Long time, no posts: We spent the weekend camping with the
Cub Scouts and managed to survive. This was our penultimate campout with my son’s
pack. One more to go before he crosses over into Boy Scouts! It was cold and
rainy the first night, so we opted to sleep in our own warm beds and delay our
arrival until Saturday morning. Since this was the 10th camping trip
in my son’s Cub Scouting career, and we’ve suffered through abysmal
temperatures, torrential down-pours and sporadic thunderstorms in the past, we’ve
already earned our Hard-Core Campers badge. No need to repeat the suffering. Saturday
night was cold with no rain. The kids and I managed to stay warm, but the
husband was miserable in the 40-degree temps. All-in-all, we had a good time
and enjoyed the great outdoors. We have another camping trip on the calendar
coming up Mother’s Day weekend. That will be another fun weekend. This time it’s
family and friends only, so I can spend the time worrying about only my kids
and not all everyone else’s. That’s always nice.
I spent last week doing a little bookkeeping for the
business, taking the puppy to an unplanned vet visit, un-bricking my Droid
phone, packing for the camping trip, and doing some housekeeping. Alas, not
much time was left for knitting or writing about knitting. I did manage to work
one sock up to the top and transferred the stitches to waste yarn. The mate is
now in the process of being bound off. I’m using Elizabeth Zimmerman’s sewn
bind off method to see if it lives up to the hype. I expect it will. Anna’s
excited to get a pair of socks she helped design – she made the color selection
and provided her foot several times for fittings along the way. Once I finish
the bind-off on one sock, I can finish knitting the top cuff on the other. Then
to weave in the numerous ends. I knew there would be several with the color
changes, but I didn’t anticipate multiple knots in the yarn in each skein. This
will probably be the last time I use Martha Stewart yarn. I bought it because
it was one of the few skeins available with natural fiber content. I know now I
don’t like it very much and will never buy it again.
The photo below shows the two socks in their current state.
The top sock, mostly green, is the one I’m binding off. I turned the sock
inside out before starting the bind-off based on a tip I found online. I don’t
know really how much this technique will help, but it’s what I’m doing. Because
it’s inside out, all the yarn tails are exposed. The bottom sock, mostly
purple, is the one still waiting for the top ribbing and a bind-off. Anna &
I are thinking of calling these her “Oppo-Socks” instead of Anna’s Spring Socks.
On-Deck Projects
My son has noticed the growing sock count for his sister. He
keeps score on things like this. She’s about to receive hand-knitted pair
number two, while he has none. I reminded him this weekend at the campsite that
the London Beanie he was wearing was the very first one I knitted. That
satiated him until we got home and he saw how close I am to the finish line on
the Oppo-Socks. Truth be told: he’s better off waiting for my fifth pair or so,
after I’ve tested various methods and techniques. If he received the very first
pair, he wouldn’t be as happy with the result as he will be receiving pair
number five. Pair number one are mine, made of 100% acrylic, are top-down with
the goofy elf point at the toe, and aren’t nearly as aesthetically pleasing as
pair number five will surely be. My only challenge on socks for boys/men is
finding a pattern for the leg that isn’t considered too ‘girly’ for him.
Anyway, Alex will get a pair of socks next. I’m going to use two skeins of
Patons Kroy in a blue colorway, so they’ll itch a little, but he’ll have hand-knitted
socks and will, therefore, have to shut up about it.
After Alex’s socks, I want to work with the Deborah Norville
Serenity yarn I have. The colors are too feminine for either Alex or the hubby,
so these will become my third pair (the first was the awful pair of acrylic
with the horrible toes, the second was the Cameo Tree pair with the Magic Loop
toe and the short heels in the Patons Kroy yarn; I’m still on the fence about
the Patons yarn – it’s a little on the itchy side and may prove unsuitable for
gift socks outside the immediate family). If the Serenity sock yarn passes
muster on me, I can order more of this yarn online to make my sisters-in-law’s
socks (Patty & Barb).
My Ugly Sweater and Future Sweater Endeavors
I haven’t yet knit a sweater for anyone else. I made one
about six months ago using some very cheap 100% acrylic. The goal wasn’t an
award-winning sweater. I wanted to see if I could do it and happened to have
tons of this acrylic yarn in my stash. It was originally part of a crochet
afghan kit given as a gift from my husband several years ago (I actually asked
for it, so the blame is solidly on me). It’s been so long now, that I don’t
remember which pattern I’m supposed to use in the pattern booklet that came with
the giant bag of yarn. The biggest problem, I think, was that I never liked the
color. It’s a dusty rose shade of pink. Dusty rose has its uses and places, but
I’m not a big fan of it. I don’t know if it’s the color I asked for based on a
bad online photo or if they sent the wrong color, or if maybe wires were crossed
in the ordering process and the wrong color was ordered in the first place. I
know I would not have asked specifically for the color. Knowing my husband and
me, I said something like “Pick a color as long as it’s not the dusty rose.” He
probably only retained the ‘dusty rose’ portion of the sentence and ran with
it. It’s way too late to do anything about it now, so the yarn has lived in a
giant zip-closure plastic bag in my bedroom since it arrived in the mail. It
worked perfectly for my first sweater project, though, because it worked up
quickly and allowed me to easily see my stitches and count rows (it’s
worsted-weight). The sweater is a raglan sleeve bottom-up pattern. All four
pattern pieces worked up nicely and the seaming was a breeze (so easy, in fact,
that I was sure I messed it up). It is a rolled-hem design: the entire sweater,
including the sleeve cuffs, neck, and bottom hem were knitted in stockinette
and were intended to roll to expose the ‘wrong side’ purl bumps to serve as the
edgings. There is zero shaping in the design. It’s basically a box of a sweater
I intended to wear over a collared button-up blouse of some sort – most likely
denim. I constantly checked the length of the sweater body as I was knitting,
but still managed to foul up the process. The sweater is several inches too
short. Unrolled, it’s the perfect length, but when it rolled itself the bottom
stopped right at my waist line. I used a tip I found in Debbie Stoller’s Stitch
‘N Bitch A Knitter’s Handbook to elongate the sweater. Basically, the tip is to
pick up stitches from the cast-on edge and knit down until I reached the
desired length. Either this is a bad method or just my poor application of it,
because the Ugly Sweater now has a ridge all the way around where the cast-on
edge is. The idea is solid, but it looks stupid on this sweater. The length
wasn’t improved much, because I basically gave up once I realized there was no
quick fix for it. I put days upon days of knitting into the stupid thing and it
was basically unwearable because of the bad length and silly-looking ridge. There
was no way I was going to rip back to the sleeve shaping on the front and back:
I’d already sewn in the sleeves! In the end, I handed the finished sweater to
my daughter and told her she never had to wear it outside the house…
My next sweater has been rolling around in my head since I
finished the first one. The method that intrigues me most is the Norwegian
method of knitting a tube, cutting steeks, picking up stitches for the sleeves,
and knitting all the sweater pieces in the round. My ideas for the sweater are
far from complete, so there they stay in my mind. Some day, though. Some day.
Another sweater in the ‘nearer’ future will be a replication
of a cardigan for my dad. His mother (I called her Grandmother) knitted him a
cardigan-style sweater decades ago, and it’s his favorite sweater. His body is
bigger now than it was decades ago, so Grandmother’s cardigan no longer fits. I
inherited Grandmother’s love of knitting, and I’m going to attempt to replicate
her cardigan for Dad. The color has to be absolutely perfect and I need
accurate measurements. During my annual trip to visit my parents this summer, I’m
taking my fiber-loving mother with me to find the perfect shade of blue (in my
family this particular shade of blue has garnered the moniker ‘Davis Blue’, as
the family name is Davis). Mom will also help me measure Dad, so what I end up
with actually fits him and does so comfortably. I also need lots and lots and
lots of measurements - because I won’t be able to mail a half-worked sleeve and
ask, “Will this be big enough in circumference at the elbow?” I’ve never worked
with button bands or button holes, either. It will prove to be both a challenge
and a milestone in my knitting venture.
Before I get too involved in the future sweaters, I have
some socks to focus on. There’s also that stupid Precocious baby blanket that
irritated me. I’ll probably cast onto the proper sized needles for the yarn and
start it again. I really do like the pattern, so I don’t want to abandon it
completely. Some day, I hope to post a photo of the 3-D spaceship shape it took
on, so you can see why I nearly gave up.
Until then, Oppo-Socks, here I come!
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