First up, the socks from Knitting Vintage Socks.
These are hanging in Meliss’a studio with some of her works-in-progress. (They look a bit puckery on their own, but are gorgeous on.)
Once I finished that pair, I decided it was time to make sure I really understood sock architecture, so I knit up this pair for Melissa without looking at any patterns or books. (I did phone my friend Chris to double check my plans before I began turning the heel).
After that I knit up a pair of Hydrangea socks from The Ecclectic Sole, but I rewrot the pattern some.
My changes:
• continued the “stems” dowm the back of the heel as slip stitches
• worked the gusset stitches in purl to match the rest of the sock
• worked the twisted ribbing around the entire foot
Doing all this was fun and confidence-building. I liked solving the little puzzles the changes presented. I’d recommend that anyone who wants to learn a bit about socks try making a few design modification when they knit a pair.
You’ll also note the single green toe I added as I was running out of yarn. It tickles me to know I’ll have that hidden inside my shoe when I wear these beauties.
Besides having exceptional computer de-programming skills, Damian is also a bit of a thinker, as you can see from this photo. (All those heavy thoughts—he needs help holding his head up.)
What is he thinking? Probaby something really deep, like, “If I had a flock of chickens would it be better to teach them to play baseball and go barnstorming—or to just whip them up into one monumental souffle?”
As part of our personal summer of socks, Chris and I are both knitting up Rivendell from Janel Laidman’s The Eclectic Sole (that’s a Ravelry link; you can also see a thumbnail of this sock on the designer’s web site).
Chris is making hers in a gorgeous bright pink (color 25) of Happy Feet from Plymouth. I’m going with Dream in Color’s Smooshy in the Strange Harvest colorway. On their web page this color looks bright, but it’s more of a deep poison green with some gold and orange running through it.
The top of the sock has clusters of wrapped stitches, which require a fair bit of fiddling, but once you get past those they fly along.
I would definitely recommend this book to other sock knitters, though it probably wouldn’t be a good choice for beginners. The patterns have some errors in them, so one has to stop and puzzle a bit to get things to work smoothly. That said, the designs are interesting and varied and involve a variety of construction techniques (top-down, toe-up, sideways).
Janel Laidmen has another book coming out this fall that Chris and I are both looking forward to: The Enchanted Soul. The patterns from this book are currently for individual sale, but we want the whole lot. If you’re on Ravelry, you can check them out, as she’s been posting them one or two at a time.
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I spent a few hours this evening reworking the Pangea Shawl pattern into a single document. Melissa will work her layout magic on it, and I should have it posted before long. We’re also doing a new photo shoot of the blue version using the Curious Creek yarn, as we just don’t feel it’s been done justice yet.
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As for the request—
I’m wondering if there’s anyone out there who has a copy of my Sandia Hat pattern that appeared on MagKnits, oh, so long ago. I have lost the original, the pattern has been unavailable on-line since MagKnits folded, and I regularly get requests for it that I’m unable to satisfy. If someone out there has it, I’d love to get a copy back, so I can post it here. I’d be glad to sweeten the deal by sending you a little something in return.
I hadn’t actually intended to take a month-long hiatus—it just sort of happened. I was bent out of shape by the Supreme Court ruling, and then crashed headlong into the concrete barrier that is the end of the academic year. And after that I did have a bit of a vacation.
While I haven’t been blogging, I have been knitting. I’d mentioned that my friend Chris was insisting that I knit a few socks in preparation for Sock Summit, which we’d been thinking of attending. We ultimately decided that driving a full day each way to meet up with other sock knitters was less appealing than the notion of hanging out with each other knitting socks in our backyards, so we made a pact that each of us would try writing up a sock pattern. We set our project up this way:
• We each agreed to write up our pattern without any test knitting or swatching.
• Once our patterns were written, we’d give them to each other.
• Each of us would knit the first sock from the other’s pattern.
• After that, the pattern writer would be given the first sock and would have to knit up the second herself.
Originally, we’d planned to do our sock swap in August when Sock Summit would be in session, but we both got going early. Chris has already knitted up her sock from my pattern, and I’m most of the way through the second one that I’m knitting myself. I’ve also finished up everything but the toe of the sock that Chris designed.
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I’ve been deeply ambivalent about sock knitting. I’m not much of a sock-wearer, and I’m very fussy about fit, so hand-knit socks always seemed like a lot of effort for a product I might not even like.
Breaking News: I am no longer ambivalent about socks.
I love them. Well, I don’t necessarily plan to start wearing them all the time, but I am absolutely addicted to designing them. They allow all sorts of wonderful opportunities for combining stitch patterns and for playing with those stitches to shape them around the various surfaces of the sock. I’m trying to be inventive with heel flaps, looking for ways to keep the slipped stitches that make them dense, but to arrange these so they echo the stitch patterns in the rest of the sock. I’ve also discovered that socks are great for using every-row lace patterns, which are miserable to work with on shawls or other pieces that are worked back and forth.
In fact, today over lunch with Melissa I found myself saying, “I want to write a book of sock patterns.”
Such a book is probably years away, but I am hoping to find homes for some of my new patterns in on-line magazines (and I am convinced that that book will come into being eventually). I also have one sock pattern I’ll be publishing for free later this summer, once I give it another revision.
Pictures soon—and I promise to try to be better about posting regularly and offering worthwhile tidbits of fun and wisdom, knitterly or otherwise.
The bad news: the California State Supreme Court has upheld Prop. 8, meaning that all gay and lesbian couples in California are now constitutionally prohibited from marrying. (To add to the injury, it was a 6-1 ruling.)
Melissa and I feel lucky to have friends, family, and coworkers who celebrate and honor our commitment to each other. Please stop and think about what you can do today (and tomorrow and next week and next month) to see that the handful of us who were able to marry in California between June 17, 2008 and November 4, 2008 are not the last.
I’ll be at tonight’s vigil with the sign I made last fall—”Knitters say K2tog: it’s a good thing.”
After much, much operatic posturing on his part, Archy is being allowed out for the occasional daytime ramble. Maggie would prefer to stay in, thank you. And Damian has no clue that “out” even exists. But Archy is a former street waif, and he knows about fresh air and sniffing things and gopher hunting and chomping on grass (and then waiting until he’s back inside to throw up). He has been bucking for an exit visa almost since the day Melissa moved in.
Archy’s new indoor-outdoor status means he and Miss Timmy have been meeting up. We have not had any actual fighting, but we have had posturing aplenty.
Poor Archy. As soon as he gets his alpha on, one of us scoops him up and walks him back inside, tutting and saying, “if you can’t play nice, you won’t get to play at all.” We don’t even act the least bit frightened by his growls and hisses. The indignity of it all!
My BKFF (best knitting friend forever—as well as pretty much every other kind of friend you can think of), Chris, is an amazing sock knitter. You should see the way they whiz off her needles, all beautiful and intricate and even-stitched.
My relationship with socks is a bit strained. First off, ever since my toddler days (or so I’ve been told), I was one of those kids who didn’t want things on her feet. I go barefoot whenever I can, and the first thing I do when I get home is kick off my shoes—there’s quite a pile of them near the front door giving testimony to this habit. And socks just add to the torture… one more layer between my feet and the fresh, fresh air they long to breathe. So things have to get pretty frigid before I’ll put on socks.
And when I do put on socks, I’m fussy about fit. I hate shloompy socks that slide down my feet. If the heels aren’t just right, I get to tugging at them until they’re halfway up my shins—and there’s no right fit for a heel once it’s all the way up there. I want them sung, but not tight, with heels in exactly the right place.
So, given my general distaste for footwear and my persnickitiness when it comes to fit, you can see why I haven’t knit many socks—two pairs to be exact. They’re complicated enough (at least they seem that way right now) that I can’t easily give them away, yet odds are slim to none that a pair I knit will actually satisfy me and find use.
All that having been said—Chris and I are going to Sock Summit in August. It’s a perfect fit for her… and I love Portland and knitting, so it’s not really off the mark for me. But going means I need to knit some more socks, so I’ll have at least a little footly cred by time I get there. So I took a break last night from some of the patterns I’ve been working up to cast on a pair of socks.
I’m going with “Little Child’s Sock” (a woman’s sock actually, the original was for a child) from Nancy Bush’s Knitting Vintage Socks.
They’re pretty darn cute: about an inch of ribbing, a 2×2 check section, more ribbing, then stockinette with a 2×2 check panel down the front and a mock seam up the back. I’m knitting them in Trekking Hand Art, Fire colorway, and am having a lovely time working my way from one section to the next.
I plan to check them regularly against favorite pairs of socks in hope that I will, despite the odds, wind up with something I’ll actually wear.
As I’d said earlier, Miss Timmy seemed to know that her trip to the vet—unwelcome as it was—meant that she finally had a for-real-and-for-true home. Not long after that, Chris bought her a cardboard scratching pad, which has been the joy of her existence. She slept on it at nght, rested on it during the day, and scratched and scratched and scratched. You could almost see the wheels turning in her head: I OWN something. I never had a MINE before. MINE is good. It has scratchy-yums.
Well, we’ve been having heavy rain lately, and Miss Timmy’s scratching pad has taken quite a hit. But that hasn’t kept her from loving it. She continues to sit on it, despite the rain, all draped out as if she’s trying to keep it dry.
Chris decided to buy her a new pad, which she takes in when it rains to keep it intact. Miss Timmy made it known that she appreciates the thought (she even scratched it some to be polite), but she still prefers her first scratching pad, her MINE.
Chris snapped this pic yesterday evening.
Oh, how Miss Timmy loves her MINE, bedraggled as it is.
Version one is knit in two strands of DROPS laceweight heathered alpaca. The color is one of my absolute favorites, and these babies are soft, soft, soft.
Unfortunately, they came out a bit tight—which is what I get for swapping out yarns and choosing a pattern size without swatching. Normally, I am quite happy to give away finished knits and don’t worry about size (”Every knit will fit someone.”) But as I worked on these babies, I knew I would not be parting with them. The fit my hands ok, but are too tight for the overpping button closure on the wrist, so I just sewed on a decorative butting to help keep the wrist opening from pulling too much and left them at that. I am occasionally haunted by the fact that they didn’t come out exactly as they were supposed to, but then the color and comfort distract me and I am nothing but pleased, pleased, pleased again.
The minute I finished my first pair, I cast on for a second pair using Argosy Yarn’s Jo Jo, an absolutely delicious wool/cashmere/angora blend. Argosy was one of my finds during Stitches ‘08. I believe the owner/dyer Melissa originally planned to run a wholesale business, but she now sells her yarns via on-line retail. You absolutely mustcheck out her yarns. These are some of the finest quality fibers I’ve ever worked with, and the colorways are rich and striking. (The prices are also quite reasonable for goods of this quality.) She has a knack for coming up with colors that stand out from the usual crowd—witness my mitts in the Cherokee colorway, which moves from burgundy to brown to black and also back and forth between dusty and clear hues.
Every stitch of this project was a pleasure, and I had to stop after every round to pet them and coo at them and marvel at the softness of the fiber and the joy of the color. These mitts do have enough overlap for the button closure, though I haven’t yet found the perfect buttons.
And here’s the yummy neckwarmer I gave my mom for Christmas. I knit this out of Plymouth’s Mulberry Merino, which is soft and glossy and comes in wonderful colors.
I’ll be publishing this as a free pattern when I get a chance, although that probably won’t be until sometimes after the end of this academic year.
