Twelve!

Good Lord, are we still doing this?

I guess we are. The count now stands at:

Twelve socks.
Five pairs plus two as-yet-unmated socks.
Two socks OTN.
Something like 20 days remaining.

The above pair is knit in Socks That Rock mediumweight, colorway Lagoon, on size 1.5 needles, at a gauge of around 7.5 stitches to the inch. This is bigger than my usual sock gauge, but the finished fabric is denser because of the heavier yarn. I like it a lot. The private side of the sock feels very smooth, almost as smooth as the knit side. I may try for a similar density in future socks. I'm betting the smoother purl side will make for a more comfortable sock, not that the purl bumps generally bother me. But I do sometimes feel them and would prefer not to.

I think the short break to knit the hatpotis and the gauge swatch for Fulmar restored me some. Plus I've been working on my secret knitting--shhh! Don't tell! It's a secret!

In any event, two good sockish things happened today. First, I stopped despising the sight of them. Whew! I hate it when I fall out of love with my knitting. Good thing it never lasts.

Second, I had one of those Doh! moments. Remember the Gypsy Girl sock with the wild zig zagging around the leg? Remember how much trouble I had with the (sigh) pooling? I have this odd barberpole curse that turns all barberpole-striping yarns into something only Piet Mondrian's mother could love. And I'm definitely not Mondrian's mother.

So, after much fussing and tinking and frogging, I finally got a stitch count that allowed the sock to look more like a nicely patterned sock, and less like abstract-geometric art. I happily knit the first sock, then reached for the second skein to knit the second sock.

And, of course, ran into problems that made all the issues with the first sock seem like child's play. I won't tell you how many times I have cast on and ripped out this sock. I will confess to a number in double digits, and that's it. I have tried everything -- varying the stitch count and the size of the needles, pulling from the other end of the skein, everything. And no matter what, the blue and the grey and the black Refused To Swirl.

Obstinate yarn! This is a big part of the reason I've been in an anti-sock mood lately.

Then, this morning, it sort of hit me. I still have close to half a ball left from the first skein. Doh! I'll knit the leg with this, and as far into the gusset as I can get, and then I'll switch to the naughty misbehaving ball. That part goes in the shoe, so who will notice or care?

Well, I will. But I'm just cranky that way.

I still love this yarn. I will be happy to knit with it again. The real lesson in all of this -- a lesson I should have learned before now -- is that barberpoles and I don't play nice together.


One other note. The Shedir Lady passed away earlier today. Thanks to all of you who were so kind and supportive during her final illness. I'm sad that she's gone, but also sort of guiltily relieved. She was suffering. But she's not suffering anymore.

Another One Bites the Dust

Rut-roh. Is that a big honking hole right in the middle of Miss Six's hideously disgusting novelty scarf?

Dang. Looks like I have to frog it.

...happy dance...

***confetti***

...blows tootie horn...

I've even come up with a strategy to help soothe her disappointment. I will give her the skein and take her to the craft store and let her pick out some beads. We'll use this horrid so-called yarn to make necklaces or something. I don't care, whatever she wants, as long as I don't have to actually knit with this crap. Ever. Again.

And then there were seven....

Fulmar Baby Steps

I got gauge! Woot! This gorgeous electric blue is going to be my Fulmar yarn. How hot is that? Have you ever seen such a saturated blue? One of the things I love about the Silver Creek Merino is that every single one of their colors is stunning. They're not all wild and bold like this one -- there are pastels and neutrals, too. But each color has that extra little oomph that makes it really sing.

And look at the way those stitches pop. This is going to be a fabulous Fulmar, which is a heavily textured sweater and needs great stitch definition. Yay, yarn!

Naturally, this yarn is discontinued. sigh....

Anyway, I am so close to spot-on with the gauge for this -- row gauge is as perfect as it gets, and stitch gauge is 30 stitches per 4 and 1/16 inches. To be flawless, that sixteenth of an inch would not be there. But really, I don't think that 1/16 is going to amount to a diddly of a difference, even over the two hundred eleventy thousand stitches I have to cast on for the front alone.

Getting gauge feels sort of momentous. This pattern scares me a little (okay, a lot), and I keep saying to myself, in a very soothing voice, "Just take it slow. One step at a time. It's just knits and purls, like any other sweater."

Ha! Is not! It's got extra voodoo and wicked skeery stuff! And tiny needles! And La Starmore herself says it requires patience!

*panic*

Step one was taking the plunge -- admitting I wanted to actually knit this thing and buying the yarn. Step two was corralling a whole mess of perfectly innocent bystander knitters into knitting this with me. The poor dears. They're being very good sports, and several of them are showing signs of being fiercely smart knitters. Honestly, they amaze me. The support and kindness in this group is -- well, it's what you would expect from a group of knitters. We have a way of blowing the curve in those departments.

So now, here we are at step three. I got gauge. This means I don't have any more excuses. I said I wanted to knit it, I have a few dozen charming co-knitters, and ... I got gauge. *gulp*

It feels a bit like standing on the edge of the high dive for the very first time, with a crowd of supporters lined up on the stairs waiting their turns to jump. No turning back now!

Head Start

The Second Wave Clapotis KAL doesn't officially start for another three weeks, but I couldn't resist casting on the hat to match. Was that very naughty of me? I haven't cast on the actual clapotis yet. Just the hat.

Once cast on, it knitted up very quickly. Two days. That's nothing! The hardest part was working the decreases at the crown in a way that made the pattern look semi-good. I had to rip it back once, but on the second try ended up with this swirly pattern. I think it will do.





















Here's the side view. I chose a 2x2 rib because it mimics the look of the clapotis, but doesn't have all those pesky holes. Holes in a hat + Chicago winter = unhappy me with a cold noggin!

The deep foldover brim will give me a double layer of warmth around the forehead and ears. Again, Chicago winter. "Dressing in layers for warmth" gets elevated to a whole other level around here. I fully expect to wrap the clapotis around the hat/neck for yet another layer on particularly bitter days.

So, that feels pretty darn good. Yesterday I was thumping my own forehead for having nine works-in-progress -- Nine! A new record! And not the kind that deserves a trophy, either. I don't mind having two or three going at a time. Four, even, when I have deadlines or mild yarn-fume-induced insanity or other extenuating circumstances. But nine? Heck, no.

Today, that number shrunk to eight. I'm thinking I can finish two more projects before the start of the clapotis-along. Maybe three. We'll see! I just want to clear the decks a little before starting in on the grandmother of them all ... Fulmar.

If you're interested, here are the hat specs.

Yarn: Jaeger Baby Merino DK, 1 50g skein plus about 15g of a second skein.
Pattern: None. I just cast on 112 stitches on size 6s and knit in 2x2 rib until it was good and long -- 9 inches or thereabouts -- and then I decreased until it was done. First I decreased the purls in the 2x2, then the knits, then worked knits and purls together in more decreases to form that swirly crown.

Started August 28.
Finished August 30. (I love that. Two days! And have I mentioned it only took two days to knit this silly bit?)

There Ought to Be a 12-Step Program For This

This is all I can think about today. I mean, just look at it.

No, really. Look closer.













This is sock yarn from the Hand Painted Yarn Company. I'm so sick of knitting socks that I'm casting on anything and everything just to avoid knitting socks.

But everytime I walk past my sock yarn stash, I have to pause, open the closet door, and stare through the clear plastic bin at this beautiful yarn. I have to force myself not to cast it on by reminding myself how much I loathe sock knitting at the moment. Can you blame me for this bit of schizophrenia? The yarn is so incredibly soft. And colorful. And flecky -- I adore the primary flecks against the teal and purple and periwinkle. Adore.

This yarn was the first purchase at Stitches Midwest this year. It occurs to me that I never finished telling the Stitches story -- with my precision laser-beam focus (ha!), I keep drifting from topic to topic and never really finishing anything. Story of my knitting life these days. Which I blame on socks. As we all know by now.

Anyway.

At Stitches in 2006, the first thing I understood -- when I walked in that market and smelled the wool and silk and, OMG, you could almost swim laps in the fumes because they were that dense -- was that I hadn't brought enough cash. I'd brought $200, which would be more than ample to go yarn shopping on any other day. But in the Stitches market, it was just enough to tease me and make me a little crazy.

I mean, come on. Mill packs for half price as far as the eye could see. One of a kind, never to be seen again, gourmet hand dyed yarns from indie farms who actually name their sheep. I mean, these people have relationships with their wool because it's that special. How do you begin to decide which to buy? It was torture.

I started saving for this year's Stitches right then and there. I came up with a plan. I would give myself a once-in-a-lifetime total yarn shopping spree. No guilt, no limits. I would take more cash than I could ever reasonably spend on yarn, and I would spend as much of it as my heart desired.

We should all have a day like that some day.

When Red and I walked into the market this year, the first thing I saw was a chicken wire fence surrounding mill packs of Noro for half price. I almost hopped the little fence and rolled around in that big fluffy bin, but luckily came to my senses. Good thing. It would have sucked to get arrested and hauled out of the market in handcuffs before even making my first purchase.

We spent a good ten minutes wading through that bin of yarn before realizing that this was only the tip of the iceberg. We were getting sucked into a yarn sale vortex before we'd made it past the first stall! We needed a plan, or we would never see everything the market had to offer. Shoot, even with a plan, we'd probably never see everything the market had to offer.

We started on the far end and wound our way up and down the aisles. It was perhaps the fourth booth where we found this very unique flecky sock yarn from the Hand Painted Yarn Company.

Bjorn and his partner (I think the partner's name was Mark, but could have that wrong), have started this lovely little cottage shop somewhere in Missouri. They don't usually sell direct to the public, but do wholesale only. They'd never been to a fiber show before. I felt like I was discovering a major new talent, standing there at that booth and chatting with Bjorn about his process. He does all the dying himself, you see, in bins and vats, patiently squeezing every skein by hand. He started to explain the process -- the flecky bits are dyed first and somehow never get overdyed -- but we were interrupted. A shame, because I really enjoyed meeting these two fine craftsmen and could have happily chattered away with them for half the day.

Plus, now I'll never know how he dyes his yarn.

Red managed to pull me out of their booth at last -- I hardly wept at all, and the giant sucking sound only echoed a little bit -- and we wandered into that greatest of all vortexes, that paradise for knitters, that pinnacle of splurgosity...

Webs.

Everything gets a little blurry after that. The only thing I know for sure is that 70 minutes after the market opened, I couldn't carry my bags anymore and had to walk back to the hotel to drop them off. Because, you know, it's darn hard to fondle yarn when you're carrying three hugely overstuffed bags. And I had to keep shopping!

After Webs, I focused on finding special things. Yarns I couldn't buy elsewhere, or artisan yarns, or other unique purchases. I bought some iridescent beads for a beaded scarf, and some beautiful vintage buttons. But mostly, I bought more yarn.

And by 2:30, I was bushed. Totally shopped out. I had planned on spending the entire day in the market, but as it turns out, I just don't have the stamina for it.

That's probably not a bad thing. I came home with money left over, and more yarn than I can knit in a year. Everything I bought fit into existing storage bins, but still, Stitches was definitely my tipping point. I have enough yarn now, and that's a very happy feeling.

And I think it's also why I have such wicked startitis right now. Time to stop shopping and start knitting! Whee!

Oh, Dear

This is how I started my morning. Imagine me innocently driving along in the morning rush, thinking about one of the manuscripts I had to reject last night. It was good. It wasn't right for our publishing house, but it was very well-written and coherent. If only I could have figured out a way to angle it so that it would fit in our lines. But I couldn't and I had to reject it, and it was bugging me this morning. Really, I hate letting the good ones go.

So I'm musing about the state of the publishing industry and how everything is driven by the shelf labels used by the bookstores, and how even a great manuscript will be hard to publish if nobody can figure out how to shelve it, and I happen to glance over at the car in the next lane.

That bumper sticker is difficult to read because, let's face it, taking a picture of a moving car from a moving car isn't the easiest task. So you'll have to trust me when I tell you that it advertises a new series by author Laurel K. Hamilton. The sharp-eyed among you will notice the apostrophe in the title. That apostrophe signals the possessive case. But what do the animators possess? I mean, other than an extraneous punctuation mark.

So that irritated me -- the freaking title, for chrissakes, and some copyeditor somewhere screwed it up because they can't distinguish plurals from possessives. This is such a basic mistake. It's like an auto mechanic who pumps gas directly into the backseat of the car. Or a gardener who rips out the shrubs and leaves the weeds. It should never happen.

Meanwhile, Laurel K. Hamilton (who surely cannot be blamed for this, I would hope) sells gobs of books with glaring grammatical errors, while my poor rejected writer last night writes excellent prose and can't get a break.
It just bugs me.

















And as long as we're on the topic of people doing the wrong thing, I must confess that I cast on something new. This is a hat -- or it will be a hat, and it will match my eventual clapotis. The fabric reminds me of a speckled easter egg. Me likee.

Another confession. I have somehow managed to get myself into three knitalongs for this fall. The first, the Persuasion knitalong, starts September 1, but I have already cast on a blue empire blouse, the Butterfly.

The second, the Second Wave Clapotis KAL, starts September 23 as the Summer of Socks ends.

The third is the Fulmar KAL which I've cobbled together from a group of amazing and brave knitters. That one is going to be a project. It starts October 1, and will require a lot of time and attention to detail. I'm looking forward to that!

Plus, I promised to teach a friend to knit cables by knitting a hat together with her. We're starting that sometime soon.

This gives me -- brace yourselves --
-- four socks
-- one cardigan
-- one hat
-- one novelty scarf
-- one shirt
-- and some secret knitting
currently OTN. Plus I'll be casting on a cabled hat and Fulmar soon.

No, I don't miss my mind. Why do you ask?

Butterfly Math

OK. In order to understand the way I did the math for the Butterfly blouse, you need to understand two things. One, I hate math. And two, when confronted with tasks I hate, I become a lazy, lazy girl.

But knitting, I like. So I started the Butterfly process by knitting the first ball of yarn in its entirety.

The yarn, by the way, is Wick from Knit One, Crochet Too. They do that cutesy marketing thing where they call rayon "soy," but we all know better, and so we'll just call this one a rayon/poly blend and leave the mislabeled-rayon rant for another day.

Anyway.

I got gauge by purling in the round instead of knitting in the round. I could tell you I multiplied my gauge by my stitch count and so forth to determine my pattern alterations, but that would be a lie.

I mean, why do math when there are pattern schematics? I can look at a map and see the final finished measurements. So, I know from this handy dandy little map that the hem circumference will be 57 inches. I also know that the next size down would be 52.5 inches, but I didn't cast on that size even though it would fit with room to spare. I want this to be very loose fitting, just like it is on the Knitscene model. The drapey-loosey fit of this garment is part of the appeal.

The pattern is knit in three pieces. The first piece is a tube and forms the body from the midriff to the hip. The other two pieces, which are identical, are long shaped rectangles that start under the boobs, go up over the shoulders, and down the back to join the tube roughly where your bra strap would be. These twin shaped rectangles are stitched together at the sides, leaving an armhole gap, and at the front and back, leaving V-neck shaping on both sides.

So, I knit the first ball as the start of the body tube. Came up with 2.375" in length for the whole 120-yard ball. 2.375" in length times 57" in girth comes to roughly 135 square inches of fabric out of each ball at the current gauge. According to the pattern schematics, the tube is supposed to be 12.5" long, meaning it would take around 5 or 6 balls of yarn. I only have 9 balls, and there are those pesky bodice rectangles to knit.

This is tricky because they're not really rectangles. They're shaped long pieces -- bigger over the boobs than at the back. I could have mapped the pieces on graph paper and figured the square inches that way. But that would have required finding my graph paper, and you know, here comes that lazy thing again.

So what I did instead was envision the long rectangles as a series of smaller rectangles of varying sizes. This is not technically true because they'd be more like, er, rhombuses? Four-sided thingamabobbies without right angles. Whatever. We can pretend they're rectangles. It's close enough.

I broke out each section of the rectangle and calculated its area, then multiplied all that by two because there are two of these pieces to be knit. Make sense?

Are you bored silly yet? I just about was, by this point. Because this was the part that required a calculator and numbers. ::shudder:: You know, first you have to take the number of stitches and divide by your gauge to get the inches, and then you have to multiply the inches by the length to get the area. It's all very mathy, and I'm a word girl.

Anyway, eventually I managed to calculate the same number twice in a row, so I took it on faith that that was the correct result. The bodice rhombussy-rectangles will require about 650 square inches of fabric.

I have enough yarn, 9 skeins, to knit 1215 square inches. The body tube is bigger than the shoulder-bodice pieces -- I can tell that just by eyeballing the pattern schematics. No math required, thank heaven.

And I have to leave some yarn to knit the little placket on the front and the little crocheted bits at the hems. I have no idea how many yards I'll need to save for that. I can't even think how I would estimate it. So we'll just call it at half a ball -- 60 yards or thereabouts -- and then guess what? The rectangley thingies plus the guesstimated half-ball for plackets and trim adds up to five of my nine balls of yarn. Five plus a little, actually.

So I'm doing the lazy thing. I'm going to decrease the body tube as I knit it so that the hips will still be very fluid and drapey, but the midriff will be a somewhat closer fit. I'll also shorten the body tube piece -- I have no choice -- and by my rhombussy-rectangle calculations for this tube, I figure it will end up being in the neighborhood of 10" in length rather than the 12.5" called for in the pattern.

I can live with these alterations. I may have to tinker with the bust pleats and gathers when sewing the tube to the rectangles, but I can live with that too.

So. Just to be on the safe side, I'll knit the bodice pieces first and then knit the altered tube, saving half a ball or so for finishing.

This was a very boring post, I know. But you know, I thought maybe if I explained my cheating, lazy way of figuring this stuff up, it might help someone else down the road. I've read a lot of articles about schematics and alterations and math, but they get so darn complicated.

My way is easier. I guess we'll find out if my way is accurate!