Electric Prince

Now that we are in the last third of the year, I thought it might be a good time to see how I was doing on my annual goal list. #4 on the list is to "Knit a pair of sock with my own hand spun yarn." I had spun up this yarn with the intention of making socks, and now it is finally happening. I think I'm in love with the way this yarn works with the Denature pattern. I had to subtract a bunch of stitches out of the pattern to accommodate my weird gauge. Hopefully I' haven't taken too many stitches out.

Last post I said I would cast on two new things. That didn't quite happen. As I was swatching with the Berroco Ultra Alpaca Fine, I decided it wasn't quite what I had in mind for the Antarctic shawl. It's a nice yarn, but I'm just not as in love with it as I was when I bought it a year or two ago. This year I've decided that I'm not going to knit with yarn that I don't love. Life is too short to do that. So instead I'm going to use the two skeins of RedFish Dyeworks Silk Sock that I bought this year at Stitches West. And I'm liking this swatch much, much better. The yarn is thicker than what the pattern calls for, but I've decided I don't care.

Of course before going wild with the yarn, I did finish my Velomeisters. I have named them Electric Prince since the yarns are Madelinetosh in Edison Bulb (the electric part) and Koigu in Prince (self explanatory).

I'm looking forward to wearing them on my next bike ride.

And a little bit of news about The Book. I'm re-graphing everything now that I've learned how to do a much better job aligning things in Illustrator. The bonus is that it is taking a tenth of the time it took to originally make some of the graphs and it looks so much better. I'm using video tutorials from Marnie MacLean for anyone who is curious. It's also giving me an opportunity to recheck graphs as I fix them all up. I'm also starting to edit the patterns to make sure the graphs and the written portions match. 

On a related note, as I was drawing up my charts, I found that there is no standardization for chart symbols. I pulled out copies of Vogue knitting, Interweave Knitting, Rowan, Coastal Knits, Little Red in the City, and looked at the Craft Yarn Council's Yarn Standards Charting Symbols. To make matters worse, some symbols in certain publications mean something completely different in another publication. And older copies of some publications sometimes have different symbols to more recently released copies. So I am doing a bit of a mixture from each publication. But I'm doing my best to build charts in a way where you only have to glance over to see what part you are on rather than stare at the chart key to figure out what the stitch is suppose to be. It should be intuitive.