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....

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.

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?")

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.

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.

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.