Knitting, knitting, knitting along…

I will be the first to admit that I’m not exactly what you’d call a “social knitter.”  I don’t have a regular knitting group, I do most of my knitting while I’m on public transit (with the exception of really complicated patterns that need a lot of my time and attention and therefore can’t really be pulled out and put away on a whim the way that simple things like, say, socks can)… and well, I never quite understood the idea of a knitalong.

Nevermind that last fall I tried to join the group knitting Mystery Stole 4… it was a good theory but really fell apart in practice.  I think the project is still hibernating in a drawer somewhere, stuck solidly near the beginning of chart 3… on the first half.

But, when Cookie A published Sock Innovation and a couple of knitting groups popped up around it on Ravelry it suddenly seemed like a good idea to join one of them.  Because, after all, here were a bunch of people, who just like me, were going to race out and buy this book and knit… most, if not all of the patterns in it.  And not just the patterns in the book.  These were people who, also just like me, were going to be pretty shameless in their love for Cookie’s patterns and knit sock after sock by the same designer.

I joined a group and merrily cast on for Glynis, the first pattern of the book and the first pattern for the group… which has all sorts of fancy rules and fancy prizes.  I knit away, and at 8 minutes to midnight on May 31, I cast off my first socks for the KAL.  Unfortunately, a jetlagged, life-fogged brain failed to remember the part of the rule that said that to count for the month’s prize eligibility, one had to post a picture in the Finished Object thread before midnight.

I was heartbroken.  Really, really, cursing-my-computer-and-stupidity heartbroken.  I had, from my own error in misremembering the rules, disqualified my self from the month’s prize drawing, and the big prize drawing from finishing every pattern in the book and… well, basically all the parts of the competition except the consolation round.  Suffice it to say that I felt frustrated.  (No, I’m not actually very competitive, except for that part where I really am… why do you ask?)

Then I realized something.  If I let myself think just a little bit outside the box, I should have been relieved to disqualify myself from the uber prize as quickly as I could.  After all, this freed me to participate in other Cookie A knitalongs.  It freed me to not knit patterns I wasn’t interested in knitting.  It took SO MUCH PRESSURE away.  And I had an epiphany that knitalongs are NOT about the prizes.  Not even for competitive people like me.  They’re about knitting something you like with people you also like.  The competition part, and the chance for a prize, is really just a bonus.

I’m spending June finishing up the Marlene D.s (in the beautiful beautiful Wollmeise 100% sock yarn, color La Digitessa yarn that I had hanging about in the stash) that I started in February (and subsequently frogged and started again in April) and I’m thinking I’ll cast on a pair of Nebulas (rav link) to participate in another knitalong, which I undoubtedly won’t finish before the end of the month.  In the event that I do happen to come close to finishing, this time I’ll remember that it doesn’t count as finshed until the picture has been posted and maybe, hopefully, plan my time a little better (or cut myself a little more slack on the race to the finish!)

In the mean time, I’ll be taking pictures and posting pictures and reveling in the pure, simple joy of making and wearing my own wonderful, soft, colorful handknit socks.  I might also delight in the fact that I have really small feet, so sock knitting goes really fast.  I have a sneaking suspicion that I’d be less inclined to knit such things if I had say, Size 11 feet instead of the cute little size 6’s that I’m blessed/cursed with.

I’d be better off with a stitch dictionary, anyway.

In keeping with a theme of “bad knitting habits” (see recent post about Not Swatching), I think it’s time for me to acknowledge Bad Knitting Habit number 2: not following patterns (does it count as a theme if it’s only been brought up in two posts? Even if they’re successive ones? Perhaps I’ll write my next post about stashing, and then I will be thoroughly justified in calling it a them. But, I digress). I realized while I was working on my Chinook Caress socks that, unless they’re relatively complicated patterns by a relatively small number of designers whose work and patterns I really love, I should probably stop spending money on sock patterns. So far, I’ve modified the pattern by going up a needle size, decreasing the stitch count, swapping out the intended cuff (which was either twisted rib or normal rib… at this point I’m really not sure which) with a picot hem, and trying to figure out the best way to give the socks short row heels. I may decide that eye of partridge really is the way to go, but there’s something really delightful about a good short row heel. This is not the first time I’ve done this. In fact, I may have swapped out pattern parts enough times to suggest that I “generally” swap out the cuff and heel for picot hems or twisted rib and only vaguely glance over the instructions about insteps and gussets and toes and such.

When I realized that the stitch pattern was basically a feather and fan motif, I felt a bit silly for feeling like I needed a pattern to knit it.

I’m pretty sure I’d be better off investing in stitch dictionaries. I’d like a to use a wider variety of cuff patterns, and maybe this would facilitate that. I might also spend a lot more time frogging, but, after the last two projects, I might be more okay with frogging than I used to be.

Then again, maybe this is all a great big sign that it’s either time for me to start knitting sweaters and shawls and other large projects that aren’t all approximately the same, at heart, or to start designing at least some of my own projects. (As a side note, it’s possible that my inability to follow patterns might have a great deal to do with my inability to complete a sweater.  I’ve started at least two; one’s been hibernating for a while because I got annoyed with a beginner’s mistake of not alternating skeins of hand-dyed yarn and the second has been hibernating because I just haven’t felt like working on it.  Plus spring/summer isn’t so inspiring for knitting an alpaca sweater anyway, even if it’s small).

It’s funny, now, to think that a year ago I was afraid of knitting socks (though strangely not sweaters…). I had doubts about double-pointed needles and turning heels all the rest. And now? Well, now I find myself loving things like the first half of Cookie A’s Sock Innovation specifically for all the good advice it gives about various kinds of heels and toes and cuffs and so on and how they relate to sock design and construction. I really hope I get to take her class at the Sock Summit. I think it’s a good match for where my head is with sock knitting right now.

In non-sock (or patterns still worth buying) news, I think it’s time to choose a pattern to start in on for another lace stole. My Hanami came off the needles yesterday. It’s beautiful, and generally, I like how quickly the pattern went. Also fun to be knitting in the same spring where I went to Washington D.C. and saw all of the beautiful cherry blossoms at their peak. The only question left is what to get…

In which I appreciate the value of swatching (and proceed not to bother)

They say bad habits are bound to catch up with you, eventually.

Well, whoever “they” are, they’re right.  I wish I didn’t have to admit that, but, there it is.

So, here’s where I admit that I am a Bad Knitter.  I never swatch.  I hate swatching.  It takes time and it takes yarn and it basically just adds that much more distance between excited cast-ons and a finished project.  Since I mostly knit socks, mostly on size 1 needles, that mostly fit, I thought, for some reason, that I was above swatches.  And pattern recommendations about needle sizes, come to think of it.

This folly has resulted in not one, but two recent trips to the frog pond (Okay, one trip and one long lazy afternoon on the edge, spent mostly in denial that yes, the offending project really does have to be pulled apart and begun again).  The first was a pair of socks based on Chinook Winds from Pink Lemon Twist designs.  72 stitches for a size 6 woman’s foot?  Bad idea.  Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d been knitting on size 0 needles as the pattern suggested, but, of course, since size 1s had been working so well, I had to know better than the pattern, right?

Wrong.

The sock was huge.  So huge that, had it not been light blue and lacy, I think it would have been a perfect fit for my dear fiance’ and I could have just kept going.  (On the plus side, since he tried on the early stage and it did in fact fit, I knew just how big to make his Binary Birthday Socks… more on those later).  This could have easily been solved by swatching, even if my “trusty” swatch had lied a little bit.  But, I forged ahead until even Adrienne said the sock looked huge and I was forced to acknowledge that yup, it was time to start over.

I started over, still on size 1s, with 63 stitches instead of 72.  5 repeats later, the socks look beautiful.  And they now have a picot hem which I like even better than the twisted rib cuff I’d done before.  It’s spring and spring is time for the cute and whimsical and that’s what a picot hem is all about.  being cute.  I love them, now… and have almost forgotten the lost hours from the beginning of the first sock

My Marlene’s, on the other hand, are waiting on the needles for their turn to be broken down and rebuilt.  They’re just a hair too small, meaning that they get over my heels with some considerable tugging… but I know that if I keep going, I won’t be happy with the fit.  It’s a pity, because they’re really beautiful.  I hate to lose the work.  A swatch might have reminded me that 64 stitches on size 1 needles in twisted rib (with traveling stitches to boot) might have just a bit too much “suckage factor” to really be a good fit.  On to the size 2s… and possibly a fluffier yarn.

I’ve been consoling myself, in the mean time with a couple of projects that are  a bit more cooperative and a bit less dependent on swatching.  One of them is a pair of very geeky birthday socks for Sam.  72 stitches in stockinette on size 1 needles made of Wollmeise 100% superwash sock in Schwarz and Forster’s Glueck.  They’ll be sort of long in the leg, because the striping pattern is determined by the binary code for “Phone Phreak” (his former job title and  a favorite self-identifier).  Binary code, I think, is a lovely way of determining striping patterns since it’s easy to assign one color to be “0″ and another to be “1″ and just knit a row in whatever color the code demands.

The only downside is that the cuff will be a bit long at 8 rows per character.   I guess this method isn’t a good way to go if you have messages longer than 10 or 12 characters, including spaces.  Longer notes would have to be weaters or scarves.

The second is a lace stole.  I think my favorite thing about knitting lace is that all that changes with changes in needle size is how dense the lace pattern is.  Bigger needles = less dense knitting.  No swatching.  (Unless, of course, one really really needs one’s lace to block to a particular size.  Then it might require multiple swatches.  But for scarves and stoles and shawls and things, they’re not so necessary.  So, 13 out of 15 charts into the Hanami pattern and I’m delighted with the results (if a bit “over” the pattern).  And Sea Silk?  Amazing to work with.  I love living in a world full of beautiful yarns.

Productivity and project names: another pair of socks for the FO pile

I finished another pair of socks on Friday.  Which makes the third pair I’ve finished this year.  This puts me right on track for finishing at least one pair of socks every month.

I know.  I never told you about that goal.  But it seems that fingering weight is the natural weight I gravitate to when I go to peruse at yarn stores (or on the Internet) these days, so it seemed like setting a goal for knitting a certain number of pairs of socks over the course of the year would be a good way to ensure that I’m making good use of my stash.

I’m hoping the total will be more than the twelve I set as a minimum, but since I’m likely to be tempted away by other interesting knitting projects, I make no promises.

At least I have public transit to keep the socks coming.

The socks that I finished on Friday were what I call my “Fireside Socks” because the unnamed colorway of Handmaiden Casbah that I knit them out of reminded me of fire colors surrounding beautiful dark brown wood.  I realized later it’s a bit of a misnomer.  The pattern comes from the Pink Lemon Twist Elements Collection which is brilliantly structured so as to have two sock patterns per element — a simple, easy-to-memorize one (such as Lava Flow, the pattern I actually used for these socks) and a more complicated and challenging pattern (unfortunately for me actually named Fireside Socks).

Does anyone besides me have trouble coming up with good names for their projects?  I always want my project names to reflect both the pattern I used and the yarn I’m using to knit them, and it’s only rarely that it works.  (Witness my lovely Marlene D.’s which are stalled due to a sad realization that it requires more tugging than I like to get them over my heels.  I’m trying now to decide whether they need to become fingerless mitts or be frogged.  I kind of feel like they’re too pretty to be frogged, and I love fingerless mitts, so I’m leaning heavily toward the former, but then the question remains as to whether I will then proceed ever knit a nice pair of Marlene socks… or socks with my Wollmeise, for that matter).  So Firesides these are, pattern name snafu or no, and I love them.  The yarn was beautifully soft and a joy to work with, and I love the little picot hem that I chose to do instead of a standard twisted rib or 2 x 2 rib hem because I like the way the little peaks remind me of flames.

I also used a short-row heel on 28 of 64 stitches which turns out to be an excellent fit for my narrow heels and gave me enough stitches to leave for the instep (plus a few on each side that I picked up) to make plenty of room for my arches.

I wore them for the first time today… my feet were soft, cashmere-comfy heaven all day long.

I’m working on some other projects, big and small, bloggable and not.  The beauty of having serious trouble with project monogamy?  I always (or at least almost always) something to write about.  The downside?  Well… suffice it to say that I’m giving myself a huge pat on the back for showing a lot of self-restraint in not buying more sock needles at the yarn store today.

Promises, promises and Confessions of a Selfish Knitter

It might have started with the sale on green yarn and fiber that The Sanguine Gryphon was holding this week in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.  Then again, it might have started before that, when I realized that I had a lot of work to do on some gift knitting that just wasn’t getting done.  I decided to motivate myself by buying myself little rewards for reaching certain milestones in the project.  1/3 done, half-done, all done, etc.

Whatever the reason, the idea of a work –> reward cycle has been at the very front of my mind this week and I’ve been trying to be good (or at least better than usual) about exercising restraint justifying my yarn and fiber habit.  So, when I fell in love with some pretty green BFL roving that was not only beautiful, but also On Sale, I felt a little bit compelled to come up with a reason to buy it.  Not that loving the roving itself isn’t a fine reason to purchase it, but I realized that I rarely get around to spinning, had never actually managed to turn singles into yarn and… well, collecting roving just because it’s pretty would ultimately take up valuable yarn space.

(Yes, I know I have more yarn than I can possibly knit in the next, oh, ten years, and no, this does not stop me from collecting it.  But it’s about choice there.  And if I ever got truly, truly overwhelmed, I know I can always destash).

So, I made a promise to myself that before I could buy any more roving, I had to turn at least half of the batt that I’ve been “working on” (by which I mean I had a few yards of singles on my spindle and a big pile of roving) since September when I was given an amazing drop spindle and some roving as an anniversary gift.  In other words, a whole (admittedly pretty small) pile of fluffy stuff needed to become yarn.  By Saturday.

I think I told myself “half” of the batt, even though it’s a small batt (2 oz. of Merino/Silk from Louet in a color with some pretty flower name like Hyacinth or Hydrangea) is that I knew that if I had insisted upon the whole thing I would never have had a chance to finish before the roving of my dreams was either sold out or no longer on sale.  I am a beginning spinner, a slow spinner and really have very little clue what I’m doing.  I read a couple online tutorials, practiced with some plain roving and a very small, light, simple spindle that Adrienne gave me way back when I first said I wanted to learn to spin and have pretty much been making things up as I go along ever since.

Nevertheless, somehow, I did it.  Around 4 am in the night between Friday and Saturday, I placed my order for some BFL roving in Toad Stroganoff with The Sanguine Gryphon (hey, I earned it!).  The few yards of singles that I had ready and waiting for a few more to join them on Monday eventually became many, many yards of (sadly rather inconsistent) singles which I eventually plied into somewhere around 28 yards of a rather variable weight yarn.  I think it’s probably the sort of yarn that one ultimatelyclassifies as “Aran” or “Bulky”, but it’s hard for me to know.  I just classify it as “uneven.” Naturally, I wish it was thinner because, well, thinner yarns are what I generally knit with (no, I don’t have a sock yarn problem, why do you ask?)

I have 1 oz. of fiber and about .2 oz of singles left (my spinning did, on the whole, get thinner, I guess, as when I plied, the singles from Ball Number One appear to have run out before those from Ball Number Two, which is why I have the leftovers) and a whole lot to learn.  (Maybe my reward for finishing the entire batt, or maybe an entire couple of batts will be a spinning class.  Maybe, better still, this spinning class will be at the Sock Summit in August!  Maybe all I will learn in that class is that I have to be really patient, because making singles for sock yarn turns out to be a slow, painstaking process at which point I just might declare defeat and reconcile myself to spinning heavy, funky, yarns.  Oh, the possibilities!)

At least I have an ounce of soft, squishy yarn to pet and enjoy that I can be eternally proud of because I made it all myself.  Not bad for a first-timer.

Oh and also?  I finished the Fireside socks.  But I haven’t taken a picture of them, yet, so they’ll have to wait for another entry.

A little bit twisted (both stitches and logic)

I seem to have a “thing” lately for twisted stitches.  I love twisted rib for sock cuffs (when I’m not doing picot hems, because even though I could do without the sewing part, they are completely adorable) — I love hos it looks, how it stretches, and what a pretty, dense texture it creates in the fabric.

Apparently, I love it so much that whenever I knit with my Super Extra Special Hard To Find Yarns (read: yarns which can only be obtained through trades or rather vigorous stalking — good thing I have a somewhat obsessive personality!), I’m drawn to patterns requiring a lot of twisted stitches.  Such as Marlene, above, which I cast on just two nights ago in Wollmeise 100% Superwash, colorway “La Digitessa.”  I’d loved the pattern since my Winter issue of Knit.1 first arrived in the mail, but had been thinking of doing it in a squishy yarn with a light sheen — maybe a bamboo/merino blend.

Then I looked at the somewhat embarrassing stockpile of Wollmeise I’ve amassed over the last two months (I’ve been a VERY dedicated stalker lately, as well as being pretty  lucky in recent updates) and decided that while I am sort of a collector by nature and there’s nothing wrong with having a yarn “collection,” yarn is a tool.  It wants to be something other than a twisted hank, even if it’s a Very Pretty twisted hank. (At least, that’s what it would want if it had things like nerves and feelings and could actually want things).  And, truth be told, I was afraid of knitting this yarn because, well, once I knit it, it will be knit and then it cannot be knit into something else… and what if I love the colorway and I want to knit everything in it and I can’t ever get any more?

Yes, I know this is faulty logic.  When have I EVER, no matter how much I’ve loved a yarn, decided I had to have more of That Yarn in That Color so that I could do another project with it?  Never.  (P.S.  Wedding-related things don’t count.  I plan ahead to knit multiple things with one yarn in that case and purchase yarn yardages accordingly.  Therefore my Never remains accurate).  Nonetheless, just to hedge my bets, I decided to make sure that the first Wollmeise I cast on was one that was relatively easy to replace.  Because I need to save my favorites for my favorite patterns.  I’m not sure, yet, if this will be a favorite pattern.

So far, I like both the yarn and the pattern (what’s not to like about Claudia’s colors, after all), and the twisted stitches do produce a stunning texture that is both bold enough to be interesting both to knit and to look at… and mild enough to not get lost in a vibrant, somewhat variegated colorway.  I hope they continue to proceed along as well as they’ve begun.

Well, that, and that I don’t get to the end of knitting the socks and find myself deciding that yes, they’re lovely, but they need to remain on display in my handknit sock drawer because I simply don’t have shoes worthy of something as pretty as my Wollmeise.  Heaven forfend.

February Finishes what January Left Undone

So much for New Year’s resolutions about blogging more. January flew by in a flurry of cast-ons (3 pairs of socks, to be precise, two of which I’ve finished, neither one of them in January. Oh well) and a very busy life offline… and here we are in February, already more than half spent.

Crazy.

One of January’s cast ons was for a pair of Merino Lace Socks from Favorite Socks. I think this might be one of my favorite pattern books ever — the first pair of socks that I ever knit was a Favorite Socks pattern, and since then, I’ve done three more patterns from that book. Poor thing is starting to show some wear.  I’d started these because I wanted to knit up some of my Sundara before more of it arrived mid-February.  I almost succeeded… I was about halfway through the second sock when my Seasons mailing showed up.

Let me just say that I adore Sundara yarn.  The colors are beautiful, the yarn is comfortable to knit, I see no flashing or pooling and I think the subtlety of the grey purple in this yarn (”Deadly Nightshade” is the colorway) plays well with a sophisticated lace pattern.  (We won’t talk about the start that I made on Garden Gate socks that was quickly abandoned to the frog pond when I realized that Black over Violet and Deadly Nightshade were just a little TOO close in tone.  Someday, the right combination will turn up in my mailbox, or stash box really it will).

Aren’t they pretty?

Also, while I’m celebrating my pretty knitting and project love, I should mention that I finally, finally got a camera lens that lets me take knitting photos in the middle of the night, when I actually have time.  It’s a sigma prime f/1.4 30mm lens, for the camera geeks out there, designed to work with an Olympus DSLR body.  I’m not thrilled with its color fidelity (I had to do quite a lot of correcting to get pictures like these), but it’s fast, has beautiful definition and, most importantly, a focal distance that is shorter than the distance between my body and my feet.  You have no idea how hard it is to photograph socks when the minimum focal distance of the lens you want to use is around 3.5 feet.  That might sort of work if I were 6 feet tall and wanted to take all of my pictures standing (except for weird shadow effects)… but at my whopping height of 5′3″ … well, you do the math.

I think I’m in love.

I was going to write about my other projects (the Fireside socks I’m knitting from Casbah in an unnamed colorway that vaguely resembles Origin, the Marble Lace Socks that I just can’t seem to make myself finish), my newfound love for knitting socks on two circulars, and the totally strange psychology of yarn acquisition that surrounds yarns like Sundara and Wollmeise and now Sanguine Gryphon’s Bugga, but I think those will have to wait for other posts.  I have dinner plans.

If anyone has a good way of motivating oneself to finish a half-knitted second sock that just sort of keeps on languishing, do let me know.

Ambition, thou art folly.

I’ve said before that I have problems finishing things.  Not in a Second Sock Syndrome sort of way but in a Well, I Got All the Knitting Done and Now I Want A New Challenge sort of way.

Which is why, two days before 2008 draws to its end, I have a pretty sad list of FOs and a pretty long list of things that are In the Works.

Wouldn’t it be lovely, I thought, as I was riding back from Tahoe the other day (where, despite beautiful, beautiful snow I spent most of my time curled up in front of a fire knitting… somehow several weekends of kicking my heels over my head in a damp, cold, draughty metal building caught up with me and a wretched cold settled in) to make it my goal to knit like mad over the next couple of days and finish all of my unfinished projects!  Then I can start 2009 with a clean slate and an accurate record of how many things I actually manage to knit over the course of the year.

(Of course, I mentally discounted the projects that are “Hibernating” or “Things I Want to Rethink” or “Things I Have No Motivation Whatsoever To Finish”)

Then I assembled all of the projects that I could potentially finish. 

Ambition, thou art folly.

So, instead, I made a plan to see what was feasible to finish.  MS4?  Obviously Not.  Happy Wanderer Capelet?  Yes.  It’s really just a little steaming and pinning and weaving in ends.  Little Blue Sweater?  Not unless that’s the one last thing I really want to finish this year.  Yellow Mermaid Mitts?  Doable.  Wedding Garters 1, 2 and 3?  Very Doable.  Marble Lace Socks?  Probably not, especially given that I’m sort of bored with them and definitely not in love with them.  Winter lace mitts?  Doubtful.  The first went pretty quickly… but pretty quickly was still more Knitting Hours than I believe I have left in 2008.  Malabrigo socks?  Oh, I do hope so.  So pretty and so soft and so… well, mostly, I just can’t wait to wear them.

Also?  I still want to knit everything out of Malabrigo Sock.  Because it’s just such a fantastic yarn.  It might possibly have spoiled me.  Then again, I’m sure it won’t be long before the curiosity about how some other yarn knits up will get the better of me (after all, that’s the story of the Winter Lace Mitts… I was just too curious about my Enchanted Knoll Farms Sock Yarn).

That’s a long list.  And the day is wasting away.  I guess I’d better put down the keyboard and pick up the needles (and pins and blocking board and waste yarn and…)

November is for Crafting, Thanksgiving is for Knitting

Every once in a while, I get so busy actually working on projects that I fail completely at blogging.  The last month would be an example of one of those “once in a while” sorts of times.  I have newfound appreciation for the people who actually blog with some sort of regularity.  I am clearly not one of those sorts of people, despite many, many attempts and promises to the contrary.

That said, I am more than a bit guilty of being too ambitious delusional (at times) about what I can realistically accomplish.  For example, after a week and a half worth’s of hemming and hawing, I found myself casting on the Little Blue Sweater from Fall 2008 Interweave Knits, ostensibly in honor of NaKniSweMo.  To date, I have knit the front and back up to the armpits (mostly due to a decision to knit the body in the round and add a “seam” purl stitch on each side.  I did this because I like knitting in the round, I hate sewing my knitting after the fact, and mostly, I had very little confidence in my ability to consistently measure 7″ of ribbing across 2 pieces of fabric), and managed the armhole and neck shaping on one side of the front.  When I realized how hard it is to shape a neck and an armhole at the same time, I found myself wishing 2 things:  the first was that I’d started my shaping with the back of the sweater, not the front, and the second was that I think it’s probably just plain hard to write good instructions as to how to shape two things, on different sides of the garment, at once.

Somehow, though, I wound up with the right number of stitches and a piece of fabric that looked reasonably like the one in the picture… so I figure I can’t be too far off.  Beginner’s Luck, perhaps.  And now, I’m  just a bit intimidated by the prospect of shaping the other side.

I decided to return to something sweet and simple, so I knit a quick pair of black, eyelet rib ruffled wristwarmers in Blue Sky Alpacas Alpaca & Silk.  The first one took me an afternoon, evening, and a couple hours of commuting the following day.  The second was one that I’d cast on around noon on Thanksgiving Day and finished sometime around midnight.  I was impressed by how fast it went.  36 stitches around on size 5 needles turns into a nice, fluffly, longish garment a lot faster than 60 stitches around on size 1 needles.  Only downside?  Between a lofty yarn and my tiny, tiny wrists, the wristwarmers don’t look quite as lacy as I’d hoped.  Now I want to do another pair in a similar yarn in a much more open lace pattern.  The only trick is FINDING that lace pattern.

I fired the Marble Lace Socks out of a general feeling that I much prefer the Jitterbug in the skein to what I’m getting on my needles, only to pick them up again this week because basically, I don’t believe in frogging.  I just can’t bring myself to undo all that work.

I started a pair of Go With The Flow socks from Favorite Socks in Malabrigo Sock.  I love Malabrigo Sock.  It is soft, light and beatuifully colored.  It is (so far) showing my stitches (more eyelet rib!) in a very pleasant way and the Abril colorway is knitting up in a pretty, mottled pattern with no flashing or pooling or even mini-striping.  Maybe it’s because the colors are so similar, or maybe it’s something else.  Whatever the case, for the moment, I basically want to knit everything out of Malabrigo Sock.  Except maybe for whatever I decide is a project worthy of the yarn that I dyed myself.  It’s pretty.  I love it.  I should take pictures and show you… or rather, I should upload and show you the pictures I have taken.  It’s the other knits I should take pictures of.

Somewhere in there, I also did a bit of sewing.  I made myself a can can petticoat and overskirt (Did I mention that, in my copious spare time, I joined a can can troupe?  I did.  It’s a lot of fun).  I loved the process of it, though trying to make something with that many ruffles in a mere couple of evenings was certainly not one of my brighter ideas.  Still, I’d happily make more in the future.  Maybe in fun printed fabrics where every ruffle coordinates with but differs from the base fabric.  There are some adorable fabrics at my local fabric store for this… though really, I need another project about as much as I could use another hole in my head.

It’s been a busy month.  The month ahead promises to be busy as well.  But hopefully it won’t turn into an excuse for blog neglect.  I’ve missed you.

Be vewwy vewwy quiet… we’re hunting Wollmeise!

Wollmeise, as there’s probably no need to tell the knitting blogosphere, is remarkably hard to acquire. If you’re a “wollmeise virgin,” acquisition often involves throwing yourself upon the mercy of kind folk on Ravelry and if you you’re not, well, it tends to involve a considerable amount of yarn stalking.

Sometimes, I’m afraid my F5 key will break from the number of times I hit it while I stalk wollmeise. I’ve done so twice, now, once at The Loopy Ewe (and oh, was it madness!) and once on Claudia’s site in Germany. It was considerably more fun to stalk Claudia’s site — although the site is a bit slower, the yarns appear gradually and randomly… and it’s much easier to wait and see if the yarn you’ve desperately been dreaming of turns up. Granted, I missed out on some Veilchen laceweight in her last shop update by waiting just a bit too long, but since I scored skeins in Barista, Poison No. 5 and Vergismeinnicht, I’m not about to complain.  I scored the day I stalked on The Loopy Ewe as well.  That day I learned a fascinating lesson… which is that when yarn is disappearing as rapidly as it does from The Loopy Ewe, one’s mentality shifts from “I really want Wollmeise in these colors” to “I just really want Wollmeise!” and while I was more than thrilled to get my hands on some, I couldn’t help but feel just a twinge of disappointment that the colors I wound up with, though beautiful, were certainly not my first choices (some of which had hopped out of my cart during my attempt to pay!).  In some ways, I feel better about my second set of stalked purchases because I made a choice.  I missed out on some, but it will come around again, probably about the time I’ve finished knitting up some of the Wollmeise I’ve got hanging about in my stash.

Sometimes, I look at the skeins that I’ve acquired through stalking (and a few via Yarnissima’s kits because I’ve happened to be luck the days I’ve dropped by her site) and can’t help wondering if it’s really worth the hype.  The base is soft and the colors are intense and beautiful and complex without being complicated. In fact, the colors are so intense that they practically radiate with a deep glow.  And certainly, the yarns that I’ve been dyeing in my kitchen in the past week or so haven’t gotten to that stage.   They’re certainly worth the trouble I’ve gone to to get them and, yes, I have projects in mind for all of my skeins, and yes, I’m very much looking forward to knitting with them.  The yarn has a fabulous hand.

Then again, part of the joy of having Wollmeise is the thrill of the stalk and the thrill of the kill and the sheer fun of chatting with my fellow Ravelers who are up in the middle of the night looking for yarn or busy refreshing our wishlist pages when we should be working.  It’s fun to score.  It’s fun to celebrate the scores of others, and mostly, it’s fun to have that “skein that got away.”  I know someday I’ll catch it, and I’ll probably appreciate it all the more for waiting.