Yet Another Sock

I don't know why I feel compelled to have two pairs of socks in progress. You'd think one would be enough. And yet it's not. I like to have one pair of plain socks on my desk to knit while dictating and reading submissions. And I like to have another in my purse so I always have something with me to knit. Comes in handy for doctor's appointments, long queues at the bank, and other assorted inconveniences.

So this girly thing is my purse sock right now. I have barely started it, as you can see, and it will probably live in my purse for a while to come. There's no rush to finish it. Its purpose is to live in my bag for random knitting moment, not to be wearable by any particular date.

I love the yarn, Filatura di Crosa Maxime Print. Very spongey and soft. In the ball, it squeezes like a high-end stuffed animal, compressing more than you expect and then springing right back into shape. My only gripe with this yarn is that their colorways tend to be outside my tastes. But for that, I'd probably own more of it, because it's very nice to knit.

Pushing It

I've got a lot of projects OTN again. And I'm pretty darned sick of all of them. Not because they're bad projects or boring or not something I'd wear, but because they have been hanging around FOREVER.

All week long, I've been dwelling on that. It's not good to have pleasurable things take on the shape of a burden.

So I've been talking about not casting on any new projects until I clear all existing projects off my lists. Socks are the exception to that rule, of course, because I need mindless desk knitting and something portable for my purse. But, not including socks, look at what I have OTN:

1. Catherine Parr.

This was cast on November 2007, one year ago. The sleeves are done. The body, knit in the round, is done to the armholes (where the fabric divides), and another three inches of the back is done above the armholes. This one is probably 80% done, except for a little knitting and some math for the neckline.

2. The Crapghan.

Remember this butt ugly thing? It's 2.5 balls away from completion. It's crocheted, and crochet hurts my wrist, so I can only work on it in the tiniest increments. Takes a long time to crochet a bed-sized blanket in five minute increments.

3. Fulmar.

I'd rate this at about 30% done. And you have no idea how much I wish that number was larger. I love this project, but it requires thought, and I can't always think about my knitting.

4. My Husband a/k/a the Cardigan.

The back is knit. That's it. I got stalled by the sleeves, but after a Stitches class this summer, I have a new way of short-rowing the cuffs so that I ought to get a decent result. I hope. 30% done.

5. The Fair Isle Bag.

Love the colorwork yarn on that one -- Plymouth Outback Wool. Nice wool, great colors. I wanted a true black yarn to go with it, and ended up with some Berrocco single ply that irritates my skin. So like the crapghan, I can only work on this one in short time increments. Maybe 10% done.

6. The Pink Sweater.

Started out as a vest, but I have enough yarn to make sleeves. We'll see how long those sleeves end up. Should be at least bracelet length. I'm nearly done with the front, so we'll soon discover just how long the sleeves will be, as that's all that remains to knit. Around 60% done.

7. The Kyoto Sweater.

I cast it on. I knit a few inches. I realized I would need to rewrite the entire pattern. And there, I stopped. Sometimes I get tired of not being able to knit patterns as written. Not even 5% done.



So that's four sweaters, a cardigan, a bag and an afghan. Catherine Parr, the pink sweater, and the afghan are all in the home stretch. I could conceivably finish all three before the end of the year. I thought about trying to knit my dad another vest in January, but now it looks like it will be Fulmar all the way, with the Kyoto (after I rewrite the pattern) for braindead days.

And even then, there will still be the cardigan.

Sheesh.

Definitely time to ignore the call of new projects. I may not achieve perfect completion of all these items before casting on something new, but if I push it, I can clear out a lot of them and make substantial progress on the rest.

Analyze This!

I found this over on Jennie Crusie's blog. Some company has come up with a way to insta-analyze your blog and give it a Myers-Briggs rating. (If you don't know about Myers-Briggs, it's a personality evaluation survey used by psychiatrists to help with treatment and by writers to help with character development.)

Here's the rating for this blog:

ESFP - The Performers

The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves. They enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.


When I first saw my result, I waved it off because it's almost a perfect opposite of my actual personality -- only three of the four letters match my own Myers-Briggs inventory.

But then I read a bit more on the website about the way the blog analyzer works, and one of the things mentioned was that different blogs written by the same people can yield different results. It's not the writer's personality being inventoried, but the blog's.

And then I realized something else. Knitting is where I escape. Hard for me to be a manager? Shoot, I'm a manager at two different companies. My default position is telling everyone else what to do, delegating, making everything around me run smoothly.

But knitting is where I escape all of that. Or try to, anyway.

Live in the present moment and don't like to plan ahead? People make fun of me for being so hyper-organized. I have a plan for how to plan my plans. But in my knitting life, I do my best to keep that urge at bay. Yeah, okay, so I gave into my natural urges and invented the monster database of patterns cross-indexed a dozen different ways. But I don't know when I'll pick up my needles again, and when I do, I don't know which project I'll choose. I knit by the seat of my pants.

I could go on, but I guess the point is that this blog analyzer showed me a few truths about why knitting is so important to me. It's not just a pressure valve, not just a place to blow off steam, but a place where I act so different from my usual driven self that the steam never has a chance to accumulate.

The Pink Sweater

Maybe I should have titled this post, "Why I'll Never Be One of the Cool Knitbloggers." The proof is in the picture. I thought I'd be all clever and such, and lay out the sweater back under the sweater front to demonstrate how far along we are in this project. It was such a great idea in my head, and believe me, my imaginary photos are more visually magnificent than that curly, bunchy mess up there.

Anyway. I'm past the armhole shaping for the front, and within maybe four rows of splitting for the V-neck. Precious little knitting time these days. Luckily, this project is so lickety-split fast that it makes up for the scant time I'm spending on it. Yesterday, during 90 minutes of Sunday morning new shows, I knit about3.5" of the front. Fast knitting. With only an hour a day, it's possible I could wear this thing to Thanksgiving dinner.

Yeah, right, like I'll get an hour a day for it.

I'm using one of the Ann Budd "Handy Book" charts for this sweater. If you haven't seen these books with the sizing charts, you're missing out. She gives precise instructions in chart format for standard patterns in a huge range of sizes. You pick the finished size you want along the top of the chart, pick your yarn's gauge along the left side of the chart, and she tells you everything you need to know: how many stitches to cast on, how many inches to knit, how to work any shaping -- it's all there in the charts.

Of course -- and this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows my knitting habits -- I can't just follow the charts. I have to change them. God forbid I should knit a pattern as written.

I decided I wanted a little less armhole depth, so I cobbled together chart instructions from two different sizes on the chart. If you think about it, we knit sweater pieces in two dimensions, height and width. I preserved the width of the body pieces, and preserved the height between the hem and the lowest point of the armscye. For all that, I followed the charts for my true size.

But for the armscye, I switched to a smaller size spec so that I will have a neater fit under the arm. This means I also have to knit the sleeves to a smaller size on the chart, so that the sleeve cap matches the shaping of the armscye.

This is an incredibly easy alteration. And the Ann Budd book makes it even easier. No math, just plug-n-play with the charts. Anyone can do it. Heck, I can't even take a decent photo, and even I can do it.

Buh-Bye Now

Do you see what I mean about this yarn? The colors work together so much better when they're not pooling.

I haven't decided what to do about this yarn. Thanks so much for all the great suggestions. Changing the gauge would also change the fabric density (and would therefore change the durability and wearability of the socks), so I don't think that would work in the long run, even if it would certainly disrupt the color pattern.

But a pattern, that might do the trick. With the help of ravelry, I've identified several patterns that might work better. Anything that breaks the tendency to pool the colors would do it. At the moment, I'm leaning toward entrelac of some kind. Either that, or I might bag the idea of socks altogether and do a scarf of some type.

Truth, though? What I really want is a finished fabric that looks something like the picture above. Because the colors don't pool, the eye sees them a bit differently. File this under "Yet Another Longed-For Impossibility."

For now, we're going to let this yarn rest. I won't bother trying to straighten out the kinks from having knit it, but winding it back onto the ball and ignoring it will help it relax. In other words, I have a great excuse for avoiding a decision on this yarn for a while.

And let's face it. It's not as though I'm hard-up for knitting material. I'll just knit some of my other hundred thousand yards of yarn.

It Looked Good in the Hank

I don't have a picture of this Schaeffer Anne in the skein, and I regret that now. I regret it because, as knit, this yarn looks like an entirely different creature than it did when it was looped and twisted and on the shop shelves. It was mostly steel blue-gray, with a strong shot of rich purple, and just a dash of teal and yellow. Based on the color changes, I suspected it would knit to a purple/gray body with shots of hot color, maybe with a resulting pattern something like this:






















As you can see, though, the Schaeffer Anne doesn't look anything like that. It's barberpoling, which is like a pox on my house in any event. Me and the barberpoles, we don't see so much eye to eye when it comes time to knit the second sock, which never, ever manages to stripe in an acceptable manner.

But the bigger problem in the barberpole is the way the green and yellow come together. Separated, they looked like nice shots of color waking up the darker shades. Together, they make an odd, jarring splash between the purple and the gray. The green takes on a kelly cast, where it's actually more of a hunter-teal shade on its own.

I'm also disappointed with the way the gray is pooling. It's flat and a little dead-looking. The other stripes in the barberpole are shaded and intermingled with at least two tones. The gray is all gray.

Right now, I'm debating whether to keep knitting in the hopes that the pattern will grow on me. Option two would be to rip it, wind it back into skeins, and just overdye it some dark color. Like black. Black would wipe this mess right out of existence, right?

I don't know. Anyone have any better ideas?

Easing Back Into My Rut

I'm slowly -- very slowly, I'm sorry to say -- reclaiming a normal routine. Things continue to interrupt that process, things such as the phone company guy who spent hours at the new shop on Friday trying to arrange for our phone number to ring on our phones. This was more difficult than anyone anticipated, and I spent many more hours at the shop with him than I had planned.

And then there's the shoulder, which continues to ache intermittently, but is getting better. It's very strange to me to read submissions without working on a plain sock. The two things go together so much that I almost don't want to read if I can't also knit a sock. But my shoulder won't tolerate a lot of movement, so I'm learning how not to multitask again. Except, to be honest, it's hard for me to sit still and just read. Without that sock in my hands, I find myself popping out of the chair far more frequently, so instead of getting caught up on submissions, I'm just sort of picking at them. But at least there's forward motion in that department, too.

Anyway, with a few fits and starts and interruptions, normal life is resuming again. For the most part, I'm at the shop for a few hours in the morning. For the most part, I work at home in the afternoons and evenings. The mountain of laundry which grew during the move is back to manageable dimensions. I even have groceries in the fridge again.

And I have these:



















Two skeins of yummy new Malabrigo sock yarn. I've cut way back on my yarn shopping in the last two months or so, but I made an exception for these. Soft, luscious, with a depth of color and intricacy of shading that's hard to see in pictures. The skein on the left, for example, is steel gray shot through with a dark teal jewel-tone, and once I started looking at the way the colors threaded together, I got sort of lost in the yarn. It doesn't show at all in the photos, no matter the background I used, the photo doctoring, the lighting -- nothing can capture the subtlety of the colorwork in this yarn. It's almost kaleidescopic in person.

So I'm happy with these new purchases, even if it felt like the worst kind of self-indulgence to buy yarn when I can't even knit. And when I'm in stash-busting mode, on a personal quest to minimize the cubic footage of my stash. But the way I look at it is:

a) It's Malabrigo.
b) After the hell of the last three weeks, it was either buy yarn or eat a mountain of chocolate. I've lost six pounds in the last six weeks and would like to keep them off, so yarn is better.
c) This puts me two skeins closer to completing the sock club thingie at Nana's.
d) Did I mention that it's Malabrigo?