mindless socks?

So, these were supposed to be simple mindless socks. For the most part they were, sort of? I started off with 72 stitches at the top of the cuff, but kept doing decreases as I knit the cuff, which kinda messed up the goal of these being super simple mindless socks for knitting in the dark on a car ride. The decreases really do help the sock actually fit my leg though, and since I have small ankles I decreased down to only 56 stitches right before the heel. I did a long heel flap, picking up 28 stitches on each side, and then decreased down to 60 stitches for the foot of the sock. I think this heel flap is actually too long for me, though not by much. The finished socks are also too long for me as well, so I’m hoping everything will be in good proportions for someone’s foot.

Cabled Great Falls Socks

This pair of socks was made with Knitted Wit’s Great Falls National Park inspired yarn. I decided to do some cables down the cuff to make things a bit more interesting. Too bad that the sock is too long for my foot model.

Thus far this year I have made:

• 65 pairs of socks

• 1 tea cozy

• 6 hats (2 adult, 4 preemie)

• 9 shawls

• 1 sweater

and I’ve spun some yarn. Fairly productive year thus far!

I'm becoming an official designer!

You, know, one who publishes their patterns! As opposed to doing all the design work and then never writing down anything, which is what I have been doing since, well, since I started to knit? I still remember my very first pair of socks, where I kept going to my mom and asking how she did the heel. I don’t think I picked the best times to enquire, as I got fairly brief instructions, but after a few tries I figured it out! To this day we do our heels slightly differently, because I just sort of figured out how to do one from her verbal instructions and looking at a knit sock. The differences are so slight as to be effectively nonexistent, but they’ve come to light because she’s been acting as my tech editor for all my patterns thus far. My biggest comment so far is that writing patterns can be very fussy, and she’s happy to tell me that I need to go back and fuss over a certain section again.

For all of my mother’s wonderful charms, she doesn’t make the best test knitter, because she can’t be bothered to pay that close of attention to the pattern-something I definitely inherited. So to find test knitters I’ve been using yarnpond, which has the significant advantage of completely formalizing the whole process (did we mention that I’m an engineer?). I haven’t yet finished running a test on there, but I did go through it from the other side, as a test knitter, for the South Woods pullover, and while at times the interface can be a bit quirky, I’m very appreciative of how easy it’s been to find test knitters. I currently have two projects on there (two!), with 6 testers for the shawl and 11 for the socks. I’m really hoping I can keep up with all 17 of my test knitters! They’ve thus far offered me some great feedback, and helped me catch everything from a missing ssk, a k3tog that should have been a cdd, missing commas, and (my favorite) the fact that I kept using the word ‘boarders’ instead of ‘borders’ (kudos to the non-native English speaker who caught that one!). The last one’s probably my favorite purely because I was editing a paper the other day, and the author had used ‘respectfully’ everywhere he should have used ‘respectively’ (i.e. the failure strength and strain are 3.4 GPa and 3.0 %, respectfully), and it made me giggle.

My two tests should be ending on the 24th and 30th, so around the same time and not too long from now. I’m hoping to publish around a pattern a month, possibly alternating socks and shawls. I think I have enough patterns ready to be written up to last me at least a year at that rate, with my recent spate of shawls. I have the next shawl pattern (the angel/butterfly wings one) all written up and ready for testers! I’m waiting on putting it out though until the current tests are done-I’m not quite sure about having 3 tests running at once during the holiday season, in addition to all the ‘real life’ stuff I have going on. I’m excited though to think about what patterns to write up next, and seeing people’s reactions. Thus far I’ve been a bit overwhelmed with how positive everyone’s feedback on my projects has been.

So, that’s what’s new here! There are still, of course, many projects on the needles, so future blog posts are assured. Now though, if you like a pattern I make, you can probably get me to actually write it down for you to knit too.

Red Shaker hats

Some friends went to Maine, and brought me back three skeins of ‘Finest 2-ply SHAKER YARN’ from New Gloucester Maine. It’s a worsted weight, and might well be the most scratchy yarn I’ve played with yet. The colors are great though, and it was immediately suggested that I could make a hat out of it. Someone just wanted a new hat, I think.

To make it wearable, I lined the lower portion of the hat(s) with a soft yarn-in this case left over 100% milk fiber yarn from my Angel Wings shawl. I also held the red yarn double with left over mohair from the Bain de Soil shawl-the colors are so close that you really have to look carefully to see that there are two yarns. This has been a great project for using up some of my leftovers!

The last picture is of the next two skeins. I can make two hats from a skein, so hopefully there will be four more hats soon! I’m planning on holding the blue mohair (left over from a weaving project) with the blue yarn, and debating whether to use it on the aqua too.

Joshua tree socks

These socks are made out of Knitted Wit’s Joshua tree National Park yarn. They have the same ‘feature’ as several of the other Knitted Wit skeins I used this summer-the yarn changes color over the course of the skein. If it were a gradient yarn, that would be great, but I’m less convinced when it’s just one of the colors dropping out of the mix and becoming white. For Knitted Wit yarns, I’ve taken to knitting the first cuff, cutting the yarn, knitting the whole second sock, and then coming back to the first sock. That way the cuffs typically match (more or less), though it can result in a sharp color change on the first sock. I did that with this pair and with the previous knitted wit socks-the blue and pink on a black background.

For a pattern I did the little diamond outlines again. The two differences this time is that I ended the diamonds at the gusset, rather than continuing them to the toe, and I decreased the number of stitches after the cuff. It was a bit tricky to figure out how exactly to do the decreases without messing up the diamond pattern, but I’m happy with the result. I do like having some decreases or ribbing, as people’s ankles are typically narrower than their legs.

Baby hats

I have been working on quite a few big shawls lately, and was a bit frustrated with how long it had been since I last finished something. Then I managed to finish two shawls (Arcade and Rosemary) both in the same day, so I topped it off with two little hats for preemies out of the leftovers from some of the recent shawls. These are lots of fun to knit, and super quick!

Rosemary crescent shawl

This is actually my first time knitting a crescent shawl, and I must admit, I’m not super impressed with the garter tab cast on. This was another project for the local yarn store, and on the whole, I would not recommend this pattern. Once I get through my current list of projects I’ll work on designing a crescent shawl that doesn’t have a weird lump at the nape of the neck. Given, however, that this seems to be a fairly typical start to a crescent shawl, that is not my only reason for not recommending this pattern. As written it has one major mistake, a medium level mistake, a relatively minor mistake, and some lack of clarity. Looking back on the finished shawl, it looks like a very simple, easy project, but for some reason it took a lot of effort and deciphering to figure out. That said, the end result is nice, even though I’m not convinced it was worth it. White sheep did enjoy trying it on as well, though Grumpy sheep was highly unimpressed and much more interested in taking a nap.

Arcade shawl

I knit this shawl for the yarn store, so they picked out the pattern and the yarn for me. I really enjoyed both-I’ve used the yarn before, so no big surprise there (it’s Kim Dyes, in the colorways Glass Jewels and String Theory, on the Sugarcookies Sock base), and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy to follow the pattern was (Arcade). It’s a big shawl-it took almost three entire skeins, but it knit up pretty quickly, and wasn’t bad travel knitting.

White sheep wasn’t quite sure how to wear such a big shawl, so she decided to model a few different looks.

Mosaic 41

I finished another pair of mosaic socks! I didn’t like the pattern for this one, so I did it in yarns that had some color overlap, so you can’t quite see all of the pattern. I also only did mosaic on the cuff.

Leaf shawl now on Ravelry

I’ve been writing my own patterns ever since I started knitting-instead of looking up how to do something, I typically just make up a pattern on the fly. Lately, people have been asking me a lot if I would write down some of the patterns, so they can make it too. It’s one of my favorite things about spending time at the local yarn store each week-getting to compare patterns and see what everyone is making-only typically no one ever can make the same thing as me, since I haven’t bothered to write down what I did. So, I am starting to actually write patterns, rather than just make them up. I need to figure out test knitters better, but I took the plunge, wrote up a pattern, and put it on Ravelry. My first pattern! It’s the leaf shawl one, that I made two of back in the spring, in green and rainbow.

I’m still figuring out exactly how all that works, so while I thought I was only putting it up so test knitters could reference, I seem to have published it for all to see. I was going to wait until at least one test knitter had the shawl done, and posted a project on Ravelry, so that there would be pictures and proof that more people had made it than just me. Ah well, the test knitters are working away right now. I think they’re far enough along that there shouldn’t be any major changes at this point. Hopefully. Also, this pattern will be included as a pattern option when buying yarn from Seven SIster’s Farm, along with my mum’s little anklet socks and a hat pattern from Mellisa of Knitting the Stash.