Socks Away

I have posted my Sockpal’s socks. It’s all in the lap of the Postal Gods now. I hope she likes them. I really hope they fit. I think I would just die if they got there, after all the months of planning, dithering, choosing a pattern and a yarn, swatching, knitting, beading and all the rest, and then they didn’t fit! All the numbers say they should, but mathematics have never been my strong suit (that sound you’re hearing is me biting my nails down to the cuticle).

I have to say, though, I am very much looking forward my own socks arriving. It occurred to me the other day, that although I have been knitting almost nothing except socks since the end of January, I have exactly two (2) pairs of handknit socks to my name, three if you count the Violet Beauregard slippers. So I’m pretty excited to be getting a pair knit just for me. I’m also really eager to find out who it is that has been knitting them and sending me goodies and cheery little emails. This has really been a lot of fun. If it weren’t for the socks on the way, I’d be almost sorry to see it all end.

I’m definately on board for Sockapalooza 5.

All Done Pottering

Okay, I’m back. I’ve finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and it was very good (not saying any more, so as not to spoil it for others who may not yet be done). I apologise for not posting at all for the past several days, but my preferred reading style is ‘total immersion’. While I don’t get to do that very often these days (what with kids and husband and housework and yada yada yada), I did manage to leave the world behind in blocks of two or three hours, while the boys ran amok.
I also finished the Red Heart socks:

The Vital Statistics:
Pattern: Lone Heart Heel Socks by Melissa Deutsch Scott for YARN Magazine, Autumn 2007 (issue 6).
Yarn: Cascade Fixation colour 3628, 2 Balls.
Needles: 3.25mm DPNs, switch to 4mm DPNs for ribbing.
Modifications: The original pattern was for a little short ankle sock, knit in 4ply sock yarn. I made mine quite a bit longer, and out of 8ply. I also used a provisional cast-on, short-row toe instead of the circular cast-on called for in the pattern. Actually, I did the foot my way and adapted the lace pattern for the larger gauge, and then I used Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Sewn Bind-off. I’ve never used that one before, but I’ve always had a problem casting off loosely enough, and I’d heard that this was a really stretchy cast-off, perfect for toe-up socks. It’s really easy, and very stretchy, just as advertised. I am rapidly becoming a total EZ disciple (I’m planning a Baby Surprise Jacket in the very near future).

In other news, the Jonquils are out! It might actually be warm again one day!

And because I have no self-control at all, I have started knitting the Opal I bought the other day.

I have to say, I’m not seeing rosebuds in this colourway. To me it looks more like a Rainbow Lorikeet (if you put it in a blender and pressed puree).

Also on the agenda is some serious attention to my horrible dry, calloused feet (no, I’m not showing a before picture, because they’re fairly gross), to make sure they are worthy of fabulous new Sockapalooza socks! Yay!

Retail Therapy

I woke up feeling a bit grumpy today. I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be in Bendigo, ogling sheep and fondling yarn. Or if not Bendigo, at least on Ravelry. Everyone in the blogosphere is forever extolling the virtues of Ravelry, linking to Ravelry, talking about Ravelry, Ravelry, Ravelry (pout! stamp!). But I’m still on the waiting list, and there are 6617 people in front of me (want to know how I know this? Go here).

Also, I have had the flu all week, and am just generally feeling a bit off-kilter. So while we were grocery shopping this morning, I bought a couple of little pick-me-ups:

This is Opal sock yarn, in a new colourway called Rosebud, bought from Caboodle Gifts and Yarn in Orange. I went in looking for solid colours to make my MIL socks MkII (I’m leaning towards Loksins), but instead I walked out with this little skein of happiness.

Also, like everyone else on the planet, I bought this:

I’m five chapters in, and already the body-count is up to 1 definite and 1 MIA. I’m not telling who.

So, if you don’t hear from me, you’ll know why. Somehow, I think the blog-traffic will be down this week.

I feel better already.

Huh.

A Word A Day gave me a doozy this afternoon. I’d say about 85% of the time, the word du jour is at least familiar to me, but today’s was a total stumper:

Resipiscent (re-si-PIS-uhnt) adjective

“Great word, but what does it mean?”, I hear you ask. “And more importantly, why have you never come across it before?”

Having returned to a saner mind.

The answer’s in the question, really.

F.S.O.

That would be a Finished Sockapalooza Object! Woohoo!

The slightly darker one on the right is the second – it is still wet on its very snazzy bent-wire-coat-hanger sock blocker. Now I just have to assemble some additional goodies (I plan on giving my pal a little taste of Australia), and we are good to post.

The Vital Statistics:

Yarn: The Knitting Ninja Cashmerino 4ply sock yarn (70% superwash Merino, 20% nylon & 10% cashmere), colourway Moulin Rouge; approximately 1 95g skein.

Needles: Knitpicks Classic Circular 2.5mm x 80cm, Magic Loop method.

Pattern: Reptilian Lace by Sivia Harding for Knitty.

Modifications: I used an Eye of Partridge heel instead of the standard slip-stitch heel called for in the pattern, otherwise, I followed it exactly, right down to the beads (which I bought from my friendly neighborhood bead shop, Beading Inspirations in Adelaide St, Blayney).

On the subject of beads, I have to say it was remarkably easy. Several people told me how brave/patient I was, but apart from the fiddly job of stringing them onto the yarn before I started (and if we were afraid of fiddly jobs, we wouldn’t be knitters, would we?), it was really straightforward. The placement was marked out on the chart, and when I came to that spot, I just slid the next bead up, knitted it into the stitch, and kept going. Trust me: if I can do it, anybody can. And it really makes the diamond pattern of the lace pop.

I love this pattern, have since I first saw it. It was challenging without being terrifying, and I will definitely be knitting it again. Right after I finish my red Lone Heart Heel Socks, make my MIL’s backup Mother’s Day socks, and there’s that brown Jo Sharp jumper still hanging over my head like the freakin’ sword of Damocles, and I want to make this, and this, and these….

Sigh.

Added later:

I just found these, and have to add them to the list of Must Knit Soon. I know that S.A.B.L.E. stands for Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy, but is there a related acronym for someone whose pattern queue is rapidly approaching that length?

Things I Have Learned Since Wednesday

1. Without the assistance of my children, I can knit a sock in a day and a half. The sockapalooza sock is all but done. It just needs grafting, finishing and blocking, and it will be posted (with some extra goodies) by the end of the week. Woohoo! (Unfortuately, no photos yet, as the camera went to work with my husband in his car).

2. The only places to buy yarn (as far as I could find in an entire day of wandering) in Bathurst are Kmart, Big W, and Spotlight (all of which only stock generic types of yarn, heavy on acrylic and fun fur), and Hobbysew, which is apparently phasing out its range of knitting yarns, as it has probably twenty balls in stock, all Heirloom brand, only five of which is sock yarn, the Heirloom Jigsaw in Faux-Isle prints.

Obviously, Bathurst is in dire need of a good yarn store…… hmmmmm.

3. My five-month old nephew has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of saliva, which he is happy to share with passers-by in the form of very juicy raspberries (a recently acquired skill of which he is inordinately proud). Everyone at the Farmer’s Market found this completely charming.

4. My four-year-old son dislikes the taste of Children’s Panadol so much that he managed to completely defeat his father and me (it was like wrestling a greased octopus) and spit out an entire 10ml dose of the stuff all over himself and us. Furthermore, he cannot be tricked, bribed or reasoned with. In the end, we just had to get his fever down the old-fashioned way, with a cold face-washer and a sleepless night.

Home Alone

Shhhh… Hear that? No? That’s because there’s no noise in my house. It’s so quiet you can actually hear the kettle coming to the boil.

My in-laws came this morning to take the boys for a few days before school goes back. They have just left, and I have the whole house to myself. Is it wrong that I did a little dance?

What am I going to do with myself, you ask? What won’t I do! Drink coffee unmolested. Brush my teeth without advice. Watch whatever I want on TV. Listen to music that isn’t played by the Wiggles. Eat vegetables without a seven-year-old making gagging noises at me. Knit without a four-year-old on my lap.

Oh, yeah! That reminds me. I intended this for a knitting blog, didn’t I? Here you go:

These are the Lone Heart Heel Socks (by Melissa Deutsch Scott for YARN Magazine, Autumn 2007 issue), knit in Cascade Fixation colour 3628 (I think – I don’t have the ball band, I won this from Regenia a while ago). They have a lace heart feature heel, for wearing with clogs. Look!

(Again with the blurry – I think I need a new camera!) This is shown on my fist, as I have a strong suspicion that it would be really hard to take a photo of my own heel. When they are done, I’ll get Himself to take a pic of them on my feet for you.

And finally, a pic of my Sockapalooza sock #2 progress. For visual interest, I added in my knitting setup:

I’ve copied out the lace pattern onto 5mm graph paper, both to be more easily visible, and to help fix the pattern in my mind, and it is stuck on a little magnetic whiteboard that I pinched from the boys. I am spiralling two strands around each other to combat pooling (I normally enjoy pooling, it’s part of the fun of hand-painted yarn, but this was smothering the cable/lace of this particular sock). Also, I have found that working with two strands is helping me keep track of where I am in the lace pattern. One strand has the beads on it, and the other strand works the pattern.

With no distractions, I should be able to get a fair chunk of this out of the way before we go pick the boys up on the weekend. I’ll just go and get started on that, shall I?

Missing in Action

It is with some sadness that I must advise that the socks I knit for my Mother-in-law as a Mother’s Day gift have gone missing in the post. More than a month has gone by, and I am forced to accept that they are gone for good. It happened thus:

My in-laws were away overseas for Mother’s Day, so I held the socks until they returned home, which they did on Wednesday, 6th June. I posted the socks the following morning (7th), which would mean they should have arrived Tuesday 12th. Unfortunately, Friday 8th June the big storm hit, and my in-laws live on the Central Coast of NSW (they are fine, and suffered no property damage). Evidently the socks are a very minor casualty of the tragic events of that weekend. Considering what others lost, we were damned lucky. I only hope they were found by someone who needs warm feet.

Therefore, there is a second pair of MIL socks in planning. They will be cast on as soon as I finish the second Sockapalooza sock for my pal, (which is underway, but so far looks no different to how the first one looked, so there’s really not much point in wasting camera batteries).

It’s All Downhill From Here

Ladies and gentlemen, you see before you one completed Sockapalooza sock; finished, grafted, ends woven in, washed and merrily blocking its little heart out, wanting only a travelling companion before it wings its way to its intended home!

It would seem that my plan has met with the approval of the Knitting Gods, as ever since, the knitting has flown by. The first day I easily accomplished my 24 rounds, on Day Two I zipped through 40, and yesterday I knocked out 36. So polishing off the toe this morning was an absolute breeze.

I just hope I can keep up the lightning pace from here. I don’t generally suffer from Second Sock Syndrome; I actually quite enjoy the second sock. I have all the notes I made during the knitting of the first sock, so I can just zoom through without any need for ripping or tinking or swearing or crying.

Angst-free knitting – what more can you ask?

Panic Averted

Well, it wasn’t really panic. Panic would have been for a week from now, if I realised that I only had one week, and less than one sock completed. Then I would have truly panicked (picture the Yarn Harlot’s annual Christmas knitting meltdown, only without the funny).

But Regenia (in real life, I bet she glows, and comes complete with her own angelic choir) came to the rescue, and told me that August 2nd is the date to post your socks, not the arrival date, as I had assumed. So I actually have three weeks, instead of two (mimes wiping sweat from forehead, and heaves huge, theatrical sigh of relief).

That very good news aside, I am going to stick with The Plan, for two (or three) reasons:

1. 24 rounds per day is achievable, and will get me done in good time (if all goes well, ten days).

2. I am by nature a procrastinator, therefore the mere fact of my coming up with The Plan represents personal growth. If I actually stick to it? I might even qualify as a Real Grown-Up before I turn 60.

3. If it all goes bad, there’s the entertainment (for you) of watching me go right off the deep end.

So, yesterday’s Goal? Achieved! Better yet, it only took two goes to pick up the gusset stitches. And I would just like to say, I completely adore the ‘Half-Handkerchief’ heel turn. This is the second time I’ve knit it, the last time being for my Mother-In-Law’s socks. Then as now, the shaping of the heel-turn works with the the yarn to frame the heel in sections of colour. Here’s a pic (once again, apologies for blurry photos; that voodoo thing is strong with this sock):

Please also note the gorgeousness that is the Eye of Partridge heel. To quote someone’s blog (I would link, but I forget who – the downside of the Pligg is that after a while, all the knitterly cleverness starts to run together into a marvellous blur), the Eye of Partridge stitch makes variegated yarn “pop like a mosaic” – whoever it was is not only eloquent but totally right. I’m loving it.

Now I’m off to watch Shrek 2 with my boys, and get a few rows closer to today’s goal.