FO: Lingerie Socks

It's been a while since I've finished a pair of socks. Last fall maybe? I don't know. I've cooled on the sock knitting front a bit. I used to always have a pair on the needles and churned them out fairly regularly. My sock draw is crammed with those monsters now, and pretty much everyone I know has gotten a pair or two as gifts, so I kind of feel like I saturated my world with socks to the flooding point.

I cast on for a pair of Lingerie Socks way back in December to have something to knit while I was traveling around Morocco. I had a really pretty skein a dear friend of mine gifted of Silver Moon Farms sock yarn, with lovely bits of silver tinsel spun in. Twinkle toes! The color is "Sahara", which I thought was oddly appropriate considering where we were going.

So, here's what it's supposed to look like if you follow the pattern:

I started the charts, but then got frustrated wallowing through pages of complicated charts and corrections. Once I finished the cuff charts, which were complicated but not difficult to follow, I just said "fuck it" and went back to making a plain pair of socks. Sitting around in a cafe in a third world country with pages of patterns flying about and yarn tangling and trying to tink back mistakes and GAHHHHH plain socks. Mine look much unlike the model.

But the cuffs are so pretty! So I'm not unhappy. But once I got past them, I kind of lost enthusiasm and worked on them rarely, hence the six months it took me to finish them.

I knit them on size 0 needles, so they are nice and tight-fitting and they will squeeze inside of shoes without bunching up and being annoying. I love the little silvery bits worked in.

FO: Elm Socks

Well Hello There! Remember when I used to knit, and spin, and make all sorts of crafty stuff? Yeah, I don't either.

I did take a moment to sadly mourn the last traces of my spoiled New York lifestyle.

That last little bit of red polish? My bi-weekly pedicures and manis are all just distant memories now. New York has so many nail salons. The competition that comes with having a nail salon on every block drives the prices way down. You can get a mani and a pedi for less than $20 and do so while you let the massage chair work out your knots and get caught up on the latest Cosmo and not feel the least bit guilty about it because it's cheaper than buying a sandwich for lunch. Here, not so much. Every salon I see, I run up hopefully and press my face to the window to check out the prices. Pedicures average around $60, manis $30. Sigh. I guess DIY is in right now. I won't even begin to discuss how much I miss my waxer.

Since I'm not coordinated enough to perfectly splosh my nails with jewel shades of paint and not look like I let someone in preschool do it, I am left with one option. I guess I could just cover my damn toes up!

The weather has been improving lately- we actually got a weekend where we spent time outside! I still am paler than I've ever been in July, but I do appreciate getting a little sun every now and then. Lazing around in the park is much nicer when you aren't lying in a swampy wetland of gloom or having hellfire and hail beat you down.

These are the Elm socks by Cookie A. It's from a great book called, "The Knitters Book of Socks". I only brought a couple of books with me to France, and this is one of them.

Alas, this pattern had a few issues. The undulating rib pattern was easy and fun, but as written, the cuff of the sock is incredibly long. So long, I left out the last 2 pattern repeats it calls for because I knew this sock wasn't going to fit any higher up my calf if I kept going. A quick glance at other people's projects reveal they had the same issue. It's hearbreaking to work so long on a pair of socks to not have them fit. It was also good I stopped because I almost ran out of yarn. Once I turned the heel, I realized I dodged a bullet there and by the time I kitchnered the toes up, I was down to just a couple of yards. 400 yards is not enough for this sock the way it is written!

I am loathe to put patterns on the actual sock foot. 1. You can't see it when you are wearing shoes, which is what I usually do when I put on a pair of socks and 2. Patterns with a cushier sock yarn like this will irritate the tops of my feet and I will never ever wear them, and I hate irritated feet more than I do my unpedicured toes. So I guess we can call this my Half-Assed Elm Socks.

The yarn is String Theory Caper Sock. 80% Merino, 10% Cashmere, 10% Nylon, this is very soft. I picked this up on sale when Gotham Fine Yarns in New York closed down.

Time and wear will tell, but I'm not quite impressed with the yarn. It pilled up and looked fuzzy while I was working with it. I'm hoping it's just the short cashmere fibers working their way out and not a structural issue.

I've actually had these done for more than a month now. I like to photograph things outside, in good light, and These would have wicked up a puddle if I would have done it any other time. I guess all that rain is making me appreciate this sunny day all the more.

I made socks and then I pranced around a meadow in them. The end.

Scarves

Right before I packed up and moved from Brooklyn, I had an insane urge to make a few bulky-yarn projects in order to:

1. Use up the bulky-yarn stash. I think all new knitters go through a phase where the answer is "bulky yarn" to all their yarn questions. It's fast all right. But damn, if you could get something to look flattering on something other than a waif, you deserve an award.

2. Justify my use of knitting time as making visual progress at a time when I felt like I was getting no where and spending my days on endless hold-music calls. Most of these things were all knitted in the course of an afternoon, and in one case, in the time it took for AT&T to dick me around and not resolve anything at all, even though I was asking nicely.

First up: a handspun cowl. It started out as a braid of Corriedale/Alpaca blend from Spunky Eclectic in the "Thunderstorm" colorway.

Great colors...nice and moody.

Spun it up as a chunky 2-ply.

Then I learned a fantastic new technique...the Mobius cowl.

It's a little tricky to get started, but it's simple once you do it. Randomly altering your knit and purl rows makes for interesting texture, and there are tons of different ways to make this your own.

I loved it so much, I went ahead and dug up bags of scarps of some Rowan Biggy Print (which may or may not have been in my stash for more than 7 years) and made a stripy, ultra bulky one on size 17 needles.

It's enormously warm, and I love the texture that the thick-and-thin yarn produced. I randomly alternated the two colors I had until I ran out of yarn, and poof! it's magic! Really, it would have been pushing it if I invested two hours in this.

So I kept on rolling with the Biggy Print, and made a mistake-rib scarf with what I had left:

The pattern (if you could call it that) is Franciose from "French Girl Knits". Mine came out short, so a pin or a button might be added at some point.

One more:

A VERY GLITZY alpaca batt from Loop!

I bought this ages ago, when I first started spindle-spinning. 2006 or '07. I spun it up pretty quickly, but then the yarn just sat in a bin for all these years. Shameful!

Spun up and plied, I only had 74 yards.

So I made a wee necktie out of it, based on this pattern (which called for laceweight yarn).

It does need a good blocking, but it used up all my yarn. Mission accomplished.

I felt clean and purged when that was done. No more odd skeins of overweight yarn to slow me down! Overly warm neckware to the rescue.

FO: Chutes and Ladders Hat

A couple weeks ago it was sofrigginhot out and it felt as though winter has never existed anywhere ever. How could these waves of oven-like heat come from the same planetary weather system that did this to my car just a few months ago?



I spent the heat-wave week working from home in my little office with no air conditioning. That's how dire my work life has gotten- I would rather spend 8 hours in an airless sauna then make my way into the city with a crush of humanity to sit in a chilly icebox for the day. It actually ended up bring quite entertaining- just when I couldn't bear the heat another second, I would run into the kitchen and cook a big dinner. Corn on the cob, wonton soup, stewed chicken thighs over fresh pasta. Basically, standing in front of the oven and cooking made it so much easier to bear the oppressive heat and humidity because as soon as I stepped away, it magically felt 10 degrees colder. Also, because I couldn't drink water fast enough to stay hydrated, when I drank something with alcohol in it, i was tipsy and having a riotous good time right away. The fact that I spent several occasions over the winter dishing out huge amounts of cash to sit in a sauna or steam room, I had to embrace the heatwave as a way to cleanse my pores. My skin...it's fabulous.

It got so hot in the kitchen, a bottle of homemade beer exploded and shattered into a million pieces. I was kind of proud of the fact that I was tougher than the beer, but cleaning up all those sticky shards was not how I wanted to spend my morning.

The other thing I thought would make me feel nice and cool was to whip up some handspun hats. Oodles of them. As many as I could find odd balls of handspun in my stash. I've been spinning for, oh, 6 or 7 years now, which equates to a whole lot of 2-4oz skeins of oddballs of yarn. I'm on a lot of conference calls and webexes all day, and I find if I don't knit to keep my hands busy, I'll just start click-clicking away on the internet or tap-tapping away on the keyboard, answering emails and stressing about all the tasks that I could be doing. So I knit, and try to pay attention to the call. It's nice.

Here's the first one I spun up:



It started as a 2oz bump of Merino/Silk fiber from Capistrano Fiber Arts in the "Etoille" colorway. It was as soft as anything and the 20% silk content made this just a little shiny. I had acquired this at the Yarn Tree in Brooklyn ages ago...I actually bought two bumps and made a scarf out of the first one I spun up. I love the color on this so much- the combination of the moody dark purples and blues with yellow really made my heart pitter-pat.

I spun this up on my Kromski Minstrel into a big, bulky thick-and thin single.





I tried to keep it as lofty as possible. I had some thin spots where a whole lot of twist accumulated, but for the most part, I was happy with my non-lace spinning. It was fun, and making a bulky yarn takes a fraction of the time than cobweb lace. I got about 70 yards.

I found a hat pattern that I wanted to try.



It's called the Chutes and Ladders hat from the "Handspun Handknit" book. It's a perfect fun little hat to eat up a skein of handspun. It's just a ribbed brim, cables with double yarn overs that you drop on the next row. Or, at least that's how I did mine. The pattern had some ambiguous instructions, so I chose to ignore them and just knit on. It was probably just the heat messing with my head. I don't see any scary killer clown faces in this, so I think I'm okay.





It's not the most tidy hat, but I had a lot of fun making this. Also- it took maybe an hour and a half, and that was even with a good chunk of multi-tasking thrown in. I keep meaning to pick up some round balloons at the dollar store. I've been blocking hats over a mixing bowl for years and they all kind of have a flatter top that what I'd like.

Size 11 needles.

Notes on a Scandal knits

Has anyone seen "Notes on a Scandal"? Yes, I know it's more than five years since it's been out, but I'm a bit behind the times. It's a deliciously wicked psychological thriller with Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. It's about emotional blackmail with two equally despicable women and their conniving co-dependent friendship. A bundle of sunshine and flowers, really.

Anyway, I was in awe of some of the great handknits that Cate Blanchett wears throughout the film. She is seen in a delicate pink lace scarf:


(all images are from fox searchlight films)

She also wore several fab cardigans that I couldn't get good screenshots of, but one of them was a seafoam colored one with big cables running up the front in a fuzzy mohair blend.



Best of all were her fingerless gloves:



They appear to be either cabled or linen stitch on the palms, with large slinky-like welts at the start and end. Maybe not entirely practical, but I must have a pair of these. I have made it my life's mission to dissect these like a frog in middle school science class (everyone now: "Ewwwww!"). Eventually, I plan on having a similar pair. Wish me luck.