I don't hate making socks!

Once upon a time I made a sock. I was bored with the whole project, even during a two-day conference, and it took me a good eight months to make the second one. I convinced myself that I hate making socks. I didn't really enjoy wearing socks either, but that was fine because I lived in Georgia and wore heels just about every day anyway. And then I moved to Vermont, and accidentally made friends with every damn sock knitter in town. After almost a year of watching them make socks (and, also, of needing and wearing lots of socks), I decided to give the sock-knitting another try.

Turns out, I don't hate making socks after all! Here are the things that made me not hate knitting socks:

• I'm doing two at a time.
• I'm doing them on one needle (I just taught myself Magic Loop! ...from 2-At-A-Time Socks, thank you Treehugger for lending)
• I'm doing them toe-up.
• I learned the Judy Becker Magic Cast-On (because a provisional cast-on for a sock is stupid...a major point of doing it toe up is so you DON'T have to graft the toe together later!)(thank you, Cat Bordhi, for your excellent how-to video).

I knit about two inches per sock last night, and fell asleep thinking about stitch patterns I might use, and how to do them so they look pretty... I've totally converted, haven't I? Sometime I'll get around to posting pictures, but that involves taking pictures, which involves putting down the knitting needles. And I'm reluctant to do that right now.

Finished Objects

A few photos of finished objects... I have done quite a bit of knitting work lately, but have been remiss in posting here. It's been one heck of a month, hitting four major milestones in the span of eight days, a sudden trip home for a semi-surreal family funeral (not someone to whom I was close, I'm fine thank you, blah blah blah), and now I'm spending two blissful weeks doing as little actual work as possible, because I will not have this opportunity to recharge myself until after Christmas. And no, there will be no Christmas knitting this year, if I can help it.

This is my finished Dashing (for Ben). My sister took the photo -- since she's a magazine editor, she's especially good at setting up shots, even with my crappy cell phone camera. They turned out really well, and I'd knit this pattern again in a heartbeat, although probably with different yarn. Something a little softer/less scratchy than Jamieson's Shetland Spindrift. Mmmm, maybe a nice Blue Sky Alpaca and Silk???





Here's the finished Red Teddy Bear, for my sister's baby (who has been born! It's a boy! Photos to come later).

Sister loves the bear -- or, at least, she says she does -- and I'm hoping that Baby A. does too, eventually.


Doc the Cat wasn't so sure about the bear once I stitched on a face. He'd rather have the thing be a little less anthropomorphic, I guess. The face kind of freaked him out.

Poor kitty.



Currently on the needles: the Tangled Yoke Cardigan, and a yellow (slightly modified) version of the Red Teddy Bear, and a pair of thrummed baby mittens that I invented and did without writing down, so now I can't get the second one to match the first. Ah, experimenting.

Dashing (for Ben)

Ben is the janitor/groundskeeper for the Cathedral next door to my house. On the other side of our house is the Catholic charity house, and across the street is a Catholic school. Ben has a lot of work to do, and he is always outside doing some kind of maintenance work. And because our house was empty for several years before we bought it, Ben got in the habit of taking care of the front of our house, too. And even though we're here now, Ben has kept up that habit: shoveling our driveway in the summer (we share a driveway with the charity house, so he might as well), trimming our crabapple tree out front (he was doing all the others on the block, right?), mowing our front yard (he quickly realized that we don't have a lawnmower), etc. Man, Ben is a nice guy.

One snowy March day, I looked out my front window and saw Ben across the street, shoveling the school's walkways and NOT WEARING GLOVES. He needs access to his hands, of course, and can't be putting on and taking off mittens all the time. And I, toasty in my pajamas, working from home, drinking coffee with chocolate milk powder mixed in, watched Ben do his work. He was out there for hours. His poor hands must have been nearly frozen, and miserably chapped. And the lightbulb went on: he needs some Dashing fingerless mitts!

So summer has come and gone, it is now October, and although I wound the yarn for Ben's mitts a couple of months ago, I didn't get around to making them until this week. The air is starting to get chilly at night (perfect sleeping weather), and I want to finish the mitts before he need them -- wrap them nicely, write a little "thank you" note, and ... well, I haven't decided if I'm brave enough to walk down the street to his house and knock on his door and hand him the mitts in person, or if I'm going to just leave the package on his front porch one day. Either way, I've got to get these mitts done before winter gets here. I hope he uses them.

Snow White Cable Hat

I knit this hat while watching the Democratic National Convention. I've had this Lopi in the stash for a couple of years, I think, and have been meaning to make a pretty cable-rib hat with it for a while.

It's a basic 56-stitch hat with a 2x2 rib. Size 9 (US) needles. I should have started with 60 stitches rather than 56: it's just the tiniest bit too small, but it's not unwearable. I added stitch markers to divide the hat into thirds, and then cabled semi-randomly when I felt like it. The cables look a little too sparse, and this was another reason I should have done 60 stitches -- then I could have divided into fourths rather than thirds and made the cabling a little more evenly-spaced and symmetrical.

Anyway, it's a hat. I'm pretty happy with it. I have a second skein of this same white Lopi, so I may make another one if I ever feel the motivation. If I do, then this prototype may get frogged and turned into mittens of some kind. Maybe. Meh.

Red Teddy Bear

Sister's Baby is due in about five weeks. That seems really soon to me, but the summer flew by very quickly this year.

I was not terribly successful in my quest to make a ton of baby stuff for her, particularly since I (a) was not purchasing any yarn, and (b) did not have much superwash in the stash. I did pick up some gorgeous Colinette Cadenza at the Kaleidoscope Anniversary Sale in June, and it took me a while to figure out what to do with it. The yarn is "Easy Care" which is sort of like being Superwash, but only sort of. Theoretically you can wash this stuff in a machine, but only in cold water on gentle cycle with special wool-friendly laundry powder -- and if you can't do all of that then please handwash. So, how that is different from normal wool I'm not sure.

But I finally found the answer to my "what the heck do I do with this yarn?" dilemma: teddy bear (Ravelry link). While a teddy bear will need occasional washing if, say, Baby gets sick on it, a bear will not get the kind of wear that a baby blanket or a piece of clothing would. And I absolutely love Zoe Mellor's Knitted Toys book, and want to knit everything in it anyway (when have you ever picked up a knitting book and fallen in love with every single pattern in there?!?!? If I knit two patterns from the same book, I consider that a bonus and feel proud of my frugality!). So I had to start somewhere.

Although it's a stockinette pattern, the head does require a bit of counting, and I ended up putting the project on hold for a little while this summer because I was only knitting on Sunday afternoons with my group -- and group knitting, in this case, is not conducive to counting. But I could count and listen to the Democratic National Convention at the same time, so the bear eventually got done. Just in time for Baby!

(In the mean time, Doc the Cat likes to cuddle up and fall asleep on the bear -- good practice for when Baby is ready to cuddle with Bear.)

Blue Eyelet Cardigan, part 2

I finished the Blue Eyelet Cardigan, and have been wearing it a ton.

I was totally right: I needed a little cotton sweater for the Vermont evenings, and this cardigan is just the thing to take the chill off. Buttons (and four of the five skeins of yarn) from Kaleidoscope. (The other skein is from WEBS. And my friend Leandre gave me a couple of scraps, too -- thank you!) The woman who assisted me when I chose buttons was so helpful. I love that place.

I normally hate knitting with cotton, but I am in love with Blue Sky Alpacas' Dyed/Organic Cotton, and will always be true. Sooooo soft.

I could see working this pattern again, maybe in red or brown next time. And if I do, I will totally buy the correct number of skeins (and the same dye lot) the first time.

Labyrinth Rug update

The Labyrinth rug started small, you'll remember. But I have been working on it, little by little.

Now it's getting bigger. It's about 25 feet long so far, and I will probably keep going a bit more. Some sources say the pattern calls for 20 feet, some sources say the pattern calls for 20 yards. I don't actually own One Skein, and I can't remember whether I'm supposed to knit for feetage or yardage, but the latter is three times the former, and that's a lot of knitting. Really I just think I'll knit until I'm done knitting and I think it's big enough.

Doc the Cat likes it, and that's good enough for me. He likes sitting next to the rug, but not on it. He's funny like that. Also, he may feel differently when it's sewn together and not a weird squishy mess like it is now.

Mittens for Him, Cuffs for Me. How Cute!

Crazy Aunt Purl inspired me. I got some red Lopi from the sale bin at the Knitting Studio in Montpelier one afternoon, and right around that same time, Laurie was makin' mittens. I definitely caught the bug, and decided that Husband needed some good mittens for the winter. For all that shoveling he's going to do when the snow begins to fall (ahem).

So I grabbed by Size 9 DPNs and based my mittens on the Super Mittens pattern (Ravelry link) from Weekend Knitting, just like CAP did. But I doubled the cuffs (knit 12 rows, purl one row, tuck under, knit 12 more rows, on the 13th row after the purl, knit into the cast-on row to close the hem) and made them extra-long so he could tuck them into his jacket sleeves nicely. And then I made some fingerless mitts for me with the leftovers. So now we have matching handwear (cute!), but I'll need him to help keep my fingers warm (sickeningly cute!). Awww.

The mittens may get a bit of a hot water dip for some slight fulling, if I ever get around to it. They may not. We'll see.

He's such a good sport when it comes to posing for blog pictures. Thanks, honey!