cwBlog

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.

First, HWMBO and I went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix last night, and the suit that Dolores Umbridge was wearing was almost exactly the same overall shade of red pink as my Tofutsies socks, and what looked like a very similar texture. They were immediately dubbed the Dolores Umbridge socks.

(A refresher: I can't find the digital camera, so I can't take a picture of the finished socks, but this is the most recent picture. It was taken at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, about a week and a half ago, just before we packed up and left. You can see the first sock here, as well.)

One of the irritations in knitting those socks was that there were four knots in the ball. I emailed the very nice people at Tofutsies and asked about that, and they told me that they had been working on their manufacturing processes to reduce the number of knots in a ball, hopefully so that most balls have no knots in them, and they've improved them. I'm definitely going to knit more Tofutsies socks; even the knots weren't that bad, because the yarn is marled and has a natural variation in color and texture, so you can't tell without a close examination where the yarn was joined - it was a little bit annoying when I found a knot, but it wasn't the disaster it would have been in something like a faux-Fair Isle Sockotta, where taking a foot or two out of the repeat means that you have a very visible break in the socks.

Also, I would recommend seeing at least some of the colors in person before buying. The colorways range from the fairly conservative to the fairly bold, and the difference between a bold orange and pink colorway that suits you and a bold orange and pink colorway that does not is not always the sort of thing you can tell from a picture on a computer monitor.

So the last few weeks have been very busy, and I've been too lazy to take out the camera and take pictures of socks. I'll update you all on the life stuff later, but I have some promises to keep first.

I finished the Knitivity socks. I'm quite pleased with them; I bought four more hanks, and added them to the stash. Haven't knit any of them up yet; they're resting comfortably in the stash. This is after I've worn the socks a couple times (ye gods, I finished them nearly 3 weeks ago, bad blogger), and washed them a couple times, and they're wearing well and the colors are just as bright as when the yarn first arrived.

I've been in a mood lately where I have wanted to knit mainly plain socks. The sock on my left foot here is a sock I started a while back as a sock to stick in my pocket and knit when I had a few minutes in line. But I worked the heel too early and too shallow, and set it aside for probably four or five months because I really didn't want to rip out the heel and reknit it. Well, I was in the right mood a couple weeks back, and I ripped out the heel, and finished the sock very quickly. It's Lang Jawoll, their cotton-wool-nylon blend sock yarn; I bought three bags of ten 50g skeins of it at the Webs tent sale last year -- all marled, one in shades of dark and medium blue, one in shades of blue and white, one in shades of black and white. I like it quite a bit; once I've made a pair of socks from it, I'll probably trade the rest somehow. (Maybe by then I'll be on Ravelry.)

The sock on my right foot is in the red and white pink and white Tofutsies colorway I mentioned before. I really like the visual texture of the marling: the yarn itself is a three-ply, and each ply rotates through about a half-dozen colors. This makes the finished sock visually very interesting. I also found that, despite the tiny appearance of the ball -- honestly, the 100g ball, though it weighed 100g, looked about the size of a 50g ball -- I had plenty of yarn to finish the first sock, and I wound up actually finishing the sock long before I ran out of yarn. I was a little bit irked that there were two spots in the first half-ball where one of the plies was broken and one knot in the half-ball I knit for the first sock, but nobody else I know of seems to have had knot problems.

(Update: there was another knot about a yard into the second half-ball, which wasn't a problem; there was also a knot about 10 rounds from the end of the ribbing, and another one just past where I needed to cut off the yarn for the sewn bind-off. Four knots in a single ball! But just as with the first sock, I had quite a bit more yarn than I needed for the second sock in the pair, too.)

And finally, the current sock pair, intended for Jason. After I put the Knitivity sock yarn in my stash, I told him the next pair of socks I knit would be for him; he could pick any yarn in the stash, and if it was self-patterning he'd get a plain pair, and if it was plain and he wanted to choose a pattern he could do that too. He chose some Regia Strato-Color, colorway number 5747, "Flanell," which is black, dark red, red, mint green, white, and tan, and looks like it might be colors for flannel. (Webs got a lot of Regia Strato-Color last summer, and I bought at least 2 balls of each colorway I liked.)

This is the second pair of socks I've knit back to back recently, which is very unlike me. I thought I had lost my little black book for a few days, so I wanted to knit the second sock in the pair while I remembered what I had done on the first one -- in particular, the mistake design choice I made by making the heel 47 stitches wide when it should have been 45 stitches wide, and all of the math ramifications that fell out of that. The second sock is on the needles right now, and I haven't gotten to the heel, so it was not quite available for the picture.

(And yes, that is his foot in the picture!)

It's been a busy couple weeks for socks.

This may be a personal record. I finished the first sock of the pair yesterday, which means I knit a sock in sock weight yarn in five days.

(I didn't blog about it then because Wednesday is game night and I was off gaming, and because yesterday was just a bit fraught for other reasons previously mentioned. Things are settling down, and the universe is working out its perversity in ways that I'll probably mention here when they're less up in the air.)

Unfortunately, the digital camera is not cooperating at the moment. I am going to blame the batteries, since it's been flashing a low-battery icon at me; but it's probably operator error. Once the batteries are recharged I'll make another attempt at taking a non-blurry photograph that doesn't reveal too much of the clutter surrounding my knitting nest.

So, capsule review time, since the point of this whole exercise was not just to have a sock at the end of it, but to try a new yarn, a new cast-on technique for toe-up socks, and a new heel construction technique. I'll take these one at a time.

The yarn: I am just as pleased with the colors and patterning of the yarn now that it is knit into a sock as I was when I first saw the hank. The choice of colors and the proportion are great, and match the pictures on the site. The yarn was mostly pleasant to work with, though it was unnervingly splitty. One of the things I like about plain socks is that, aside from the toe and heel shaping and the ribbing, I can mostly knit by touch; what I found with this yarn was that that was dangerous, as I could very easily pick up only 2 or 3 of the plies with the right needle, or catch only 2 or 3 strands of the yarn before pulling it through. I think (I hope) I caught this on the following round each time.

I'm currently in the process of rationalizing the acquisition of similar yarns from Knitivity, though that may need to wait until other issues play themselve out. It's not like I'm in danger of running out of stash in the next few weeks months years.

The Turkish cast-on: I don't think I like this as much as Judy Becker's magic toe-up cast-on; it was more fiddly to work, and didn't produce as nice of a toe. Some of that may just be because it's the first time I tried it, so I may try it on a few more socks.

Judy GIbson's reverse flap heel: This, on the other hand, is @#$%ing brilliant. It is my new favorite heel type. I'm going to meditate on it for a while until I completely understand how the numbers work out, and then make a detailed technique blog post on it.

Stay tuned for photos.

The famous socks are done.

One of my absolute favorite parts of the whole process of sock knitting is when you get to the toe part of a top down sock. Because you're reducing the number of stitches every other row or so, it just picks up speed until you're done. The last round of these socks had 16 stitches -- that's a far cry from the 88 I cast on!

I also like how wool is forgiving. In the first sock of the pair, I worked a YO at one point and knit 4 or 5 rounds before I noticed it. I dropped the offending stitch and let it ladder down, and at the time it looked like it would be a tension disaster. I haven't even washed the socks yet, and I can't find the spot. And the second sock - I won't go into all the mistakes I made, but suffice it to say that had I realized how many mistakes I would eventually find, I would have been better off ripping the sock out and starting over from scratch. When you rip out a cable motif and reknit it, you almost invariably have tension problems, because you don't match the tension perfectly; when I reknit the top front center Skabersjö motif on the second sock, the tension was all over the place, but by the time I finished the sock, the tension had evened itself out. When I wash these, I don't expect I'll be able to tell the first sock from the second any longer.

The pattern's going to be available, probably sooner rather than later.... watch this space for more information.