Six!

Six socks.
Three pairs.
Er...35 days?

Plus three half-socks on the needles, most of which are more or less at the heel stage.

Not bad for a gal who usually takes a week to ten days to knit a single sock. I suspect that goal of six pairs is well within reach, and the "only if I'm really, really stretching" goal of eight pairs might not be such a stretch after all. We'll see. I'm just going to keep knitting socks and see how far I get.

Some days, I get further than others.

Today, just when we thought the house was starting to need not quite so many tradesmen stomping through it all the damn time, we had a wee problem. The crawlspace flooded. Turned out to be a broken sillcock* in the wall connecting to the outdoor spigot. We think either the painters or the cementers** broke it earlier this week while working out in front. Both teams used *cough*abused*cough* the hose. Regardless, it broke, and consequently we had our favorite plumber back to the house.

How sad is it when you have a favorite plumber? I never met the man before we started renovating this house. Now I know all about his grandchildren and his best fishing spots.

Anyway, as long as our charming favorite plumber was here, we had him install a new hot water heater. What the heck. It's about the only thing in this house he hadn't yet worked on.

I guess I should mention that no yarn was stored in the crawlspace. So there's our silver lining on this rainy day.

*I have no clue how to spell silcock/syllycock/whatever. Yes, I'm a professional editor and should care about these things. But not tonight. It's a stupid pipe, it's busted and it's probably misspelled. We'll all just have to learn to live with the horror of that.

**Yes, we had the outdoor trim painted and the cement walkways repaired this week. We pretty much have work crews here every week. I've stopped talking about it because this has been going on since May 12, 2006, and I'm well and truly sick of it. My current approach to the renovation process is to pretend it's not happening. Which turns out to be a great way to deal with it, until some teenaged housepainter breaks a sillcock and floods your crawlspace.

Five!

I'm so very happy to be able to blog again. And here to help me celebrate is sock number five for the SOS07 challenge. I love this sock, love the way it turned out, love everything about it -- pattern, yarn, color, everything. It's just a happy squooshy sock.




















The pattern, corded rib, was taken from Charlene Schurch's SKS. I love how the texture changes when you wear it. Look at those eyelets that suddenly appear. Very nice. Me likee this pattern, and it couldn't be easier to knit.


















I also set out the back of the Silver Creek cabled cardigan to block. Before I pinned it out, I would have sworn that it would never in a million years stretch to the proper dimensions. But it did, and now I'm less worried about knitting the fronts.

I don't know why I can't get the Silver Creek to photograph properly. No matter what I do, the color is off. And not just off by a little, either. The actual color of this yarn is midway between a royal blue and a dark turquoise. It's very bright and vivid, but it always photographs as a charcoal or navy. I messed around with the photo editor to get it closer to the true color, but the photos still disappoint me. The yarn is too beautiful to be misrepresented like this!

The Hole Truth

I don't know wtf I did this time. I was blissfully knitting along, mostly knitting by feel that second Mountain Colors flathead cherry sock while I watched Clinton and Stacy shred the ego of yet another unsuspecting fashion victim. There's a WNTW marathon today and I'm in a deeply snarky mood. You know what that means? Voila! Instant multitasking! I can slack off for the afternoon in two different ways at once!

Am I good or what.




















Yep. Or what. Because today, knitting by touch equals a big honkin hole in my sock leg. Do you see that? Front and center? That dark loop sticking out is a dropped stitch. Just above it is a nice large hole.

Here's a little mystery. I still have the right number of stitches on the needles. So not only did I manage to drop a stitch, but I also managed to somewhere, somehow, some time add a stitch.

My guess is that I slid the needle between stitches instead of into the stitch. I created a yarn over instead of a stitch, and then dropped the old, still live stitch.
And for an added bonus, I also managed to knit an inch past the dropped stitch before noticing it. Am I good or what? Or what.

Clearly I need to pay more attention to my knitting and less to Clinton and Stacy. Or maybe the knitting goddess is punishing me for knitting when I should be working. Or maybe it was some subliminal freudian thing, me putting a hole in my knitting while Stacy ripped some poor chanteuse for wearing an argyle sweater with holes in it. I felt bad for that little jazz diva. I mean, we all have that beloved comfy sweater we hold onto past its prime, right?

















And sometimes holes in the knitting are a good thing. The turquoise Dale Baby Ull on the right is a zigzaggy lace rib from Charlene Schurch. Very easy pattern. Every other round is regular k2, p2 resting round. Then on alternating pattern rounds, you either yo-k2tog or you ssk-yo on the knit columns, and purl the purls as usual. I've been playing with this pattern as I knit it, alternating the way I wrap the yarn, knitting and purling through the back loops, and basically just messing with it to see what kind of effects I can create. The only difference I see so far is in the size of the holes from the yarn overs. The pattern itself remains intact. That makes sense, but I still have this urge to mess with this as I'm knitting it.

The Baby Ull is knitting into super squooshy, super sproingy fabric, making it the exact opposite of the jaywalker. I turned the heel on the jaywalker and have knit about half an inch of the gusset. For now, I'm sticking to the chevron pattern, but that won't last much longer. The fabric is wickedly inflexible and a regular stockinette would be so much more comfortable on the feet. So I'm thinking I will decrease partway through the gussets in pattern and then switch to regular stockinette when the stitch count seems low enough to make the right size foot tube.

That's the sock report.

In other news, I must sent out a hearty Oh Crap! My Bad! to my SnB crew. I forgot about our alternate meeting last night. And next week I will be in Dallas for that conference, so it will be two weeks before I get to ogle all of your knitting again. ...pout... But hey, maybe by then there will be a finished snake cozy to admire, eh Missus A?

Jaywalking

I'm knitting the heel flap of the first jaywalker. Not sure what I think of the pattern or the result. On the one hand, the chevron looks cool and it's a fun and easy knit. On the other hand, the resulting fabric has some properties that might not make for the most comfy sock. It's dense, tight, and not very flexible. The ribbing and the chevron don't seem to coexist peacefully. And I'm afraid the sock may be too large.

But I'm going to keep knitting. I'm debating whether to stay in pattern for the whole foot, or knit the gussets down to a smaller number of total stitches in a more flexible stockinette fabric. Anyone have any thoughts to share on that? I'm about the last knitter on the planet to knit jaywalkers, so I imagine there's a wealth of insight out there regarding this pattern.














I also cast on these boot socks in Dale Baby Ull. Though it's barely apparent, there will be a simple pattern on these. My initial thought was to do a cable of some sort, but after swatching the yarn, I decided on one of the 4-stitch patterns from the Charlene Schurch book. These ought to be quick and fun.

The only other thing going on right now is the mad scramble leading up to RWA's annual conference. I'm trying to focus on things like clearing off my desk rather than on things like which yarn to pack. I wound off a couple of skeins over the weekend so I have ready yarn to choose from. But with all the real work I need to accomplish this week, worrying about yarn just can't be high on the to-do list. (We'll see how long that resolve sticks.)