Wintry Weather

We have had snow here , twice in the last week, so of course the boys want to know when Santa will be here. They never believe us when we explain that Christmas is in summer in Australia. Bob the Builder, Thomas the Tank Engine, and all their favourite TV shows wouldn’t lie to them, now would they? (No, I do not have pictures of the snow: I’m not fool enough to go out in that much cold just for your amusement. The reason I like living in a cold climate is that it means when it’s freezing outside, I get to curl up somewhere cosy and knit, with occasional glances out the window to remind me how nice and warm I am indoors.)

The Sasquatch has had a cold, so he spent three days curled up asleep on the couch, while Bob the Builder played over and over on the DVD (I love ABC for Kids DVDs; they play automatically, which means I don’t have to stand around with the remote in my hand, waiting for the menu to appear). Every time I switched it off, he opened one eye and said, “Hey, I was watching that!” and then went back to sleep as soon as I turned it back on. He is so much like his father, it’s scary.

There has been knitting, of course. You want pics? You got ‘em.

FO! The Jaywalker mitts:

Vital Statistics:

Yarn: Patons’ Patonyle, 4ply (fingering) 80% wool, 20% nylon, colour 4312; slightly less than 1 50g ball.

Needles: Birch 2.25mm DPNs for wrist, changed to 2.75mm for hand.

Pattern: Half nicked borrowed from Grumperina, half made up as I went along.

They are toasty warm, and I’m very happy with them; in fact, I’m wearing them as I type this.

And Ta Da! Actual progress on my Sockpal’s sock!

I apologise for the blurryness, this is actually the clearest picture I have yet managed to take of this yarn in any knitted configuration. It seems to have some kind of weird photo-resistant voodoo on it. This is the reason I haven’t posted any swatch pics, even though I have been swatching this yarn for weeks.

This is two and a bit pattern repeats, and I can’t tell you how much I love this pattern. It is coming along beautifully. After all the swatching angst (yes, there was angst; I couldn’t get the pattern and the yarn to agree, there was pooling of an unhappy nature, I had to go through several different beads before I found the right ones, the list goes on), it is finally working.

Of course, now that I have said that, you know that Murphy is going to have to slap me down.

How Not To Felt Slippers: A Tutorial

Before:

Preparation:

Read every felting tutorial you can find online, borrow a library book on the subject, and arm yourself with as much knowledge as possible. Just to be on the safe side, go back and re-read the Yarn Harlot’s experiences with felting. Laugh.

Gather together your giant freakazoid monster socks, carefully tied into pillowslips, and leave your children with your husband while you take a trip to the laundromat, as your washer is not an appropriate one for controlled felting (it will felt stuff all right, just not when you want it to).

Make certain you begin on the worst possible day of the month, after almost no sleep (courtesy of a cranky four-year-old).

Step 1.

Read the instructions for the washer, select the hottest, harshest wash cycle, add two pillowslips containing socks, an old pair of jeans for agitation, as well as a squirt of dishwashing liquid, insert the appropriate number of coins in the slot, and turn on washer. Settle down in a hard plastic chair and attempt to get comfortable with your knitting.

After ten minutes, get up to check progress on your slippers. Realise the water in the machine is cold. Swear. Figure you may as well let it run through the rest of the cycle anyway, as you have already paid for it. Sit back down with your knitting, and eat some Pringles.

Take home a pair of very clean, only slightly less gigantic freakazoid monster socks.

Step 2.

Get home, show your husband your almost total lack of progress, and have a cup of coffee.

Fill the sink with very hot water, add a squirt of dish liquid, put on your rubber gloves and start scrubbing. Realise why almost every tutorial you found online deals with how to felt in a washing machine, not by hand. Only a crazy person does it this way. Continue scrubbing, and decide that the women who used to do it this way must have had forearms like Popeye.

Finally bite the bullet and toss the bloody things in your washing machine on the Rinse/Spin cycle (generally the culprit when you have in the past felted things that didn’t necessarily want to be felted) .

Take socks out of machine and look at them. Swear more. The sodding things are still too stinking big.

Step 3.

Go back to the sink. This is where your preparation really comes into play, as you are, on this particular day, not only tired and out of sorts, but very susceptible to backache when standing over a sink that is just a little too low for you, therefore forcing you to bend over just a bit. Swear under your breath the entire time you are scrubbing the !@@#$%^& socks, pausing occasionally to be grateful it is a nice enough day for your children to be outside, away from you and your vocabulary.

Work back and forth between your double sink, one half filled with hot water, the other with cold, scrubbing and grinding and wringing your knitting. In short, do everything you have always been very careful to avoid doing to your beautiful handknits into which you pour so much of your time and effort.

Decide you will give them one last chance to behave, and put them back into the washer for another ride through the Spin/Rinse cycle. Massage your back and mutter like a complete lunatic while the washer runs.

Take socks out of washer, hold them up to your feet, and decide that they are close enough. Put them in the tumble dryer for a partial dry, and then hang them up on sock blockers near the heater.

Once you have put the children to bed, sit down with a large Irish coffee (heavy on the Irish) and some very dark chocolate, put the nearly-dry felted slippers on (over a pair of thick socks) and put your feet up in front of the heater (this counts as blocking).

Conclusion.

I’m pretty happy with how they have turned out. They are still a little big, but I’m okay with that. I’m particularly pleased that the colours have stayed nice and stripy, even though you can’t make out the individual stitches anymore. The fabric is good and thick, and I’m confident that my feet will be nice and warm this winter.

Sorry if I sound a little under-enthused, it’s been a longish day, and beating the crap out of a pair of giant freakazoid monster socks really takes it out of you.

One other thing. This right here?

It’s four rounds of a Sockapalooza sock! It would have been more, but I’ve been otherwise occupied.

More in the Mailbox

The postie has been very, very good to me this week. On Monday, it was the goodies from my sockpal, and yesterday it was one of these. You see, the pattern I have in mind for my sockpal’s socks is Reptilian Lace, which owing to the big wide cable/lace pattern up both the front and back of the leg, would be impossible on dpn’s (the only way I have ever knit socks to now). The pattern calls for two circs, but I have discovered that I am not a fan of the two circs thing – I don’t know why, it just doesn’t do it for me. But Magic Loop, now that is the Greatest. Thing. Ever!

So I ordered me one of those snazzy little Knitpicks Classic Circulars from Prestige Yarns, and yesterday when it arrived I was so excited, I ripped it straight out of the package and cast on. WooHoo! It is totally everything it is cracked up to be. The tips are glassy smooth and nicely pointy, the cable is flexible (and purple!), and the join is almost non-existent, it’s so smooth. Love it, love it, love it! I will absolutely be buying more of these (and the person in charge of birthday shopping has already been notified that he will have an extremely happy wife if I get the Options set this year).

And further to Monday’s post, I would like to show you that while I have been remiss in blogging, I have actually been a busy little bee.

I made bedsocks for my eldest (who shall henceforth be dubbed Mr Coffee, mostly because he is all cafe colours, brown hair, creamy skin, caramel freckles across the nose, and eyes the colour of cinnamon, but also because he is a hyper little guy).

He was pleased. So pleased, in fact, that I have had to institute a rule: he only gets to wear them to bed. Otherwise, I would have to knit him a new pair every week (my boys only get handknit bedsocks, because I have seen what they do to their everyday socks, and I am NOT putting handknit socks through that).

Yarn: Patons Jet 12ply, col 6. 70% wool, 30% alpaca.

Needles: 4mm x 80cm circular, Magic Loop method. ( I told you I use my family as Guinea pigs; how do you think I know I love Magic Loop but don’t like two circs?)

Pattern: Universal toe-up formula, by Amy Swenson for Knitty

Mods: Again, short-row garter-stitch heel and toe (why pick up wraps if you don’t have to?), cable pattern up leg made up out of my own head (which you can’t see very well because of the striping). Pilling and what-have-you courtesy of Mr Coffee scuffing his feet on the carpet.

Remember this?

Check it out now!

Yes, I finally got my act together, and finished the damn thing. And I hereby swear to you, from this day forth, I am only knitting jumpers in the round! Which brings me to the other jumper languishing in the Ikea pile. I have figured out what I am going to do. I am going to rip the raglans back to the armscye, and knit them in the round from that point up, then seam down the sideseams.

Well, that’s the theory. Be prepared for swearing and crying.

Oh, and to aid in keeping my hands warm, thus enabling more regular blogging, I am making myself a pair of fingerless mitts. One down, one on the needles.

Yarn leftover from my MIL’s Mother’s day socks, pattern ripped off borrowed from Grumperina’s Jaywalker socks. These actually started out as socks, until I discovered they wouldn’t go over my heel, but they fit really nicely on my hand (I would just like to point out that I am only 37, not 1000 as this photo of my hand might make you think. Believe it or not, this was actually the best photo I could get of my hand).

And finally, I haven’t any FO pics of the felted slippers yet, because it has been too damn cold to take Sasquatch to the Laundromat. It actually snowed here this morning! Anyone reading this who lives somewhere that it really gets cold is probably laughing their arse off right now, at our piddling little smudge of snow, but please bear in mind this is Australia. There is a reason why the image people have of us is Lara Bingle wading out of the surf, asking “Where the bloody hell are you?”. We are, after all, the sunburnt country.

There is also a certain irony in the fact that it has been too cold to go and finish slippers intended to keep my feet warm.

This may be my longest post ever. Apologies if your computer is also somewhere cold.

Largesse

Largesse (lar-gess) – noun

1. Generous bestowal of gifts;

2. The gift or gifts so bestowed;

3. Generosity, liberality.

My (upstream) sockpal sent me some goodies! Look!

I can’t tell you how chuffed I am. What a happy thing to happen on a grey winter Monday! (And I’ve been meaning to pick up a ball of Tofutsies for ages).

On a totally unrelated topic, I have been a bad, bad blogger. Morgan gave me a (very sweet) kick in the butt the other day, sending me a comment asking if all was well. Everything is fine, but the cubby-hole where my computer lives is very cold, and I’ve been quickly checking emails, reading the bare essentials (Yarn Harlot, et al), and then making a beeline for my cosy couch, and the knitting basket. I’ve been swatching with the Cashmerino, and while the swatching has been successful, my attempts to take an un-blurry photo of the swatches have been less so.

However, I do have knitting pics for you:

These are the giant freakazoid monster-socks that are destined to become felted slippers. I really love how perfectly the varigated yarn stripes, and while there is a bit of pooling around the heel gusset, I decided to keep it that way, because the individual colours are so very beautiful, and the pooling there allows them to stand alone for a little. I can’t wait to see how they look once they’re felted.

Oh, the vital statistics:

Pattern: Fuzzyfeet by Theresa Vinson Stenersen for Knitty

Yarn: The Knitting Ninja 12ply Corriedale, colourway “Violet Beauregarde”, 2 skeins, 166m per 100g skein.

Needles: 7mm dpns

Gauge: 14.5 stitches & 18.5 rows over 10cm (4″)

Mods: I lengthened the cuff, otherwise unchanged.

Here is a reference shot, with my (somewhat odd and bony) foot :

Please note that my foot is on the largish side, being a size 9, but this pre-felted sock makes it look almost dainty. Even my husband’s giant size 12EE’s swim in these ( question: why is it that almost every sock knitter has a large-footed spouse? I never see anyone on the Pligg rejoicing in their significant other’s petite paws).

The jumbo-socks are off to the laundromat for a swim in the industrial machine tomorrow or Wednesday, as my washing machine is a front-loader, and the felting instructions say I need to check progress every ten minutes or so. I’ll post FO pics later in the week. And now, if you’ll excuse me, my hands are very cold, and I’m making many, many typos, so I’m going to go wrap them around a hot coffee-mug, and maybe eat a couple of those choc-mint sticks my lovely sock-pal sent me.

The Stampede Forms Here

For all those of you who asked, the creator of my gorgeous yarns is Morgan, AKA The Knitting Ninja, and her new online store is now live. Here’s a quick reminder of why you want to go there:

Mmmmm….. Cashmerino goodness. There’s all kinds of scrumptious new colourways, too.
Also, Morgan has added the following incentive – if you enter the code KATESBLOG at checkout, you will get 10% off anything you buy for the next two weeks (until 17th June, 2007) .

Now just try to form an orderly line, and remember, it’s all fun and games until somebody crashes a server.