yarn and sock p0rn

I am weak . . . Look at what I brought home yesterday!

I was at a library conference in Columbus yesterday and was planning to meet up with E after it finished. Well, that meant I had 2 whole hours to kill. So where did I go? To a Yarn Shop, of course! One of the two Yarn Shop locations is near (ish) where I was so I went there to knit for a while. Well, the sock yarn selection called me over and I found this wonderful stuff.

I've asked the Socknitters, Project Spectrum Flickr group, and Socktoberfest Flickr group members for pattern suggestions. I am thinking something with a fairly simple flower or leaf pattern. I know both groups will have a ton of suggestions! The color of the yarn is perfect for the Project Spectrum colors this month. I just love it.

Look! Pictures of a project finished weeks and weeks ago!

Sexy ;)

And a project I finished yesterday! A baby hat made out of the Kool-aid yarn I dyed months ago.

The colors ended up pooling a little unexpectedly. Who knew it would group itself into dark and light sections?

I hope the new momma and baby enjoy this hat!

Project Pologomy

I'm on the back of the Ballet Camisole. It's been a fun knit so far. If I work on it tomorrow, I should be done very soon. This picture doesn't capture the colors well. The one from last week was much better.

I haven't worked on the Black and White socks at all this week. Oops. I'll get back to that soon.

A friend from library school just had a baby so I started on a little baby hat for her new daughter, Annie. If I hadn't left the WIP at the barn a couple of days ago, I would have been finished with it in no time. That is the nice thing about baby stuff, there isn't much to make!

Overheard in New York

Overheardinnewyork.com won the humour category of the Bloggies last year. For those of you who don't know, the Bloggies are like the Oscars for blogs. I just discovered it on Friday and immediately signed up for its RSS feed. This was one of today's posts:

College guy #1: Okay, we need to go to the grocery store.
College guy #2: But that's so boring! How am I going to update my Facebook status? Drew* is shopping for groceries? That is so lame!
College guy #1: Dude, you really can't live your life based on an imagined Facebook profile status. It's just not healthy.

--116th & Broadway

:) Be warned if you don't like cursing, this blog does include a lot because it is snatches of conversation heard on the street.

The solution to my problem

I'm working on my black and white socks while attending the Web 2.0 workshop. I love it when professors let me knit during lectures. It helps me get so much done :)

I'm almost ready to start on the heel. I think I am going to do a Sherman Heel on this pair. The Naga socks used this type of heel and it was a lot of fun to do. The heels will be white like the toes.

My problem with these socks is, because I am putting an intarsia design on the leg, I need to work the design flat instead of in the round. This is a problem because I would be forced to have a seam down the back of the leg. Now, remember that I hate weaving in ends? Well, I hate seaming stuff together even more. But I really wanted to do this design (yes, I do know that intarsia will result in me weaving in lots of ends). Wasn't satisfied with it but willing to overlook the sewing because the finished product will be awesome.

I went to The Knitters Mercantile yesterday between the end of the workshop and meeting up with E. I started talking with another knitter about my conundrum about the leg of these socks. We talked about picking up stitches on both sides then doing a three needle bind-off, sewing the sides together, etc etc. Then she hit on the perfect solution. Her suggestion was to just make eyelets, weave a ribbon up the back, and that is how the sock will be held together! Genius. I don't know why I didn't think of that before.

I'm not going to show you the design fully until it is finished. You will have to guess what it is from partial pictures in the next couple of days. A little challenge for you :)

Ballet Camisole

Ballet Camisole beginning,
originally uploaded by bookworm knitting.

Andi asked what color the Ballet Camisole is. Ask and ye shall receive! I don't have the ball band for this yarn on hand so I can't tell you what kind of cotton it is. I'll look that it up later.* I am hoping this time I have a better grasp of measuring.

*OK, found the ball band. It is Tweedy Cotton Classic, color # 466. The yarn is made up of 4 or 5 strands each of a different color (greens, blue, purple, yellow). I really like the way the colors come together.

Size does matter

Apparently, I have no idea how to measure myself for sweaters/tank tops/other tops anymore. I started on the Ballet Camisole the other day and was trucking along quite nicely. Until, that is, I realized it would fit someone twice as big as me quite comfortably. Oops. Time to frog.

I love the color of the cotton yarn for it. But, damn, this stuff is splitty. I have to keep a little bit of my attention on it at all times. At least the pattern is knitted in the round (<3) so I won't have to be seaming it up later. I'll post a picture once I get another couple of rounds finished.

Naga socks

I've finished!

There is something about the backs (and sleeves) of sweaters and the ribbing at the top of socks that seem to take forever to finish. I just kept knitting and knitting but it took eternity to reach 2 inches!

I really liked the pattern on these socks. The scales are fun to watch develop and cables along the leg are just fun. (Of course, to me, cables are crack.) For some reason, I couldn't wrap my head around the pattern until I reached the repeats on the legs. I should emphasize that the pattern on the foot and the pattern on the legs are the SAME. (The only difference is that the stitches are arranged a little differently so that the leg just has a cable running up the side.) Throughout the foot repeats, I had to keep the pattern with me to keep glancing at it to make sure I was doing the pattern right. Didn't need to do that on the leg. Guess it was some sort of weird mental block.


I should have picked another color for the pattern, though. Four colors had too much going on to see the scale patterns. I might have the perfect color for another pair of these. We'll have to see. That yarn might want to become something else.

I'm planning on gifting this pair. I have to show them off today and then they are in the mail!
"Carolyn: oh, like cinderella, i get lucky because i have small feet
Carolyn: except, instead of a prince, i get socks"

The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)

Call me a web 2.0 dork. I have a workshop for my MLIS this weekend about web 2.0 and what it means for libraries. One of the library blogs on my Bloglines list mentioned this video and it is definitely worth watching.

Feeling guilty again

He is really good at making me feel guilty for riding. Yesterday afternoon, Java was sleeping out in the pasture when I went out to go riding. We didn't do anything too intensive. It was nice to stretch our legs. Today, I didn't ride because the weather was crap. Rainy, cold and possibility of snow (again!).

I'm still working on the Naga socks. I am going to make the leg 6 pattern repeats which is the same number of repeats as the foot. They are going a little slowly because working on the 0s are hurting my hands/arms so I need to keep taking breaks.

I cast on for another pair of socks yesterday.
Sock knitting machine, that's me. I'm going to use up the Cherry Tree Hill black yarn with this pair. The toes, heels and design on the leg are going to be Cherry Tree Hill white yarn and the rest of the sock is black. These socks are being worked on 1s (they looked lonely without socks on them so obviously I needed to cast on another pair). It is amazing the difference between the size 0s and 1s. My hands/arms don't hurt working with the 1s for hours on end but a little while on the 0s and they hurt like hell.

I made the white toes at The Needling Yarn yesterday and started working on the black during a movie last night. (How to see if someone is worth keeping around: not one disparaging comment about my knitting and a complete understanding that I can't sit still for more than 5 minutes without doing something.) I definitely had to work by feel and not by sight with the black in a dark theatre. The movie was really good. It was a story about the bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes written by Clifford Irving. He completely made up correspondence between him and Hughes. It kind of reminded me of Catch Me If You Can crossed with the book, Dutch, an autobiography about Regean that the author made up sources and people in Regean's life. I like intelligent and yet funny movies.

Snake socks

I got the Gras socks packed up to this morning and stopped by the post office on my way to work. It makes me feel so accomplished! I just hope my friend likes them.

I'm finally getting back to the Naga socks designed by Abigail. I've been a bad test knitter because I started them a while ago but got distracted. I'm almost finshed with the foot and am ready to start the heel soon. I've never done a Sherman Heel before so this is a learning experience for me. I really like the look of the pattern but am having some misgivings that the Kool-aid yarn might not be the right yarn for it. The colors might be too busy for the pattern. Perhaps if I just had a dark purple and neon green (grape and lemon-lime), it would look better. Oh, well. We'll have to see what Abigail thinks.

After I finish the Naga socks, I am going to start on another pair of socks for a friend. This one will be using up the rest of the black yarn from the S&ouml;dera socks and some white. I think I will make the toes, heels and design on the leg in white with the rest of it in black.

I seem to be on a sock roll recently. It doesn't help whenever I go to a yarn shop, I usually pick up a skein.

I went into Kim's on Friday to show off the S&ouml;dera socks. She had just got in a test sample of TOFUtsies so I am going to work it up and tell her what I think about it. The colors are beautiful greens and blues. It reminds me of the perfect summer colors! I think I'll make a mini sock out of it. That shouldn't take much time to make.There has been a lot of talk about this yarn on the Yahoo Socknitters list recently.

On Saturday, I ran around Columbus like an idiot running errands from one end of town to another as well as going to a couple of yarn shops. People have raved about the Knitters Mercantile and now I completely understand why. The shop had a great selection and the people were really nice. They had a table in the back for classes and a seating area in the front of the store. I wore my S&ouml;dera socks because I thought I might visit yarn shops and wanted to show off. One lady noticed them and, from then on, kept telling people about them :) I felt very flattered. I bought a skein of scarlet and grey sock yarn for Dad. We'll see when I get around to that. It was dyed by a woman in Utica, OH which is in my county. They had a lot of her hand-dyed fingering weight yarn as well as Lorna's Laces, Opal and other sock yarns that I didn't actually write the name down (darn it! I even had a small notebook with me!).

I also stopped in Temptations in Dublin. (For some reason I can't find their website right now.) The store was kind of like a maze of yarn in the various rooms of an old house. Nooks and crannies everywhere. They had lots of different yarns but not a ton of sock yarn. They did have some tofu yarn so I picked up a skein of pink.

Yup, am definitely working on the sock yarn stash exceeding my life expectancy.

In every wood and every spring there is a different green

For still there are so many things that I have never seen: in every wood and every spring there is a different green.

LOTR, Bilbo's song

That is probably one of my all-time favourite quotes and describes my world view quite well. To me it says, there is always something new out there so I am going to go see it.

What does this have to do with anything, you might ask? Well, I finished the pair of Gras socks that I was working on for my friend's birthday. This is the second pair of Austermann Step socks I have made and the love affair has not cooled. I love working with the stuff! Anyway, the color of these socks really is truly reminiscent of grass because it is not one shade of green. It varies from bright green to an almost brownish-grey-green with little flecks of brownish red in it.

When you glance out at the grass, you might just see one color but, if you look closely, there is so much more going on than at first glance. Metaphor for life? Eh, too highbrow for me. ;)

Fun with PayPal

Oh, dear. Teasecatalog.com takes PayPal . . . .

So I lied

I will actually get a picture of my Sodera socks posted sometime soon. I went to Jo-Ann Fabrics after work today to find elastic to keep the socks up (darn you cotton! *shaking fist*) and to buy ribbon. I couldn't choose between the black and red so I ended up buying both colors. Too bad they didn't sell the size I needed by the yard so now I have 2 full spools of it. I am sure I will find a use for them sometime.

I did find elastic but not the kind I expected. I thought I would have to get black elastic because, duh, the socks are black. They did not, however, carry black elastic in 3/8." At first glance they didn't seem to have any 3/8" at all! But then, what should I see in the upper right-hand corner of the elastic section? Why, it is clear elastic in 3/8". That is right, clear! So now I will be able to use it for another pair of knee highs I made a while ago (pre-blog time). I wasn't even aware they made clear elastic. I just hope it has similar qualities to the normal kind of elastic like being stretchy. Small detail with elastic.

I cast on another pair of socks today but these are going to be simple, simple, simple. It will just be my plain vanilla, toe-up sock recipe. I am making them for a friend and, luckily, she has the same shoe size as me. That means I don't have to be crafty and weasle her foot measurements out of her without making her suspicious. They are being made in Austermann Step, Gras. I love the greens! Luckily, I had the foresight (foresight! I know! Who am I and what did I do with Anne?) to have Andi buy 2 skeins of it. One pair for me and one pair for my friend. My love affair with this yarn continues. The toes of the socks are already done and I have an inch knitted on the foot. Socks from this yarn just fly off the needles. Guess it helps that it is plain knitting all the way.

I really do need to get back to the test knitting pattern. I do like it but I think my brain needs a break.

instructables

I just found this site this morning (thank you library blogs) and have totally become addicted to it. Click on this link to see a totally awesome way to use those old encyclopedia sets.

instructables : A bookshelf made of encyclopedias! YAY!

Searching through this site is going to be fun!

Almost finished!

I am sooooo close to being finished with the Södera socks. I am currently working the row where the ribbon is run through. The next step is working 1 inch in 2x2 ribbing and then binding off! I've woven in ends as I went or did Russian joins so I won't have much finishing left to do. Definitely not going to be doing a project in all black anytime soon! It is enough to drive you batty and/or blind. I'll post pictures of the finished products tomorrow though I still need to find ribbon.

I would have been done with these sooner but I decided on Friday to rip out 2-2.5 inches because my first set of increases were wonky. True, other people might not have seen their horrible wonkiness but I would and it would ruin the socks for me. I spent almost all of the car ride to and from Cleveland, the waiting time, and during the Yarn Harlot's speech working on the socks. The next sock is going to have to be something mindless that I can whip out in a couple of days.

Tonight, I'm meeting up with some friends from high school most of whom I haven't seen since we graduated 6 (!) years ago. One girl is visiting from Vermont but the other two live in the Columbus area. I guess we are just lazy/ over committed with other activities. It should be a fun evening and definitely outside of the normal scheme of things. I'm house-sitting this week so I would have probably spent my evening zoned out in front of their cable knitting. Instead, I'm tempted to knit at the bar and see what kind of strange looks I would get ;)

Some guys really know how to make you feel bad . . .

. . . for waking them up.




When I got out to the barn this afternoon, I found Java asleep in the sun. He was making little grunts which I took to be his version of snoring. It made me really feel bad for waking him up and making him go to work.



Capone decided to get into the action, too. Though he combined lying down with eating. How lazy!



Sam decided he wanted to roll instead of sleep. Lace ignored all of them (and me) and kept eating.

Time to get up!