a Starmore pattern, would look at the charts and the terse instructions, and run weeping in the other direction. Nobody told Mike that charts were hard, so he didn't have any problem learning how to knit from them. Nobody told him that knitting patterns were supposed to be wordy and friendly, and so he wasn't bothered by the terseness and lack of handholding in the pattern. Of course when he ran into unfamiliar things, he had to look them up, but he expected that -- he had been knitting for less than a year.

His fourth pair of socks was a test-knit for my Elsinore socks -- cables all over the place, a total of six cable panels around the sock in the size he knit. He wasn't the best test knitter, as he was a bit unclear on the concept -- his entire commentary on the pattern was, in essence, "I like the socks a lot. You made a few mistakes in the pattern but I figured out what you meant and knit the right thing anyway."

So what makes Mike not an "average knitter" in my eyes? For one, his willingness to try new things. I see list email from people who have been knitting for 25 years but who are only just now getting the nerve to try socks. How many dishcloths and garter stitch scarfs can one person knit before trying something new just out of sheer boredom? Empirical evidence suggests that there is no upper bound to that number -- but the master knitters challenge themselves.

For another thing, he's not afraid of knitting. (This may have something to do with his day job as a fireman.) So what if the thing he tries doesn't work? He can always rip it out and reknit it -- and he's likely to learn from the mistake. (And to fix others' mistakes.) He's what Elizabeth Zimmermann called a "thinking knitter."

And, if you look at the population of knitting lists and knitting circles, that makes him decidedly above average.

From a post I made to the Knitlist on June 27, 2007:

In my case, I'm not quite on a yarn diet, but if I don't pay
attention I will buy yarn compulsively, because it is pretty and not
because I need it. My rules are - (1) No buying anything unless I
have a specific project in mind for it; (2) For each pair of socks I
finish, I can buy one more ball of sock yarn; (3) Anything hand-spun,
hand-dyed, or otherwise unique, anything on sale for more than 50%
off, or anything I see on a visit to a new or non-local yarn store
can justify an exception to the former two rules; (4) anything goes
at the Webs tent sale, the Webs year-end sale, and Rhinebeck, at
least until the credit cards are declined.

Such reasonable rules!

I have many favorite sock yarns -- because I have many favorite styles of sock!

I have a love-hate relationship with Schaefer Anne. I love the yarn, but it is so fine that I need to knit it on 1.5 mm needles. (That's 000 in US sizes.) So it takes me a lot longer to make a pair of Anne socks. On the other hand, I can make a pair of socks in my size and still have plenty left over from a hank, so I don't need to worry about dividing it in half and knitting toe-up.

I like Opal and Regia self-patterning yarns. It seems to me that Opal is a bit smoother and Regia is a bit rougher, but they both make good socks. And Opal (even though it doesn't say so on the label) wears like iron and is machine washable. I don't like all the colorways, but I think both yarns come in a broad enough variety that I can find colorways I like.

I like Austermann Step; it's a bit splitty to work with, so I have to pay more attention. I think I like the socks, too; I made myself a pair, and somehow they seem to find themselves on someone else's feet more often than on mine. So someone likes the socks, which is good. They do require special care: the yarn has aloe and jojoba infused into it somehow, which means that you can't wash them with fabric softener.

I like the hand-dyed yarns that Ray Whiting (http://www.knitivity.com) produces -- beautiful, rich combinations of colors. The base yarn he uses is a little bit splitty, but not that much more so than Austermann Step, and the colors are rich and permanent -- I've probably washed one pair of socks from his yarn 15 times, and it's still just as brightly colored as it was the day I finished knitting it.

All of these are great yarns for plain St st socks - the sort of socks I keep in my shoulder bag for when I'm on the bus or train, or when I have to wait in line somewhere. No complicated patterns, stuff I can do from memory.

But I like more complicated socks too....

I like Briggs & Little Durasport a great deal. It's a rustic single-strand yarn, 20% nylon (or thereabouts, maybe 15%, maybe 25%, my memory's not perfect) that's not heavily processed -- you will be picking bits of grass out of it now and then. It's very well suited for colorwork socks (though their Sport line, which is 100% wool, comes in a much broader range of colors). It's also quite good for Aran or cable knit socks. I have tried lace socks with it, and I think it's a little too fuzzy to get good stitch definition.

(I've also found that the B&L Heritage and Regal yarn lines, 100% wool in a 2-ply yarn, are an almost ideal for Aran sweater knitting.)

I also like Bartlett Sport (http://www.bartlettyarns.com) a great deal. It's a two-ply, light sport weight or heavy sock weight yarn. It comes in one-pound cones, so it's a bit of a commitment, but the colors are so rich and heathery that it's an easy commitment to get into. It's great for colorwork socks. It seems like it should be great for Aran socks too, but I haven't tried that yet.

And I like Tongue River Farm icelandic sock wool. (http://www.icelandicsheep.com) It comes in a variety of natural colors - a cream-colored off-white, a rich brown, a cool grey. I've knit a colorwork sock in two natural colors, and it is beautiful and warm and soft. I want to try this yarn with icelandic socks too.

So I guess I'm just incapable of being faithful to one sock yarn.

(a post I made to the Socknitters list on 27 December 2007 in response to a question about "what is your favorite sock yarn?")