Socks on Vacay: Death Valley

My second Knitted Wit skein is Death Valley. I enjoyed the colors on this one, and I find it fascinating how it pools at different numbers of stitches. My cuff pools so that the blues and greens form a stripe, and the pinks and browns form another stripe. In the decreases after the cuff there’s a portion where all the tan lines up, and the brown and green stripe on either side of that with a blue and pink stipe opposite. In the foot the pooling creates a narrow band of repeated stripes, mixing up the colors much more. It is a fun yarn.

I modified the pattern a bit more for these pairs. I found that the smallest cast on fits my ankle just fine, so I cast on with only 54 stitches, but I used 66 on the foot. I used a really narrow heel flap, so that I could have the same number of stitches on either side of the gusset decreases. I also used an odd number of stitches on the heel flap, with the eye of partridge stitch, which is a great combination.

I played yarn chicken again, to get two pairs out of this one skein. I’m getting pretty good at yarn chicken! I had about half as much yarn left after the Death Valley socks than I did after the Virgin Island ones:

The sheep are enjoying their new socks

These are my 35th and 36th pairs for this year!

Socks on Vacay: Virgin Islands

This summer there is no Tour-de-Sock, so clearly I needed to go in search of another sock knitting extravaganza. Socks on Vacay is a very different beast, with a lot more whimsy (at least in the determination of prizes, and really, what else matters? Prizes!). You use yarn from Knitted Wit, knit a sock pattern by Shannon Squire, and post the results on Instagram. I still need to worry about that last step, as I don’t yet have an instagram… My local yarn store is also getting in on the fun, and offering prizes for people, so how could I not support a sock knitting event and my local yarn store?

Knitted Wit is doing a range of national parks yarns this summer, which happens to be the only yarn my store carries from Knitted Wit. If you buy four skeins of the national parks yarns, you get a patch, and if you buy 16, you get an enamel pin. This is my first skein of national park themed yarn, and the park in question is the Virgin Islands.

I picked out a pattern that was an anklet, for two reasons. First, this way I can really use up the entire skein, with next to no leftovers, so long as I don’t try to make pairs for giant size 13 men’s feet or some such. Second, if there might be a prize for the most number of socks, well, these require less knitting for more socks! I knit the smaller pair first, and they are really much to small for me! There’s one picture of me trying to cram my foot into one, and I could only barely get it on. However, I noticed that it fit my lower ankle just fine, before I got to the foot bit. The second pair I made just a bit smaller than my size, and they fit well. I tried to follow the pattern for the first sock, but, well, I started making modifications at the start of the heel flap. Just minor ones! The finished socks still look the same, and really are very similar-I could probably tell looking really closely that they weren’t exactly following the pattern, but I’d have to have a correct and incorrect one in my hands to see any differences. Except in the toe, which I took longer to decrease, and that you might be able to see just based on pictures.

As I was reluctant to actually buy someone else’s pattern (Tour-de-Sock was my first time following sock patterns…), there will be quite a few in this pattern for this project… especially now that I know it well enough that I don’t need to carry it around with me. Expect more discussion on how I modified it…

Nymph on a bender

I happened across this yarn at the Portsmouth NH Market Square Day. My first temptation was that there was sock yarn at all, but then I started reading the names of the colorways, and I decided I needed this ‘Nymph on a bender’ colored yarn. The dyer is Birch Dyeworks, a New Hampshire based dyer. I like the yarn a lot, and I think it worked really well as a good pair of straightforward socks.

In the background you can glimpse some of my spinning projects that I’m currently working on!

purple tweed

This yarn is Less Traveled Yarn’s Donegal Tweed fabric with the characteristic small pieces of yarn in different colors. This colorway is called Midnight, and it’s 85% superwash Merino wool, 15% Donegal Nep. It’s the same pattern as the last pair, but a bit bigger. This yarn would have done fine with a pattern, but it had been passed over before because some bugs had gotten into it, so it was in lots of small balls. I think all the bugs have since died, as there were no new breaks, but some of my stash will have to go through a few rounds in the freezer to make sure…

This is pair # 31 for 2019, and 591 overall!

Watermelon socks, and knitting at work

I needed some mindless knitting for my travels, so I pulled this yarn out of the stash. I’d made a pair of socks from this yarn before, so I knew it would be too busy for any pattern to show up. It’s a knitpicks handpainted stroll yarn in the watermelon colorway. This is just my standard sock pattern.

I would have gotten way more knitting done last week, only I’ve been told not to knit at conferences. I used to knit through all my classes in undergrad and grad school, but the current job sees knitting in a negative light. I’ve been told that I’m unapproachable when I’m knitting, and that people take it as a sign of disrespect. I was also asked if I really wanted to be known as the person who knits, implying there are some negative connotations going on with knitting. Because of this I have been instructed not to knit where people can see me at work (i.e. meetings/talks outside my small group (my group being forced to make allowances for me), which includes conferences). Since I really like keeping my hands busy, this makes meetings and talks way less fun to attend, and I feel less good about how I’ve spent my time when I do go, since there’s always the thought that I could have been more productive doing something else instead. When I can knit through those meetings I’m able to console myself that, if nothing else, I at least made progress on my current sock. I see this knitting restriction as one of the serious downsides of this job, though I am still allowed to knit at my desk and while doing experimental testing, at least.

Round Mountain Fibers socks

This is my fairly standard cabled clock sock pattern. According to Wikipedia’s sock page:

From the 16th century onwards, an ornamental design on the ankle or side of a sock has been called a clock.

There are three references at the end of the sentence, and I’ve heard the term used in real life, so it must be true! I really like these side cables as a way of adding a bit of interest to the sock, without having to do anything super fancy or complicated. I also can use them on busier yarns that way, like this one. I was a bit worried that any pattern was going to be lost in this yarn, until I saw the way that it pooled.

The yarn is a one of a kind color from Round Mountain Fibers, a 100% superwash merino wool, made in the USA. It feels like it should be really well wearing, and it was a lot of fun to knit with.

Entrelac House Pride

I took the rest of the house pride yarn, and made these! I really wanted to see how the yarn would pool with entrelac-I wanted the bright colors next to each other without the grey. I tried hard to get each square to either be rainbow or grey, and I managed it on the top of the foot. It’s a bit hard to tell in the pictures, but the top of the foot is colorful, and the bottom half is grey. I knit the top half first, then came back and knit the heel, bottom of the foot, and the toe. I was playing yarn chicken, and had just enough yarn left to sew in the ends when I finished…

The colorful yarn is ‘House Pride’ from Bad Wolf Girl Studio, and the grey is ‘Badger Black’ from Holiday Yarns in the flock sock base. I’m really happy that the grey I happened to have on hand matched so perfectly!

I’m off for a conference next week, so don’t expect new updates for awhile…

MSW socks #3

swatch, again with 8 sts per inch

Third pair is now off the needles, and boy is this yarn so much softer. My swatch is still at about the same 8 stitches per inch (not that my swatch gauge matches my sock knitting gauge, which seems to be slightly looser?, but this way I’ll at least have a sample to keep), but this yarn is slightly finer than the previous two, and so much softer. We will have to see how it wears over time though-I’m hoping the bunny ply is fine enough and tightly spun enough that it won’t just shed out or felt the sock down several sizes. I did notice small, short bunny fibers flying around as I knit (causing me to sneeze quite a bit-I guess I’m just super fussy about breathing in fine fibers), but hopefully that’s an anomaly.

For this pair, I used 96.2 grams for the socks and the swatch together, compared to 107.1 and 106.6 g for pairs 1 and 2, respectively. I also added two more rows to the cuff, and 3 more to the foot of the sock, since otherwise I was worried the socks would be much smaller.

I used the eye of partridge stitch on the heel, with a standard toe, which is a slightly different combo than on pairs 1 and 2. The yarn itself also looks different-the bunny has a distinctive look and is super white.

In other news, Mommy finished her pair from the first yarn! This is the unbalanced yarn that’s somewhat harsh. I had decided to to a spiral toe on my socks, since the swatch had a tendency to lean, but Mum did a standard toe. She says that it doesn’t quite lay flat off the foot, but that once it’s on a foot it behaves nicely. She’s a tight knitter, so her pair of socks ended up with a much denser fabric, though se actually used slightly fewer grams of yarn than I did.

MSW sock yarn #3

This yarn is the same in structure to #2, but the goal was to try to get something a little softer, though (hopefully) still with good durability. So, we switched out the Border Leicester for some angora (bunny fluff!).

Sock yarn #3

‘Z’ twist Angora bunny, unwashed and spun from lock
’Z’ twist Perendale, unwashed and spun from lock, spun finer than for #1 and #2
’Z’ twist Polwarth, unwashed and spun from lock

These three singles were plied with a ‘S’ twist, and it ended up almost perfectly balanced (no tendency to twist itself up). The finished skein weighed 198.8 grams before washing, and 189.6 g after, so there was 5% loss in washing.

The angora single:

At one point my sister had pet angora bunnies, and while I don’t think any of this angora came from her bunnies, we did get it at that time, so I feel entirely justified in sharing cute bunny pictures.

The fiber was a bit matted and felted, and looked like it had been shoved into the bag directly after being plucked from the bunny. I decided to go ahead and spin it as it, without any preparation, so it wasn’t my most even of singles. It wasn’t too uneven, but for next time I will be carding it first.

We plied the yarn with an ‘S’ twist, and it came out balanced. Mommy, the official plier for this project so far, says that this yarn is finer than the other two-we’ll see how much so when I start knitting! It certainly is much softer, though I’m not sure that it is quite ‘next-to-face’ soft. The finished yarn weighed 198.8 grams before washing, and 189.6 grams after, so there was 5% loss in washing. It makes sense that the loss is half of what it was for #1 and #2, since for this yarn 2/3rds of the fibers didn’t have dirt and lanolin in them, whereas for #1 and #2, two of the three singles were fresh from the sheep.

Purple carrots and a blue sky

This is the rest of the yarn I used for the heels, toes and cuffs on my carrot socks. The two different pairs have very different patterns, but they’re the same Correidale sock yarn base from Once Upon a Corgi. This yarn was fun to play with, and I love the names that the dyer came up with for the colors!

Decreases in the diamond purl pattern-blank squares are knit stitches, p’s are purls, p2 stands for purl two stitches together, and grey means that the stitch is no longer there.

The purple socks (colorway: Like my cold dead heart) have more of the purl stitch diamonds on them. I made the diamonds really big on these ones, in contrast to the Vocabulary diamonds ones. I think I like both sizes equally well, but the advantage of the large ones is that I was able to put some decreases into the cuff without completely messing up the pattern. I knew I was short on yarn, so I wanted to cut out stitches wherever possible, hence the desire for decreases.

I’m also pleased with how the toe worked, as I did smaller and smaller diamonds right through the toe part up until it was time to kitchener stitch the last stitches together.

The blue socks (colorway: depths below) are a pattern that’s been nagging me to try since I was working on the socks for my sister. I’ve been wanting to see how these cables would stack next to each other, and this yarn was solid enough to actually see the design.

These are pairs 25 and 26 for this year!