cwBlog

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....

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.

So someone on Socknitters asked what our favorite sock yarns were, and this is what I said.

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 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 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. 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.

So I've been remiss in blog posting. Alas, I have nothing interesting and public to say right now.

It's been in the mid 70s to high 80s in Boston for the past week - gloriously sunny. Unfortunately, this means that it is officially way too hot to work on sweaters. The Irish Moss needs 2 more repeats of the central motif on each shoulder saddle - that's 32 rows of approximately 17 stitches, if memory serves, and so it's really less than an evening's work. Then it needs to be pieced together, and the collar knit - maybe two evenings' work, though mattress stitch always goes faster than I expect. But when it's 80 degrees out when I get home from work, picking up a sweater is the last thing I want to do when I get home.

On the other hand, the second blue sock is about 20 rounds away from being done. I've been knitting on the T. If you see a male sock knitter with a shaved head on the Red Line or on a bus near Davis Square, say hi.

There was a thread on Socknitters this week about the tiresome parts of knitting socks. Some people hate toes, others hate heels, others hate ribbing. I've determined that what I hate is change -- I never mind the toe when I'm a bit into it, I never mind the heel once it's started, and I never mind ribbing after the first row. But I've had socks sit for weeks before because I got to the point where I needed to start the heel, or start the ribbing, or start the toe, and I just didn't feel like doing it.

Go figure.

In other news, one of the goals for the weekend is to get my current projects photographed and on Ravelry. I meant to make it to a knitting circle this week, but I went to a board game night instead. I'm also trying to find a knitting shop in Boston that sells metal glove needles in sizes 00 and 000. More news as it happens.

Okay, I'm much better at making a couple blog posts in a day than at making one per day.

So if you look back at one of the things that inspired me to kick off this blog, you see this pair of socks:

So when I met the Yarn Harlot, she complimented my socks and put a picture of me in her blog. The estimable Linda Walsh emailed me to ask if the pattern was available anywhere, and (thinking quickly, since I wanted to make sure the pattern made sense to people other than me) I said, "hm, you want to test knit it?" And she did, while she was on vacation in Guatemala, and took pictures.

She also offered some really good commentary on the pattern, which I've been incorporating into a revision, and I've also been working on a PayPal shopping cart. However, I'm about to move and start a new job, so I'm not sure when I'll be able to get it up -- but I'm hoping I'll have enough time to get it done by next weekend.

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.

Sorry, all, I've been on the road, visiting my parents, and that's not conducive to photographing. I promise pictures of the Knitivity socks, and of the blue pink socks in the next day or two.

I really like red. I have a pair of Red Sox socks, made from Briggs and Little Tuffy, in the Red Mix and Ecru colors. The Knitivity socks (yes, faithful readers, I still owe you a picture) have a lot of red in them. I have several as-yet unknit handpainted sock yarns with a lot of red in them. So a few months ago, I was really pleased to find Tofutsies, a sock yarn I had been hearing about, in a beautiful red and white colorway. I brought it home, divided it into two toe-up balls, tossed it into the knitting bag for a future project when I had freed up a set of 2mm needles, and forgot about it.

Well, I finished the Knitivity socks. There was a set of 2mm needles freed up. And in a burst of responsibility, I ripped out a sock heel that I had put on far too early. I'm not sure quite what I was thinking; perhaps I was subconsciously anticipating a horrible accident in which I lost the front half of my foot. Whatever the reason, I had knit a sock that was about two inches too short to go on my foot; but once I ripped out the heel, knit a longer foot, and reknit the heel, I had enough momentum to finish it; and there was another set of 2mm needles freed up.

So yesterday I pulled the beautiful red and white Tofutsies out of the knitting bag, only to find that it had gone all pink. I think it was hanging out with some mostly-blue Schaefer Anne and forgot its original purpose. But maybe I was beta-carotene deficient, or under the influence of Mercury in retrograde, or just slightly off in my color perception that day. Regardless, there is no denying it: the yarn is pink. Screaming, rich, remind-you-of-the-1980s pink.

So far the reaction has been, "those are for you?! But they're pink!"

@#$% it, I'm knitting these socks, and I'm wearing them. If anybody makes a fuss, I shall feign red-green colorblindness and pretend to be shocked that they are not a calm blue; if that does not work, I shall stab the offender repeatedly with an 8-inch long, 2mm diameter nickel-plated steel dpn until he bleeds on the socks and they cease to be pink.

That should show him.