cwBlog

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.

When we last left our noble adventurer, he was about to begin the sock heel.

When you work an ordinary French heel, you knit the heel flap, then you wrangle some short rows to wind up with a roundish heel, then you pick up stitches on the side, then you work decreases to narrow the sock down for the foot.

When you work the heel from [Judy Gibson's "You're Putting Me On" pattern] (http://tiajudy.com/putmeon.htm), you work increases to widen the sock for the ankle, then you narrow the sole for the heel with ssk and p2tog, then you pick up stitches on the sides of the heel, then you knit the heel flap, joining it to the live stitches that you increased.

So I got through the increases just fine. The pattern uses left-leaning and right-leaning lifted increases along the sole -- the ankle gusset. And I got through the narrowing of the sole right under the heel. But when I got to the point where I was supposed to pick up stitches, I went off the rails. (Remember, sometimes I'm a designer. This is a euphemistic way of saying I can't look at a pattern without feeling the compulsion to change it.)

So I ripped out the part of the sock heel where it narrowed, what Judy Gibson calls the "heel extension." The sock was built on 80 stitches, and there were 12 increase rows, so I had to decrease 24 stitches down to 8, then pick up 15 on each side. Instead, I short-rowed from 24 down to 8, with wraps, as if I were working a short row heel, and then instead of picking up 15, I knit the wrapped stitch and then the wrap. There were 8 wrapped stitches on each side of the center of the heel, which meant that instead of picking up 15 on each side of the heel, I had 16 live stitches on each side of the center of the heel. The difference between 15 and 16 meant that the heel flap would wind up being 2 rows longer, but I didn't think that would be a big problem.

I must admit, I really like the way this sock is turning out. I like knitting toe-up socks in order to make sure I use up all I have of a hand-dyed or self-striping yarn, but I really don't like the way short row heels look with hand-dyed or self-striping yarn, which kind of defeats the purpose. This sock construction technique means I get the best of both worlds -- the heel flap construction and using all the yarn.

I also find myself, to my chagrin, planning my next pair of Knitivity socks. Maybe if I let Himself pick out the color and let him think the socks are for him, he won't give me too much grief about the ever-expanding stash....

(And yes, Himself, I know you read this blog. If you see a color you like, speak up.)

EDIT: This heel construction was recommended to me in the first place by Ariannah Armstrong, a Socknitters list and chat regular, who has a blog at http://ec.lecti.ca/ -- I can't claim all the credit!

I made a major decision yesterday, and it's one of those decisions where there's no way to know which one will turn out right, so you have to go with your gut instincts. I went back and forth for about a week, thinking yes, thinking no, trying to rationalize what my instincts said. This has left my nerves just a little bit jangly, and making the decision has calmed them down a little, but not much. And on top of it, I had the scratchy sore throat feeling yesterday that shows I'm coming down with a cold. So I've been knitting kind of compulsively.

And the beneficiary has been the first Knitivity sock:

Fortunately, the yarn seems to have forgiven me for my earlier lies to it.

I finally settled on a gauge of 9 stitches per inch on 2mm steel needles. I'm experimenting with more negative ease than I usually use, so I'm knitting this sock on 80 stitches. I cast on 10 stitches with the Turkish cast-on; the instructions given there are for working it on circular needles. It was a bit of a pain on dpns, but I made it work on the second try, and it's easy enough to see how it works. I worked a round toe and got it up to 80 stitches, then knit 50 rounds for the foot. Now I'm ready to start the heel.

The colors in the sock are just as rich but a lot more subdued than I would have thought based on the hank. I like the black and red stripes spiraling up the sock; this is something that Opal Rainforest Zebra and Opal Rainforest Tiger both did, and I liked it when they did it too. The yarn itself is a little bit splitty, which means I can't quite knit by touch; it has a similar feel to Austermann Step in that regard.

So far I'm quite pleased with this yarn. We'll see how the sock continues.

So I finished the Elsinore socks last night, blogged about them, and went to bed. Today I wore them to work, with sandals. (The office is somewhat casual, but in weird ways -- wool socks with sandals are just fine, though.) They were much admired.

But when I got home from work, there was no more lying to the new yarn. It was right there, sitting on top of my knitting bag, watching me as I Kitchenered up the toe. It saw that the needles were no longer being used, and I think it had seen the needle cases in my knitting bag by that point and knew that I had lied to it about only having one set of needles. So I handwaved away its accusations and put it on the swift.

The label is marked "Short - 3.5 oz" -- that's still close enough to 100g, and there's enough there for a pair of socks. I usually knit hand-dyed and self-patterning yarns into socks from the toe up, because it makes it easier to use up the whole yarn. So I split the ball into two smaller balls.

The yarn seems fluffy and splitty -- I separated the plies on one end while I was untying it from the hank. This is a new yarn to me, so a gauge swatch is pretty much required. The label says "Needle Size 1 or 2, 7 stitches per inch" -- I'm going to try with a 2.75mm (US 2) needle first. The yarn looks like it might work well for me with anything from a 2mm to a 3mm yarn, but it's a fluffy yarn, thicker than Opal, so I'm going to try it at the larger size first.

(Incidentally, I really like the colors. Ray at Knitivity had no way of knowing this when he offered me the yarn to try, but I think red and black look great together, and I have a couple of other self-patterning and handpaint yarns with colors like these.)

I'm also planning to try a couple of new things in this sock - a friend highly recommends the Turkish cast-on, and a heel flap construction designed to look just like a top-down sock with a French heel, designed by Judy Gibson and used in her "You're Putting Me On" sock pattern. In the best-case scenario it will be fun; in the worst-case scenario, I'll find out how this yarn handles being ripped out and reknit....

More news as it happens.

So this is actually my third attempt at starting a blog, and it's all the fault of those pesky Canadians, and possibly one Texan.

A few weeks back the Yarn Harlot came to my local yarn store -- Canadian the first. You can read about the adventures she had on that trip here. If you scroll down, you'll see a picture of me; I'm Charlton, knitting kilt hose of my own devising.

Now, the yarn I'm knitting them from is the most excellent Durasport from Briggs and Little, a most excellent yarn mill located in New Brunswick, Canada. The Yarn Harlot recognized the yarn -- perhaps it gives off secret pheromones perceptible only to Canadians? -- and called the socks "clever."

Of course this was noticed. How many people named Charlton can there be knitting socks? So my Canadian yarn got me another 15 minutes of international fame. (Someday I'll write about my first 15 minutes of international fame -- I was on Jeopardy!) Of course everyone insisted that I should put a picture up when they were done.

To make it more interesting, apparently a gathering of over 600 knitters counts as front-page news in the area; unbeknownst to me, a photographer took a picture in which I am clearly visible in the audience. (I'd put a link in here, but the Daily Hampshire Gazette requires people to subscribe to see articles online -- and they charge for it.) So suddenly I was outed as a knitter, and people who recognized me called and emailed to ask if it was really me there.

Anyway. So the discussion of the Yarn Harlot and kilt hose caught the eye of Ray, at Knitivity, who has apparently been mulling the idea of dyeing some Briggs and Little yarn. He emailed me to ask my opinion, and in the process offered to send me some of his hand-dyed sock yarn. I ask you, am I really supposed to say no to an offer like that?

So he sent me this:

Beautiful, beautiful yarn. And it wants to be socks, and it said so very clearly.

(If you're not a knitter, and know me from some other area of my life, and you found this blog by Googling: that statement is not a sign of impending mental collapse. Ask any knitter or fiber artist: the yarn speaks to us, really it does, and it tells us what it wants to be. Really.)

I lied to it, and said I only had one set of sock needles, and it would have to wait until I finished the kilt hose, in the interest of international relations with Canada. But it insisted, and it bullied both the Schaefer Anne and the hand-spun hand-dyed I have already divided into halves for toe-up socks. It shoved the Fair Isle gloves out of the way, insisting that they wouldn't be necessary until at least November. I think it believed the lie about only having one set of free needles. We'll see.