knitting in the dark

I had a chance to sit down and watch part of the live coverage of the Tour de France yesterday and today and thanks to that TV time I have now finished the pair of socks I had been struggling with (my tour de france knit along project). I started these about two and a half months ago; it’s so unlike me to have a sock project take that long! I did rip and restart at least twice though…

They’re baggy in the ankles and way too long in the leg and foot for me, but they should fit my father just right…

pattern: my own (braided cables - what was I thinking?)
yarn: Brown Sheep Company Wildfoote in “Jungle”
needles: my trusty INOX 2mm metal dpns
started: beginning of May?
finished: today - 11 July 2007

notes: Well, I learned a lot about cables on socks and will likely be passing on cabled projects for a while. But the real note is that this yarn is too splitty for cabling, not that many other people knit cables with tweedy yarn. I’m not a huge sock yarn snob - I prefer sock yarn with nylon content to help with the wear and tear (handknit socks are my and my father’s favorite things to wear during cooler weather), but this yarn is quite synthetic feeling (maybe it will do better after a wash?). I definitely prefer Fortissima Socka and Regia for the price range…

Now, what do I work on for the next two weeks of le tour?

In honor of the beginning of the Tour de France, my friend and I took a bike ride out to the Rockaways to play on the beach yesterday. We actually take a day-long ride almost every other week, but we can pretend it was for the tour. It was the perfect day to sit on an ocean beach; hot but breezy - the water was warm enough to play in - after the initial shock, of course - but still cold enough to keep you comfortable for a bit after getting out. I remembered to give myself a liberal coating of sunscreen so I managed to avoid all sunburning (I am REALLY fair-skinned and will burn every time if I don’t pay attention). I might do the ride again tomorrow by myself (thanks freelance schedule!) since it is supposed to be ridiculously warm again here in NYC. After riding out there (only about 14 miles) and playing on the beach all afternoon we were quite tired and rode the subway back home to Brooklyn…

So there was no progress made on my Tour de France knit along socks since the race started until this morning. This is where I began, with one complete (and completely annoying) sock of my own design for my father’s Christmas present (for 2007 - I’m very early and not very late)…

Side view:

Because I have such small feet, I am always surprised by how long I have to make his socks… last year I made his socks toe-up, which I should always plan to do in the future because there was less than 2′ of yarn left from the first skein after completing the sock - eek!

And in the background of that last shot is the start of the second sock (no Second Sock Syndrome for me, thanks…) Let’s get this pair over with so I can move on to something fun:

I’ll do a finished object post (hopefully) soon, but for now I’d like to say I am not enjoying knitting with this yarn except for maybe the intense color and reasonable price.

The Tour de France starts tomorrow so I signed up for the (surprise!) knit along! You can join up until the start time tomorrow:

I joined the polka dot jersey group for projects that are “all uphill” and I was planning on working on the cabled green socks for my father’s Christmas present, but just joining last week inspired me to work on them! I have since finished the first sock and have started the second of the pair and I am well on my way before the race even begins.

So… after I finish these I will work on other long-lingering works-in-progress; I have many. Hopefully I will be able to make some progress on the stack!

While I was working in Boston at the beginning of June I had very little time to play around my old stomping grounds, but I did, of course, find time to stop into two (and a half) local yarn stores:

The first: Mary Jo Cole Needlework (don’t bother with the website). I actually went here to find a needlepoint gift for my mother because they have some great brick cover designs to make doorstops, but I discovered that they now carry yarn for knitting… sort of. It’s mostly novelty yarn meant for the scarf-knitters of the world. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a “yarn store.”

The second: Newbury Yarns (again, not a terribly impressive website). Cozy, clean, friendly… I went not looking for anything and came away with (wait for it…) sock yarn! At typical retail price, some Schaefer Anne in beautiful green, blue, and a touch of purple:

I’ve never knit with the Schaefer Anne before, but I hear good things and it has nylon content, so I’m sure it will be okay. And at half price (I think it was a mistake, but didn’t actually look at the receipt until home in Brooklyn - I only got charged for one ball), some deep red Fortissima Socka:

This is perfect yarn for a pair of socks for my father as he prefers solid or slightly tweedy yarns for his annual Christmas socks. I’m already working on the pair for this Christmas, but there’s always next year with him.

And the third and final yarn store: Windsor Button (yet again a nearly useless website). This store was so much fun for me! This is a good old fashioned craft store, which we don’t really have in NYC. We have yarn stores, fabric stores, ribbon stores, button stores, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseam, but no all-around craft stores with felt squares and googly eyes and yarn and zippers and cross-stitch canvas. They had all the basics plus a lot of nicer yarns… somehow I managed to escape without buying anything because I didn’t see anything that was an absolute deal or that I couldn’t find elsewhere.

(warning: end of knitting content!)

I also spent some time admiring the view out my hotel window in the evening during my dinner break:

And took my usual wake-up shot:

And because I’m a lighting designer (read: dork) and constantly taking pictures of light for “research,” I give you a shot of the afternoon sun coming through the window and hitting the wall because the color is just so intense:

Contests at Skeins Her Way and Lotus Knits! have inspired me to write about how I learned to knit. My maternal grandmother and both of her daughters (my mother and my aunt - she calls herself Ant Kate [sic]) are knitters. My mother knit me and my little brother some of the cutest sweaters and vests when we were little. There are pictures at my parents’ house in Seattle, but I live in Brooklyn and the concept of scanning is foreign to my mother. The pair of sweaters I remember best were navy and had my and my brother’s initials across the chest in signal flags - they were so cool, but we couldn’t tell them apart, so my mother smartly put one stripe at the wrist on one sweater and two stripes on the other. I think I may have been about five at the time. Around that same time I wanted my mother teach me how to knit… I was in kindergarten and I remember taking my newly acquired needles and yarn with me to my friends’ houses after school and their parents thinking I had the oddest hobby for such a little kid. I think I completed about 6″ square of garter stitch in a chunky light blue wool on like US 8’s before I forgot about the whole wanting-to-knit thing.

When I was about nine I went through another knitting phase; my mother was knitting socks for my father with some sort of stranded colorwork - I think it was little fish. I wanted to work on what she was doing and not on my own project, so she let me sit on her lap and work on those socks and on a cream sweater with big magenta roses (don’t judge - we’re talking mid-1980’s here!) that she was knitting for herself. She’s only recently admitted that she had to rip back all the parts that she had let me knit to redo them…

The next time I picked needles up was in December of 2001. I was visiting my Ant Kate’s house during my Christmas vacation and I was about to study abroad in London and only knew one other person going. She found me some needles and some beautiful and vibrant red wool and reminded me how to cast on, to knit, and to purl. I wanted to make a scarf (like every beginning knitter) so I decided upon moss stitch to combat the curling edge problem and to keep it interesting. I found that knitting was just like riding a bike… I remembered things about tension my mother had taught me at five. I’m glad I picked something that would take a lot of time (I throw yarn with my right hand - moss stitch is terribly time consuming that way), because I was addicted to it - I would stay up late at night knitting and watching German MTV. I remember making mistakes and having no one there to tell me how to fix it… I didn’t realize that I could have just found any yarn store and they would help me figure it out! I had to figure out how to fix dropped stitches while keeping the stitch pattern right and how to put stitches back on the needle after ripping and how to bind off all without an experienced guide.

And when I finished the scarf, which was really much too wide for my tastes (I still have it somewhere, but I think it’s in Seattle), I decided I could do anything and wanted to try a sweater. I went to Liberty of London to check out my options. Options at Liberty include: Rowan. And that’s it. But I didn’t find myself wanting for any other options - Rowan yarn is incredibly beautiful and I find the patterns easy to follow. I found in A Season’s Tale a sweater whose shape appealed to me and decided I would knit in the recommended yarn but would add stripes for interest. I think I actually did a gauge swatch that first time (but I certainly didn’t wash it) before I cast on and knit up the four pieces of the sweater. I found directions for mattress stitch on the internet while on the computer at the library, seamed it up, and wore it proudly. I still wear that sweater even though the fit leaves something to be desired. Oh, and blocking? Yeah, that’s something I’ve just started doing recently - FIVE years later!

(Sorry for the crappy pictures-of-pictures, but my scanner refuses to communicate with my new computer!)

Even if all I’m reading is knitting books, at least I’ve started reading again. I went through a big reading funk and hadn’t finished a book in about six months. While out of town I finished three books I’ve been meaning to read since I received them for Christmas:

Reading Elizabeth Zimmermann always feels very empowering. KNITTING WITHOUT TEARS is not my favorite of her books, but it does have the seamless hybrid sweater (which I want to make for myself) and the Modular Tomten Jacket (which I want to make someday).

I also read her KNITTING WORKSHOP, which has an excellent tip for Long-tail Casting-on - you don’t need the slip knot at the beginning; you just lay the yarn over the top of the right hand needle! Why didn’t I think of that? It has the recipes for the Babies’ Surprise Jacket and the Rorschach Sweater, which I’ve only ever seen here, and it is lovely.

My mother also got me KNITTING FROM THE TOP, as she felt it was a classic accompaniment to the other two. My mother has never ever knit anything without a pattern - not even socks. I think reading these books one after another has definitely convinced me to do a sweater without a pattern, whether or not it follows any of the recipes… but I have a long WIP list to do before I even think of starting something new. I should prioritize those items and attack the list rather than starting new things for this round of Project Spectrum, even though red and black are some of my absolute favorite colors.

Sometimes I think I take knitting and all my other crafts for granted. It’s only when I see someone just starting to learn do I really appreciate the time it took my mother to teach me how to knit, needlepoint, cross-stitch, sew, and quilt (not to mention cook and bake). My mother first taught me to knit when I was about five or six years old; I think I stuck with it for about 9″ of a “scarf,” nevermind that we lived in Seattle and there was no need for scarves! I wish she had saved that little bit of blue scarf for me - or at least a picture of it!

Last summer I taught a friend how to knit and, while she enjoyed it for those first few moments, she gave up the moment someone wasn’t there to supervise. I don’t blame her - it takes a lot of time and effort to solve knitting problems on your own the first few times you encounter them. And you have to know that you really want to solve it and to get better at your craft. When she was packing up to move from NYC to Portland last month, she found the needles and yarn and the bit of knitting she had done and gave it all back to me in one piece. And before I ripped it out to rewind it onto the ball I took a photo for us to remember it by:

If I hadn’t been knitting for so long I would want to quit now because my current knitting challenge is pissing me off. I am designing a pair of socks for my father that is masculine enough that he’ll wear them, but not too boring for me to knit. In the past I’ve made him pairs that are stockinette and pairs that are ribbed, but golly do those get boring fast. He’s not cable-adverse like some people tend to be, so I thought I’d put together some stitch patterns myself and see how it goes:

I thought it was going swimmingly (I love the braided cable) until I measured the leg diameter… it’s so skinny it wouldn’t even fit my little tiny feet! So I ripped. And wow did it hurt to rip all that cabling. And I tried again…

I added 12 stiches to the needles and added some plain ribs in between cables and tried a looser braid and it will fit now, but that braided cable is SO UGLY and needs to be tighter as in the last iteration. I’m okay with the ribbing and the small cables and I will keep those features in the next installment. So I’m going to pull it all out again… but the Brown Sheep Wildfoote rips easily and is holding up nicely. Thank goodness I didn’t try this with a mohair blend or it would be a big sticky mess!

I have a couple other projects that are in need of “fixing” as well… and I’m hoping to work through their problems before I start new projects. I bought some yarn while I was in Boston for work last month and I just can’t wait to get started with it. Fortunately it’s all sock yarn and I only have one set of 2mm needles so I have to finish these socks and the Fiesta Mittens that I started in February first!

The pieces for this sweater have been done for months. And the Project Spectrum blue/white/grey months are almost over, so I need to finish the two sweaters that were my goal for the first two months instead of starting new projects…

I’d never blocked a sweater properly before yesterday. I went the cheap route and bought two 32″x40″ pieces of 3/16″ foam core board from my favorite local art store, Pearl Paint, and drew a one inch grid onto them. Then I covered them in clear plastic recycling bags for “waterproofing.” They seem to work just fine for a total cost of under $10.

I love the way the pins line up. I used every single straight pin I owned and still would have used more if I had them!

It’s amazing the difference it makes in the fabric - I never would have guessed that it would have such a positive effect on this pattern! I always thought blocking would make things look sort of, well, flat. And it does, but not in a bad way. As Eunny says in her blocking tutorial, Block Me, Amadeus: “it’s the difference between a sweater that looks ‘homemade’ and one that looks ‘handknit.’” So I gave it a try and I see now what she meant!

Hopefully it will make a positive effect on the ease of seaming and how the whole thing drapes while worn, but for right now it smells like wet wool in my bedroom…

Ta da! Charcoal grey and white-striped Project Spectrum Jaywalkers:

started: 10 March 2007

finished: 21 March 2007

pattern: Jaywalkers (just like pomatomus: I think I’m the last one to the party)

yarn: Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock in a self-striping purl exclusive colorway

needles: 2mm INOX dpns

notes: The Jaywalker pattern is great - it’s so easy and makes a very flattering fabric. Shepherd Sock is likewise awesome… why wasn’t I told about this yarn sooner? We’ll see how it holds up, but it’ll probably do well due to the nylon content. I made the leg longer than the pattern said to, but I have short feet so there’s always leftover yarn… even with this adjustment I still have a 3″ diameter ball left to make a pair of self-striping baby socks with:

I am starting my spring cleaning and have decided to organize my yarn and fabric stash this year. Most of the yarn is for planned or actual works in progress, but some is not; I put some things up on DeStash - Cash For Your Stash and some yarn I’ve given away. But the best part is that the yarn portion of the giant mess in my hallway:

Is now contained in a smallish (17″ x 13.5″ x 7″ tall) west elm media box, which fits on top of my bookshelf very neatly:

(The fabric portion of the stash is still to be sorted and organized, but I hope to clear out the rest of the plastic containers in the hallway by the end of the month…)