robknits

News, reviews and hexagons

     Not much blogging going on here chez Rob, but there has been some knitting.  First the news:  one complete Sockotta sock, completed on an unbroken wooden needle.   I knit this toe up, as usual, until I decided not to knit it anymore.  I began my usual K1P1 rib and then decided I didn't like it, so I just did a sewn bind-off without any intermediary steps.  Knitting this was fun -- the yarn does not produce the moaning sounds knitting with handpainted 100% merino can produce, or merino and silk, or merino and mohair... ahem.  But it was fun, and quick and did not hurt my hands.  And the size 1 Knitpicks Harmony needle is also just fine, thank you.  No bend, no breaking.  So I started this one's mate, just in time to take it on a trip with me.  Another good reason to use Harmony needles -- they don't scare anyone in airports.  I do like wearing the cotton blend socks I have made, so I foresee more Sockotta in my future.  Especially since the colors as they appear in the skein have always attracted me.  Here's a picture of the sewn bind-off you can embiggen if details appeal to you.  

     The review.  Did the latest Vogue Knitting just come out, or did I miss it due to moving pyschosis?  Did anyone notice the amazing fact that the shape of the Kaffe Fassett sweater does NOT resemble a cozy for a Volkswagon Beetle?  In fact, it has SHAPING!  I have always been tempted to knit one of his projects and then hang it on the wall as art.  I still remember realizing that one that I loved was marked "one size fits all" and measured 57" around.  Actually should have been marked "one size fits no one."  Though Erma Bombeck said it best when she asked "One size fits all what?"

    This issue was very interesting and full of creative design, if not very wearable for me.  There are some gorgeous items for very thin people, like the shrug worn with a wedding dress.  The one that went on my gotta-make-it list, though, is the last one in the thumbnails on the Vogue Knitting magazine web page, the blue lace tunic.  I am already considering yarns.  I'd love to do it from stash, especially since I have been hands on with that stash since realizing I was going to move.

     In the meantime, the lovely yarn on the left (Jojoland Melody in colorway 8) is slowly becoming the first few of the 80-something hexagons that make up the swirl stole.  Each hexagon is only 16 rows and once I got the right needles, and found a row counter, it went pretty smoothly.  The right needles were Knitpick Harmony double points, so I am knitting Melody with Harmony. Ha!

 Despites my doubts about the color before I started, I am really liking how it is developing.  But since there are 80 something hexagons to knit, I don't know how quickly this one will get done, even though I am not going to have to sew the hexagons together.  That sort of thing does not happen chez Rob.   Though again, this will be good travel knitting. It is still very small, and I can amaze the muggles by knitting with 4 brightly colored needles. 

Busy

I wrote a long blog entry with photos and links and Typepad lost the whole thing.  Snarl.  Emailed apology notwithstanding, snarl.  It's driving me a bit nuts tonight too.

But. I'm trying again.  In the continuing projects arena, the Sockotta sock is speeding along.  I am past the heel and onto the leg of the sock.  I was going to use a garter rib pattern, but didn't much like how it looked with the self-striping yarn, so I ended up going back to an old favorite of mine.  Row 1: Knit around.  Row 2: K3, P1.  For an example of what this looks like on a solid-colored sock, take a look at Knitty's Thuja. Looks really nice with the self-striping yarn, and is going very quickly.  And I have still not broken the Harmony needle.  This sock actually fits really well, thus breaking my streak of carefully knitting socks that don't quite fit.  I am breaking another rule, by knitting this sock before knitting sock 2 of the Moving Socks, and by not rewinding the large skein of yarn into two balls so I can knit both of these socks at the same time.  'S OK, though, since I only have one of the Harmony size one needles.  But I do have to finish both pairs before actually casting on for yet another pair of socks.  The threat of SSS (Second Sock Syndrome) is just too scary.  I was going to use a heel stitch on this sock but as usual forgot as I started the back of the heel.  I like how the stripe worked out on the heel

The urge to spin has been lurking in the background for weeks.  With the studio room still in chaos, I have not yet set up the Columbine wheel, and the new-to-me Suzie is under a table.  But the drop spindles are lined up and ready to go. 

 It is fun looking at them lined up as shown in the picture below but this is not a great way to store them -- the heaviest part of the spindle is of course the whorl, and so if I touch any of them they fall off the shelf.  Left to right we have:

• One of my favorites, my little Jenny, a bird's eye maple spindle from Red Barn Farm.  It weighs an ounce and it has been great for spinning the fuschia handpainted silk roving I got a few years ago at Maryland Sheep and Wool.  A very reasonably priced spindle too that has the longest spin of any of my spindles.
• The Greensleeves Bare Bones.  A great basic spindle.  It weighs, according to my postal scale, about 2 oz.  My only problem is that the hook now spins inside the spindle.  The Greensleeves folks told me to send it back for a tune up but I haven't been able to bring myself to do that.  Very dumb.  Now that I want to, their website is missing lots of info, like their address. 
• Above the Bare Bones is the Greensleeves Tom Foolery.  Very pretty.  The postal scale says it weighs about 1.5 oz.
• Then, pretty but not much for spinning, is that little one made of two stone whorls.  It doesn't spin for very long at all.
• The next big, beautiful whorl belongs to Hatchtown's Amelia, bought at Maryland Sheep and Wool two years ago.  I raced over to their booth last year to buy another, but they hadn't shown up.  No new spindles are available on their website either.  If I remember correctly, it weighs about as much as the Tom Foolery.
• So, since I couldn't buy another Hatchtown in at the 2007 MDSW, I bought that beautiful spindle next to it at the Turnstyles booth.  That white wood is holly.  I haven't used it yet because it doesn't have a notch in the whorl for the yarn.  I need to find instructions for using a top-whorl spindle without a notch, or find a woodworker to put one in for me.  It weighs an ounce, which means I can use it to spin some of the other batches of handpainted silk waiting in the stash.

Finally, I picked up the Hatchtown Amelia and the gorgeous merino-silk roving I bought at Yarnivore last month (turns out it is Louet/Gaywool roving in the Jacaranda colorway) and started spinning.  To preserve the colors I stripped the roving into pretty thin strips, so that I didn't have to do much predrafting.  When you gently pull the strands to predraft, the colors blend a bit.  Spinning strips helps preserve the color variations. 

I am finding this easy to spin on the Amelia.  In fact, it might be a bit overspun, but since I am going to ply it, and that involves spinning it in the opposite direction, that's OK -- it should unspin a bit during that process.  The Amelia is much heavier than the Jenny, letting me spin a thicker yarn, and that is probably contributing to the overspinning.  But it doesn't spin for as long as the Jenny, or at least I haven't gotten it to that point yet.  I have 4 oz., I think, of this merino-silk in the Jacaranda colorway.  I haven't yet figured out what weight yarn I am spinning, though whatever it is I have been pretty consistent. 

I am still spinning the fuschia silk on the Jenny.  Once I fill the cop this time though, I am eager to try plying it.  I have a lot of it left to spin, but I am going to ply together what I have already spun and see what sort of yarn I have come up with.  I am thinking of knitting this into Sivia Harding's Diamond Fantasy scarf/shawl.  Some research is needed though -- everyone seems to use a heavier spindle to ply, which I suppose makes sense since the yarn you are working with is now twice as heavy (two strands of the original spinning).  I have to figure out which spindle I would use. 

I can't tell you how great it felt to find the following:

Hard to work without your tools!

As far as I can tell, I could find a knitting meet-up in San Antonio on Sundays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, a couple of Fridays a month, and Saturdays.  Some minor health problems have kept me home and going to bed at 8 pm, so I have missed a week's worth of meet ups, and miss other knitters.  I need to catch up!  Tuesday will be the first chance I have.  In the meantime I am going to keep knitting and spinning in an effort to keep from scratching the itchy spot a new vaccine gave me.  But I am going to be sneaky -- I am going to STOP looking for the missing Campanula project.  'Cause the minute I stop looking, I'll find it.

Doing what I said I would do.

Well, not so much.

A number of WIPs were reunited with their patterns.  Caches of knitting notions were unearthed and organized (where did all those crochet hooks come from?).  WIPs with their patterns found nooks in an artistic tower of wicker baskets next to the couch.  It was actually possible to sit down and knit.

So I did.  But not, of course, on any of the WIPs.  First, I had to try an experiment.  At Yarnivore, a member of the Alamo City Knitters gang suggested trying different needles when I said knitting with the cotton-blend sock yarns made my hands ache.  I remembered how I had snapped every wood or bamboo size 1 needle  I had ever used.  But... a brand new Harmony wood laminate size 1 needle had arrived in the mail from Knitpicks. You see, I was already thinking about trying it out, remembering from somewhere that laminated wood tends to be stronger than plain wood or bamboo.  So I picked up the Sockotta I bought at Yarnivore and the new needle... and WOW.  I have most of the foot of the first sock done.  And I have not broken the needle.  No real ache in my right hand either.  I had bought, in the same order, the Harmony tips in sizes 5 and 6, and I am about to go back and order some more in other sizes, as well as more size 1 circular needles.   The Sockotta sock went with me to the doctor's office and the lab for a blood test today (sinus infection #376,421,686.  Or is it 376,421,687?).  Considering there were no magazines in the lab waiting room, that was a life saver.

I also was able to go ahead and start another project that had been percolating for quite some time.  Several years ago, when I treated myself to Stitches West, I bought some gorgeous yarn at the Newton's Yarn Country booth that I have tried to photoraph several times, unsuccessfully,  for the blog. Here's another attempt.  (The yarn is actually more purple and less blue than this appears on my screen.)  It is one of their novelty yarns, with a contents label that makes it sound like it has a bit of every known fiber in its make-up.  Visibly identifiable ingredients include mohair and rayon.  The right pattern just never appeared.  Recently though it occurred to me that I might like to do Lou's Lattice Lace Wrap in this yarn.  Lou calls for Knitpicks' alpaca lace yarn.  The purple and copper mystery yarn is heavier than that.  Last night I wrapped it around a ruler, decided it gets 16 wraps per in (wpi), and went to look up what that translates into in knitting weights.  Turns out 16 wpi is a fingering weight.  So I pulled out the new size 6 Harmony needle tips and cast on.  The combination of yarn and pattern might work very well, and the wrap will be larger than one done in lace weight.  I am close to done with the garter border, so will see soon how the yarn looks in the lace pattern.  I am not adding beads -- this yarn has occasional flashes of shiny stuff in it already.  Now, though, I want more of the Harmony laminate needles. :>  Lucky Kim, she got a complete set as a Christmas gift!

Getting back to my needles

     The knitting meet-ups here have helped get me back into knitting mode and out of my stuck-without-a-project rut.  I did need something relatively simple, something to knit on autopilot but as I have said I got stuck when I thought of socks, immersed as I was in my new sandal-friendly environment.  But there was a sudden breakthrough.

     First, I fell in love with the Chevrolace sock pattern from Knitty's Winter 07 issue.  Not sure how I missed it the first time around.  Knew immediately that I want to use the Dream in Color Smooshy yarn that I have in the Wisterious colorway.  (The second from the left in this line-up of last summer's sock yarn splurge.) I couldn't start right away though since the Smooshy is not wound.  So winding that is on the do-next list.  (The other yarns in the picture, from left to right, are Cherry Tree Hill Sockittome in Moody Blues, Lisa Souza Sock! in Mother of Pearl, and Schaefer Anne in Mint Caramel Frappe.  All awaiting the perfect project.  I don't like the self-designed pattern I started with the Anne.)

     Sock-yarn blankets were also on my mind, as a way of providing a continuing mindless project.  The problem was I couldn't help trying to plan the colorwork on a mitered project, which was kind of beside the point.  Finally, I picked up one of the afghan or Tunisian crochet hooks I have, one too small to make a nice fabric out of heavier yarn, and started experimenting with bit of leftover sock yarn.

      I can't stop. 

     I love the woven look you get with afghan/Tunisian crochet.  And I love the motion involved.  But the relationship among needle size, yarn size, and fabric is quite different in Tunisian crochet than in knitting.  I am using a size G Susan Bates hook.  That's a 4 or 4.5 mm size hook, the equivalent of a size 6 or 7 needle, that I am using with fingering weight yarn.  In knitting that would get me a lacy fabric.  In Tunisian crochet, that gets me an OK blanket-weight fabric, but I really could have used an even larger hook to get a drapier fabric!  That's why I ordered such huge hooks to experiment with fabrics for jacket patterns.  As you can see, I am working in broad color groups with a few contrasting colors thrown in.  The result? I need to knit more socks to get more leftovers!  That helped reignite my interest in knitting socks too.  Isn't that funny?

I don't think I like the brown/copper bit I used in the blue-ish strip.  And I think putting together lots of strips will look as uninspiring (to me, but then, it's my blog) a grannie-square afghan.  So, I think I am going to make strips of varying lengths and then somehow put them together with navy blue sections, in a quilt-like kinda way.  Til then, though, I am just going to make strips of left-over sock yarn.

     So in addition to knitting Chevrolace out of the Smooshy Wisterious, I am also going to start a pair of all-stockinette socks with the  Apple Laine Apple Pie sock yarn in the Best Friends color Kim gave me as a going-away present.  I was also able to look back through the blog to discover what stitch pattern I had used on the Moving socks, done in Paton Kroy Eclipse.  So I can work on sock #2 there.  So with a sock yarn leftover project in motion, and 3 sock projects about to take off, I appear to be back in my basic knitting status.  But I still have to find the following:

• More sock yarn is hiding somewhere.  Missing is my stash of red sock yarns, including the gorgeous Mysterious yarn I bought from the Knitting Zone.  There is an APB out for red sock yarn on Inspiration Drive.
• The Campanula WIP.  I know I saw it somewhere.
• My knitting notions in a clear cosmetic bag.  Now THAT is critical.

Sock!

      In the singular.  My moving-therapy sock #1 was completed just a few minutes ago.  Using Patons Kroy in Winter Eclipse, purchased for very little during, I think, a Herrschnerrs sale. Notice the other all important items sharing the top of the cart:

• Painter's tape.  Good for labeling items going into the freezer and anything else that needs a label.
• Two cat brushes, because of course Maggie will only allow herself to be brushed by the pink one and Frannie only tolerates the blue one. 
• A catnip mousie
• Pencils for marking pattern repeats.
• A knitting magazine.

Anyway, this sock is also a bit long.  That's the second pair in a row that ended up too long.  I am going to cast on right away for Winter Eclipse #2, and will try making that one shorter.  I am also casting on for sock #2 immediately to counteraffect the news that apparently the electricity in the house I want to buy in San Antonio was installed by monkeys.  I tried some alcohol but I think it's gonna take some sock knitting before I calm down.

      We interrupt this knitting blog for some cat cuteness.  First, as all folks who share their home with cats know, if you make a pile of something it requires a cat.  Moving, of course, produces lots of piles.  As I was trying to wash every piece of clothing I own, this resulted.   Maggie appears to understand that her role in the house is to produce moments of outrageously sweet cuteness I disavow in all other parts of my life.  Oh, and then she did this:

Yup.  Discovered ice cubes.  And nope, she sure wasn't supposed to be on the counter.

   Frannie is sharpening her skills of invisibility, except at feeding time and when she has to be brushed.

     Ok, back to fiber fun.  I figured out how to pack a spinning wheel today.  It included a big box, lots of towels, and whatever yarn was still lying around in that room.  And I may have gotten a bit carried away when I prepared for a couple of months of knitting while packing, moving, and unpacking:

Ya think? The yarn for 9 or 10 pairs of socks, a shawl, and 3 sweaters in progress.  I think that's about 2 years worth of knitting for me.  I think I should make it til I am unpack.  Face it, Rob, this is a security blanket in its raw state.  That would have been a cute moving project -- random skeins of things knit into a security blanket. 

Oops

      Yes, the package did say open carefully.  So ... I only used the scissor on the corner.  Hmmm.  This is the skein of Cherry Tree Hill Cherry Blossom sock yarn.  And yup, I had cut the yarn.

      I actually took this with amazing calm.  I began using the swift and the ball winder, thinking of what I might use the yarn for if I had lots of little bits of it.  I was also entertained by what the yarn looked like on the skein vs. what is looks like wound up.  To my pleasure, the ADD gods rewarded me for this bit of calm by letting me wind a center-pull ball that weighs 1.75 oz (out of a 4 oz skein) before I began to hit the short bits.  For some reason I was also  entertained and charmed by the tiny little center-pull balls that each short bit created.  Then, magic struck, and the rest of the skein was wound into a ball that weighs exactly 2 oz.  Since I make socks toe up, I will start with the smaller skein.  So wow, I didn't experience even a moment of horror and panic.  A whole new world of possibilities is opening up before my eyes.  Cheerful interest instead of doomsaying.  Gee.

     Of course, it might be because of the momentous, well, hugeness of everything else.  Last week I flew down to San Antonio to look for a place to live.  Forgot the camera.  Sorry.  But I really got to know the geography of the city and even, after some reality about what I can afford sank it, found a house I would like to own.  Another 1950s ranch, which I find kinda funny.  I grew up in the ultimate 1950s ranch in the very first suburban development of Levittown New York.  When I bought my current house, which is, in fact, a 1950s ranch, I told my dad that I was doing so well I was able to buy the house he had bought for $9000 in 1951.  So now, if all goes well, another (nicer than my current) 1950s ranch in San Antonio.  With a huge gorgeous room that I am not going to waste on the master bedroom (all I do in there is sleep, right?) but rather will use as a studio.  With French doors onto the deck.  And a huge walk in closet to corral all the yarn, fiber, spindles, looms....  So OK, huge-issue-to-deal-with #1: house hunting.  Actually that was huge-issue-to-deal-with #1.5 since getting through Cincinatti in an ice storm on my way down was huge-issue-to-deal-with #1.  That too was experienced with unusual calm and patience. Hmmm.

     So, huge-issue-to-deal-with #2 is of course selling the current house, which has to happen at least 15 minutes before buying the next one, right?  Lots of people are coming to see the house, and there might even be an offer on the table.  Keeping the house presentable has elicited all new kinds of behavior from yours truly: all the dirty dishes go right into the dishwasher.  The bathroom sink gets rinsed out every morning.  I sweep.  I vacuum.  And the truly astonishing result is that the house continues to look very nice.  I have been admiring the wood floors.  Who knew?

     And, I am packing, tossing, recycling, freecycling and selling.  Apparently this sort of huge overload of immensely focused work toward an urgent and immediate lifechanging goal is just what ADD likes.  Though I really want a nap.

     Winding the Cherry Blossom was a form of fiber therapy.  I also went to a new-to-me knitting group (Centre County residents -- a group of very nice people meet to knit on the couches in front of the tv in the Wegmans cafe every Thursday night).  One of the participants is someone I met on Ravelry, because she is an almost-PhD (defending next Thursday.  Go Lauren!) who was awarded a post-doc with the top guy in her field in ... San Antonio.  She'll get there later this spring.   I am still knitting the Patons Kroy Winter Eclipse socks.  But I want, as I said a few entries ago, to wind up a bunch of fancy sock yarns that I have into two balls each so I can just grab 'em and start knitting.  But... here's a question for you.

     The only other time I wound a larger amount of yarn into two skeins to make 2 toe-up socks at the same time (each sock on its own circular needle), I did it from one of those large balls that Trekking and other sock yarns come in.  That was easy.  I put the ball in a bowl and used the ball winder, occasionally weighing what was left in the original ball to get two even balls.  But the yarn I have now, like the Cherry Blossom, is in hanks.  The only way I can think of getting two balls of equal weight is to wind for a while, then take the skein off the swift, weigh that, and put it back on.  Lots of risk of tangles there.  The alternative of course, which would be much easier, would be just to wind one ball, weigh it before casting on, and knitting one sock with less than half the total weight.  I think that would probably be safer.  I have a real yen to knit some stoles and shawls but think I had better stick to socks during the weirdly comfortable chaos of the move.  Though of course once I say that I want to spin, and knit lace stoles.  So I will soothe the fiber yen by winding gorgeous extravagent sock yarns.  Pics to come.

Good ideas circulate, and, a next step

     I finally sat down to read the instructions for Fleegle's toe-up no-flap no-hassle sock heel.  I learned how to do the one I like from a knitting booklet that should never have gone out of print: Janet Rehfledt’s Toe Up Techniques for Handknit Socks. They are, in fact, identical!  Great knitting ideas have multiple sources.  I do like that Fleegle calls it a no-flap heel, since I could never figure out which part was supposedly a flap.  It is a great heel, easily adapted to fit well, and it involves increases, of course, rather than picking up stitches.

     And here is the last, I think, of the sock yarn bought in panic at the idea of not having simple knitting at hand during the packing-moving-unpacking-starting a new job phase of my life.  The gorgeous stuff on the right is SocKX, the Knitting Zone's own handpainted merino sock yarn.  The colorway is called Mysterious.  The mail also brought a skein of Cherry Tree Hill Sockitotme in Cherry Blossom.  I still have to wind several batches of sock yarn into two balls each, before the ballwinder, swift and scale are packed.  I have been so freaked out by having the stash packed that I have not yet put away the equipment.   Or figured out how to pack the umbrella swift.  Hmm, looking at the thumbnail of the swift, I might just need a long box.  But how the heck do I pack the spinning wheel?

     Before loading the fiber equipment onto the moving van, of course, I need to find a place to live.  Tonight I head to San Antone (as my new boss calls it) to look for a place to live.  Supposedly I will come home on Sunday to an official offer on my house here in PA.  That house, after two weeks of grueling sorting, tossing, donating and cleaning, looks pretty good.  So real progress is being made in this move.  Having the de-crapping of the house over with is an enormous relief.  And when I get back I will start packing in serious ways, which will involve more sorting, tossing and donating.  But I feel like I have gotten past the biggest obstacle in the move, and am getting into the fun stuff.  The cats, who have taken to hiding under my blankets, do not agree.

    

Best friends

    First, some yarn beauty.  More about this yarn below.

    Leigh mentioned there would be no snow in San Antonio.  Since we have been hit in the last two weeks with layers of snow, sleet, ice, snow, sleet, ice....  the thought had occured to me :>.  I will have to get used to ferocious heat in the summer, but San Antonio knitters have already warned me that buildings are air conditioned to the point of refrigeration.  I lived in Mexico for 3 years (without air conditioning) but certainly will have to figure out how to dress for work.  And I have been watching the weather in San Antonio and it gets cold at night in the winter, so cardigans will come in handy.  And socks.  I can't sleep at night, except in the warmest seasons, without socks, so at the very least they will be worn in bed.

   By the way, slip stitch is the absolutely easiest and fastest way to work with color.  You only work with one color per row, and it is a very fun way to use up stash and small amounts of yarn.  I've used it on hats as well and will probably do some more hats that way for Macuwita sni. 

     My friend Kim is someone I met through knitting.  She is the one who seduced me into the dark side of luxury sock yarn.  She organized the creation of a knitting guild here, has organized a LYS's annual bus trip to Maryland Sheep and Wool.  I don't think I have ever done Maryland Sheep and Wool without her and that will be tough for me on the first weekend in May this year when I will be something like 1500 miles away.  We get together when we can, which can be hard, since she is a very busy person -- she runs Sen. Bob Casey's office here in central PA.  Yesterday we managed to meet up at the cafe at Barnes and Noble, our usual spot.  A gift bag was on the table when I got there.  Inside was the gorgeous yarn you see above.  It is Apple Laine's sock yarn, in the colorway... Best Friends.  Isn't that perfect?  Wait, I can't resist -- here's another picture.

Kim said the name first attracted her but when she saw the colors she knew that sock yarn would be perfect for me.  She bought it at Loopy Ewe of course -- Kim appears to be a permanent virtural resident there! The non-blue in the yarn is brighter than my picture shows -- the true colors are somewhere between those on Loopy Ewe picture and mine.  This is very luxurious yarn, folks -- wool, mohair, silk and nylon, in the gorgeous glowing colors mohair and silk can produce.  It is also sooo luxurious to the touch that I wound the first skein into a ball BY HAND last night.  Can't remember the last time I did that, but ooooohhh....  Best friends know that when you are packing and overwhelmed you can worry about not having sock yarn at hand.  She even included the chocolate kisses Sheri includes in her packages. 

    There was another gift in the bag too, which Kim bought locally at an agriculture show that had a market area for locally made goods.  Isn't this a gorgeous shawl pin?  It will get a lot of use in San Antonio.  Kim noted the teal stone and thought it would go well with a lot of my shawls and scarves.    Leaving friends who know you that well is a hard thing to do, and to my delight Kim is taking my insistence that she come to visit seriously, thinking of a fall or winter trip.  And I am thinking that in 2009, a vacation and a meet up might be arrange around either Maryland Sheep and Wool or Rhinebeck.

     Turns out I had a gift for Kim as well.  A pattern I had just bought for a lovely scarf made from two skeins of fingering weight yarn -- perfect for someone who is Sock-Crazy, right?  It is the Beaded Garden Party scarf available for instant download ( I LOVE that) from the Knitting Zone.  I think that online store is one I have use the longest, for years and years, starting with an early computer sock-pattern program owner Mary Moran wrote.  It was actually a stitch dictionary for knitting in the round and while she no longer sells it, I still use mine.  A great source for yarn and patterns, great service.

    The first Winter Eclipse sock is now past the heel and into the leg.  I am going to finish winding the Apple Laine sock yarn this weekend.  I am also going to wind (into two balls) other batches of lovely sock yarn I have waiting, while I still have the scale, ball winder, and swift unpacked.  Those sock yarns, my needles and notions, the Macuwita sni sweater and additional worsted weight yarns for hats and mittens, the two cardis in progress and the Helen's Lace shawl all fit in two knitting bags -- my big red bag (a find at Target, where I think it was intended as a beach bag and which has accompanied me to all Maryland Sheep and Wool expeditions) and my Bagsmith Project bag will travel with me and be available through the whole packing, traveling, and unpacking process.

FO, and oh yeah, teaching

A recent entry was titled something like Teaching and Learning, but I never did get to the teaching part.  But first, here's a shot of the Claudia Handpaint Oops! socks, very snuggly and warm and on my feet.  Which was greatly appreciated, since when the ice finally melted we got hit with a snow storm.  It is VERY wintry out there, and temperatures tonight will be something like 10 degrees F.  If Mother Nature is trying to let me know I did the right thing in moving to San Antonio, she is doing a good job.

    I have finally achieved competence on the sewn bind-off on my toe-up socks -- they are now both comfortably stretchy and neat looking.  This stockinette sock with an eye-of-partridge heel was probably the fastest pair of socks I have ever knit -- I started them January 24th and finished the second sock on Feb. 9th. 

     So of course, here is another sock toe.  The picture is a little blurry and I have to go back and see what that loose stitch on the left side of the photo is all about.  This is going to be another all stockinette moving-therapy sock.  In terms of the yarn, I have gone from the sublime to the mundane, having just finished using 100% merino handpainted yarn and turning now to this yarn.  This is Patons Kroy in their Winter Eclipse colorway.  This is true stash yarn, not something I bought last week and am calling stash!  I bought a whole bunch of Kroy sock yarn when someone -- maybe Herrschners -- was having a big sale.  I think I paid under $2 and change per skein.  It is not, of course, as soft as the merino, but I like it.  I also -- after all this time -- can't get over how cute sock toes are.  A major benefit of knitting socks toe up!

    So, teaching.  As some of you know, I work in a huge university library.  Once a year we have an In-Service day, where folks in the library teach/present/explain/introduce aspects of their work in the library.  They do it in really interesting ways.  A colleague of mine, who is our subject specialist for religious studies, taught a session on the book and movie The Da Vinci Code, introducing in that context the resources we have for (serious) research into the history of religion (and why that book is so bad).  Another colleague introduced all kinds of bibliographic software, including one available free on the web, that you can use to create and maintain bibliographies -- no more tedious bibliography typing for each paper! (I swear, that was the hardest part of finishing my disseration.)  We also though have a few sessions each time of general interest -- health issues, hobbies, financial topics.  This time, those of us who get together every couple of weeks for a fiber arts lunchtime meeting offered to teach knitting.  Maybe 6 of us took a few students each.  I think we had something like 18 students, first thing in the morning!  This was my first opportunity to teach a knitting class.  I had 3 beginners, one a lefty.  I love teaching but had never taught a knitting class.  I thought long and hard about the best way to do this.  So, I started off by saying there were several ways to knit and the only thing that mattered was the resulting stitch.  I had cast on for them, and as I taught them the knit stitch I taught them to read the stitch.  That, after all, is what made a radical difference in my attempts to learn to knit well.  One of the students, while new to knitting, was a crocheter, so I taught her right off to hold her yarn in her left hand, continental style, since that is what crocheters already do.  She was off and running in no time.  The second student, while claiming she had never knit and was timid about learning, did great.  She tried holding the yarn in her right hand, then in her left.   The first one showed up a week later at our knitting lunch with a perfect garter stitch square.

     The lefty?  She chose to hold the yarn in her right hand!  She had tried to learn to knit before and had found it very confusing.  She had however developed what she thought was (and I quote) "a stupid way" of holding her needles.  I got to tell her that she held her needles the way Shetland knitters did, supporting one of them against her body!  She loved hearing that, and I told her about knitting belts, about holding needles under one arm, etc.  Teaching her to read her stitches made all the difference, and I taught them all to purl as well.  And do a knitted cast on.  This was in early January.  I met my lefty for a knitting lunch last week, and she pulled out about a foot of knitting (a garter scarf) that she had done in just 2 days!  We reviewed purling, and has decided to do the center section of the scarf in stockinette, then go back to garter for the end.  So big success!  And a reminder not to assume how lefties are going to decide how to hold their needles.  I loved teaching knitting.  So maybe, when I get to San Antonio, I may look for a place to do that.

    I got a lot of cleaning and packing done yesterday while listening to my iPod,  Today I can't find it (!!!) but am trying not to use that as an excuse not to get to work.  But before I go back to work -- take a look at this shawl.  I love it.

Little projects

     In this weird in-between state I am finding it hard to knit on my larger cardigan projects.  I ended up picking up and finishing the socks I started way back in September.  I see I called them comfort knitting back then too.  I am surprised they took me so long to finish, since I really like the Froehlich Blauband yarn but in between I started several things and finished a few things.  I'm not finding it terribly exciting, but here is a picture.  I still have a whole pile of things to block.  I am including them in the album called Knitted in 2007, 'cause they were, and because it is my blog and I get to make the rules.  Anything finished in the first two weeks of January gets counted in 2007.  So this weekend I hope to block the mitered pullover, the bias scarf I knit out of alpaca lace (last spring!), and the Ostrich plume stole.

     I have reached the point on the Pearl Buck cardigan where I need to decide how much longer to make it than the pattern calls for.  The length of a casual fleece jacket I have might be just right, so I am going to measure that.  This was going very quickly until I had to make a decision. :>  The next skein of yarn has been wound and is waiting.  And I am thinking of going back to the Schaefer Anne socks I started early in the fall.  The Anne feels so wonderful to the touch that they would be true comfort knitting.  They are still in the sock-toe stage and would require only finding the chart I created for the stitch pattern. 

     On the unnerving side, just as I am preparing to move to San Antonio, the venerable Yarn Barn of San Antonio has announced it is closing.  I don't think there is any cause-and-effect there.  I didn't do it, honest.