I'm in love with my yarn

My favorite Christmas knitting item this year happens to be a pair of handspun socks.  I am completely in love with the yarn that resulted from this delightful colorway, appropriately named Man Sock, dyed by Three Waters Farm.  I was going for something approximating Trekking yarn, where the colors of the individual plies change over time, and I think I got pretty close.   

I divided the roving in half lengthwise (to make two socks).  Then I divided each of those parts into three pieces lengthwise.  If one end of the roving is A, and the other B, then I spun one of those thirds A-->B, the second one B-->A.  The third one I split one more time lengthwise so that I could spin it A-->B-->A (yielding color stretches half as long as the thicker strands, for more shifts in color).  So the yarn is roughly symmetrical head to tail, and should approximately match from one sock to the other (give or take).  We'll see how the second one comes out!

The majority of the yarn so far is Blue-Faced Leicester, and the second bump of fiber is superwash Colonial (to finish the cuffs).  I got around 290 yards out of 4 oz, and the socks are nice and squishy knit on size 2 dpns.    

The 3 stages of sock: 

A nice close-up view of sock deliciousness!

It will be hard to give these away on Christmas morning, but the recipient is very deserving!

I'm ready, I'm ready!

(in my best Spongebob voice, naturally)

For my sweet sockpal, I'd like to introduce you to your new socks! I'll be introducing you personally in a few short weeks, of course, but here's a little preview for you:


Regia Canadian Colors in Admiral (nice navies and neutrals with just a touch of Carolina Blue in there), size 1 Crystal Palace dpns. Top down generic sock, with short-row heels (made deeper with the mini-gusset described here, and a wedge toe. Sometimes, a plain stockinette sock with a fun stripey yarn can be a delightful thing to knit. I hope they keep your toes warm!

I also finally finished another pair of socks that were destined to become knee socks at one time, and I would have had enough yarn, except that this yarn had the. longest. repeat. ever. Yup, that blue on the heel only comes back in at the very top of the ribbing. They're structurally the same as the sockpal socks, but done toe-up instead.


Opal I-lost-the-ballband-in-a-nasty-washing-incident, size 1 bamboo dpns.


As for the rest of the weekend, I think I'm all set. Book? Acquired at 12:50am this morning after a fun B&N Potter extravaganza. Other book? Acquired while I was waiting for it to be time to line up. House scarf yarn? Check. I'll come up for air later.

Socks done, pics soon!

The Sockapalooza 4 socks for my buddy are done, and pics will be coming soon! Meanwhile, I'm making Monkeys, and listening hard to the siren song of Mystery Stole 3 - I just need to either spin up a mess of white alpaca (I've got about 60 yards spun up so far) or cave and get yarn and beads. We'll see. Beads are scary but sparkly. Some of the best things in life are, too!

Reparo! and other sock fun

Last time we saw our intrepid stripey kool-aid dyed sock friends, they were a partially finished cuff. Since then, in the extended blogging hiatus, they have become a strong favorite of my socks, and have been in heavy rotation all fall and winter.


Unfortunately, I have discovered that the original construction of these, which included an afterthought heel over 60% of the sock stitches, placed a rather weak row of grafting right at the stress point of the heel, where I just found that it was starting to wear out! See?




My first thought was to just darn the darn things. But after darning the one row, it seemed that I needed to darn the next round, and the next round, and after a certain point, it seemed ridiculous to re-do an entire heel in duplicate stitch. Screw that.

Fortunately, with afterthought heels, you can do a heel replacement surgical procedure without having to reknit the whole foot. First, I found the woven-in end from where I had started to pick up the stitches to make the heel in the first place, and un-wove it. I picked out the stitches, putting them on dpns as I went. About halfway around, I realized that I was very carefully picking up the stitches on the heel itself, rather than on the sock I was trying to repair. This was not a good thing, and led to the socks' exposure to colorful language. Another fine educational opportunity for all involved. After undoing the round of stitches, I had one unattached heel, and one sock with 4 dpns outlining where the new heel would be knit.

Heel, or part of a teeny bikini? You decide.


Since the old heels had worn out at the point, I decided on a different type of construction for the new heels. Instead of going around and around and making another toe, with grafted end, I made an hourglass/short-row heel (directions in Simple Socks, Plain and Fancy), and grafted the bottom half to the sole of the foot. I also went down a needle size from 1 to 0 so that the fabric would be a little stronger. Knitpicks bare does not contain any nylon, so it does not seem to wear as hard as other sock yarn, but it is really soft and comfortable! The striping pattern is different now, but I'm still very happy with it!


In new sock news, I just completed a pair of plain stockinette socks with the Socks That Rock mediumweight in Henpecked that was in my Christmas stocking. Soft, warm, and I love the colors!


I did short row heels on these as well (but standard wedge toes, since I like how they fit), and I used a nifty tip for making short row heels less shallow that I picked up from one of the patterns from the Six Sox knitalong a couple of years ago (Stashbuster Spirals by Janine Hempy).



On the instep side of the foot (not the heel side), starting a couple of rows before the heel, make a mini gusset by increasing one stitch every other row (only on the instep side) for a total of 2 or 3 stitches. I use M1 increases between the first and second stitch on the needle). Then after the short row heel is done, decrease the same amount over the same number of rounds. So 3 rows before you get to the heel (toe up or top down), if you were using 4 dpns and starting a round in the middle of the heel, you'd have:

Knit across needle 1.
K1, M1, knit across needle 2.
Knit across needle 3 until you get to the last stitch, M1, K1.
Knit across needle 4.

Do one round plain.

Repeat the first round.

Do your short row heel.

When you get back to the instep the first time, knit it plain, since the last round you did was an increase round, and you're decreasing off the last stitches from the heel anyway.

On the next round: Knit across needle 1. K1, ssk, knit across needle 2. Knit across needle 3 to the last 3 stitches, k2tog, k1. Knit across needle 4.

Knit the next round plain.

On the next round: Knit across needle 1. K1, ssk, knit across needle 2. Knit across needle 3 to the last 3 stitches, k2tog, k1. Knit across needle 4. This should take you back to the original number of stitches. Finish your sock however you like! Here's how it looks in close up:


For those of you who can't wait to try this out, and need a reason to make more socks, don't forget to head on over to the Blue Blog for Sockapalooza 4 signups! Happy knitting!

Time suck

Don't go here unless you've got a lot of time to kill. It's frighteningly addictive.

Metacognition

I am in the middle of making a simple little toddler-sized sweater for one of the little guys, and I have found a book that claims to guide the process for you. While the designs are cute, and there are a lot of variations that one can apply to the basic architecture, there is one thing about it that is driving me nuts.

I loathe, disdain, and despise bottom-up teaching because it completely annihilates any semblance of critical thought, and usually learning, for that matter. We do a lot of it in schools, because it is easy. When you are dividing fractions, you flip and multiply them. But why? What is the overall concept behind this? We know that squaring something means multiplying it by itself, but why don't we learn that it's the same idea as making a square with that number of units on a side, and what you're getting is the area? Why on earth would any knitting pattern book that purports to help you style your own knits begin with the premise that you need to do this in the tight confines of their yarn and their gauge, without giving you any hint in the way of actual measurements for each of the sizes listed? A one- to two-year size isn't given in inches, it's given in a number of stitches to cast on (if you have the right gauge in their chosen yarn).

Fortunately for all of us, you do not need to be the least bit bright to reverse engineer the measurements from this approach. From a top-down approach, you are trying to find the inches around. To do that, what pieces of information would you need? They tell you gauge, and they tell you the number of stitches to cast on. What mathematical operation would you need to use in order to figure out the overall inches used by that many stitches? If 20 stitches gives you 4 inches, then how many inches would 70 stitches give you? See, now you know how to actually figure out the problem-solving yourself, rather than having to remember that I told you to divide.

What is described in this book is not designing, it is cookbook. And I don't like cookbook. I will never teach someone how to do email by giving them step-by-step instructions. ("First click this, then this, then...") Invariably, they mess up one step and are petrified with confusion, because they do not have an overall guiding map in their head of what they are doing. These are the people who claim they could never knit/bake/grow stuff/use a computer because they could never remember all the steps involved. Because the approach they were taught was never "here is a forest, and there are a lot of trees in it," they were taught "tree, tree, tree, tree, another tree, etc." A lace pattern would be hell if all we had to go on was pages and pages of step-by-step instructions in text form. The sheer amount of yarn-overs would fell the heartiest of us.

So in my own corner of the world, I teach, and I teach my kids and my students how to think, and figure things out, and look at the big picture, and hope that they can carry a little bit of that out into the world with them.

10 knitterly things you don't know about me

Yeah, I'm still here. Summer got busy. Fall got busier. Right now, things are careening along at a roller coaster pace on all fronts, and it's just insane. But Grumperina's little meme made me pause and hit up the blog again.

1. I come by knitting genetically. I apparently am descended from a long line of knitters, and it was just assumed that I would learn how to knit. My mom was a knitter, and I still have a box of handknit kid sweaters to show for it. They're being worn by the second generation now, and even though some are a little cheesy and dated, they're still in circulation. I remember my Grammy teaching me to knit when I was six, but I had to learn again when I was nine in order for it to stick. Red Heart sport weight red yarn, aluminum needles. My mom and Grammy both knit English style, and that's how I learned, but apparently my great-Grammy was a lightning-fast continental/German knitter.

2. I have no beef with crochet. It's useful, and you can make some nice stuff that way. (However, the knitting needle to crochet hook ratio in my house does seem to imply that knitting is the main gig here.) In high school, I used to make those snowflakes and little angels out of that white thread and starch them for Christmas ornaments. I was not all that wild and exciting in high school. Imagine Hermione Granger, and you've just about got it.

3. I knit socks in meetings. Even sometimes in important meetings with people in the state education department. Better yet, they think it's really cool.

4. I can only really knit after all the kids are in bed. It's not really safe to have a handful of double-pointed needles when there are two-year-olds launching themselves at you. If it takes a while to get all the kids down, then this will severely cut into the knitting portion of the evening.

5. I am lame enough to have different projects that I can work on in different situations. Dark observation room? Plain sock. Carpool line? Sock, but it can have some patterns since I can pay more attention. Watching Lost? Plain sock, or sweater sleeve, but I'll probably have to frog and re-do. Lace? Only when nothing else is going on.

6. I used to be a very in-the-box knitter (e.g., pattern follower), but spinning has completely rocked my fiber world. Now I improvise and change things like mad when they don't suit me. The same thing has happened with my cooking over the years, too. I think it's just a result of experience.

7. I dream of designing lace someday. I don't think it's a matter of not being able to do it, but rather a function of not having the luxury of enough time to sit down and think about it.

8. Despite the fact that kids are small, I haven't knit a thing for my youngest two guys, and my oldest guy has only gotten two pairs of socks (which probably now fit the youngest guys). I need to get on with that, but they sure grow fast, and I have to aim up a few sizes to make sure I'll finish it while it would still fit.

9. I will not be torn with anguish if none of my kids grows up to be a knitter, but I will give them the opportunity to learn.

10. It's knitting-related, anyway... I do not own a sewing machine, nor do I have the slightest clue how to use one. My mom had one, and let me wind a bobbin of thread on it once. It promptly exploded all over the room, and I don't think there were ever any sewing lessons after that. So any time the instructions call for machine sewing to reinforce a steek, or to install a zipper, I end up doing it by hand. (because I'm chicken.)

More later, and maybe even pictures of some of the stuff I made this summer...