70 posts tagged “socks”
While taking photos for the previous post, I spotted this cheerful view in the background. Left to right: Baudelaire, Clessidra, Elegant ribbed stockings, Push-me-pull-you, Triskell cable, Coriolis. I've got a pretty good wardrobe of handknitted socks now - there are several more pairs which aren't on the radiator, including the dissertation socks currently on my feet :-)
Today, The Princess Bride and the push-me-pull-you socks have been vying for my attention. I've had to pause in my knitting during particularly interesting bits of book, and pause in my reading during particularly interesting bits of sock. The socks are now finished; the book has about a third to go.
1. Joined at the ribbing, just before casting off.
2. Just after casting off, looking like what would happen if Georgia O'Keefe was a knitter.
3. Immediately post-separation. Outer sock still inside-out on the left; inner sock on the right, right-way-out as it has been all along (my first real sight of the right-side!)
4. Both socks right-way-out.
5. On my feet, with the stripes lining up! (With bad colour matching - the other photos are a better match.)
These are very close to being finished. Double knitting the ribbing is a bit fiddly, but it's a joy to be able to read my knitting again after acres of reverse stocking stitch, even though since it's ribbing I rarely actually need to read it. I have misknit several stitches on the inside sock, knit instead of purl or vice versa, but nothing two minutes with a crochet hook won't solve.
(But to save you any anxiety, the situation has now been saved. Phew.)
I was knitting merrily away on the push-me-pull-you socks while watching The Professionals, when I noticed a bit of green from the variegated yarn on the red side. Oh noes! I had accidentally twisted my two yarns together about four rows back. Four rows isn't much to frog, but picking up the stitches again - alternating the two yarns, and on the wrong side - was not an option I was prepared to consider. I thought about just leaving it, and fixing it when the socks were finished and the right side was visible, but that would mean I couldn't separate them, impairing my ability to weave in the rest of the ends as I go, and making the knitting messier and the finishing task harder. I couldn't produce more than about 2cm of free yarn at the relevant spot, and am not at all sure of my ability to tie a secure knot after cutting such a short length.
After examining the problem, and discarding all the alternatives, I came up with a solution: I dropped the two guilty stitches (one on each sock) back down to the row before the twist, and held them out of the way with safety pins (which was a risk - I must get some of the coil-less variety). Then, forced by necessity to break the no-peeking-at-the-right-side rule, I un-interlaced a bunch of stitches either side, sewed in another length of yarn along the path of the twisted strand (on the red side, to make matching easier), and screwed up my courage to cut the yarn at a point where its path was duplicated, to give me enough spare yarn at the twist to tie a knot (fortunately, I remembered to untwist the yarn before tying the knot ;-)
Situation saved. And in some ways, I like having to fix this kind of mistake in my knitting - I enjoy thinking about the structure of the knitted fabric and working out what to change to make things work again.
(Following the spirit of the no-peeking rule I resisted the urge to take a picture of the bit of the right side which was briefly revealed. It looked nice, though!)
Second pic is the red-toed sock just after turning the heel (the other sock is tucked inside, as it is while I'm knitting).
Third pic, the variegated-toed sock, ditto.
Fourth pic, both socks conjoined, just after the heel turn, with the ends still straggling and the hole at the join still very visible.
Fifth pic, same thing a few rows on and with the round beginning moved to centre back instead of the side. Ends all woven in, and holes closed up reasonably well (how good this looks on the right side is yet another thing I don't get to see until they're finished!)
Progress continues apace with these, although they're quite tiring to knit, what with small stitches and having to hold both strands under tension all the time. I love how they look on the wrong side, and I'm really impatient to see what the right sides look like, for which I'll have to wait until they're finished. I'm more than halfway to the heel, and I'm sewing in the ends from colour changing as I go, to avoid it getting too untidy, and to avoid the possibility of finishing the knitting and then being put off by all the ends and never finishing them. I don't mind sewing in ends in small numbers, so this is working fine.
The second is a last-minute Christmas gift for R, which I partly wove in front of him on Christmas Eve, figuring (correctly, it turns out) that he pays no attention to what I'm making unless I talk to him about it. There are stripes in the weft - plain dark grey Jaeger merino and black tweed YSL - but they're much less obvious in the flesh than in the photo.
Next up (pictures three and four) is the finally-finished Clessidra. I don't think I'll use the riverbed sockitecture again, because I don't like how it fits me, but I love the socks and am going to wear them to a crafting date tomorrow :-)
Picture five is R's blue socks with a reknitted heel after he wore a massive hole in one of them. I think I've still got some of the blue, but I'm not sure where, and he didn't mind them being mended in black.
The last pic is my new sock project, double knit socks which I'm knitting wrong side out, so I don't have to move the yarn backwards and forwards (near side is English-style purl, far side is continental-style knit, so one strand in each hand, which is fun). The downside of knitting them this way around is that I can't read my knitting on the wrong side, so whether I'm increasing or not on any given row is a bit random but because I'm knitting them at the same time they'll match anyway so it doesn't matter, and I'm planning a short-row heel so there's no other increases or decreases to keep track of. I wanted to use different yarn to make it easier to keep track of which stitch belongs to which sock, so these will end up non-matching stripes - once I've finished the toe I'll break the yarn and swap them over, and keep swapping them at random intervals throughout (must remember to break yarn to do this, so I don't end up knitting the two together).
My old camera died, so I'm way behind in taking photos of things, but today I bought a new one, which I chose on its ability to take closeups. So here's the last week or so's crafting...
Spinning! The alpaca (first two photos) isn't new spinning, but I took the photos to test the closeups - the second is without flash, because super macro doesn't work with forced flash, but it still shows that the picture is clear even this close up. The third picture is the plied result of the shetland-merino-silk-mohair mix, and the fourth is to be a gift for a friend. It's the hand-painted purple wool I bought at the Knitting and Stitching show, but it was so matted it wouldn't spin easily without carding it first, so it's much less variegated as yarn than it was when I bought it. I've got two more lots of fibre from the same supplier, but carding really would mess up the colours in those, so I'll have to carefully pre-draft before spinning it.
Knitting! We bought teapots on holiday in Cumbria, and now I've made a teacosy from the three-ply wisteria yarn that matches the navajo ply in my dissertation socks. It took me a day, and the top is Cat Bordhi's whirlpool toe! And I'm still knitting along on Clessidra - over halfway through both socks now.
This is my lovely new drum carder, which arrived yesterday, and which has already got through hours and hours worth of hand carding in a very short time indeed :-) I've now carded all of the lilac alpaca which is destined to be my MiL's Christmas present, and spun the first lot of it; I'm intending to spin most if not all of the rest of it this evening, and then it will be ready for washing and plying, hoorah. I've also made a start on carding the black alpaca, which will end up carded again, with the purple merino, to make goth-coloured yarn.
I was intending to make this into a wrap for me, and had originally thought of one of the beautiful spiky lace shawls I keep seeing on Ravelry, but in the same delivery from Fibrecrafts as the carder was another package, which I'm not entitled to enjoy for about six weeks: the loom R is giving me for my birthday. I've got two projects planned for this, and one of them is the gothmerino-alpaca - a nice simple rectangle of plain weaving to make the kind of wrap I like best. The other weaving project I'm planning is one I've already talked about: the autumn coloured wrap, with one ply of burgundy merino and one of variegated autumn-leaves colours. For a while I looked around for fibre in the colours I want, and then when I gave up on that, I looked around for undyed fibre and dyes to produce it myself, but then I remembered that Freyalynn (who dyed my Wisteria and Caribbean fibre) also does custom dye jobs, so my autumn leaves fibre has now been commissioned! This will be a birthday present from my parents. I believe in planning ahead in such matters :-)
And Clessidra is coming along nicely. The heel is turned, and I'm into the ankle, and am just about to take measurements and make calculations for the calf increases.
