Stitches West 2017

About a month before Stitches West happened this year, I decided that maybe I did want to take a class. I've been interested in trying out weaving. The all-day weaving class was full, but Deborah Jarchow was doing a one hour market session on how to set up a Rigid Heddle loom. She was an excellent teacher and I have all sorts of aspirations now. Besides the class, I spent two different days at the market. I know, I know... I have plenty of yarn. I'm weak.

This is what came home with me. In the top left are three skeins of Spincycle Yarns Independence in the Payback color way. I'm planning to make an Arrowhead Cardigan out of it. In the top center are two skeins of Lost City Knits Foothill Fingering in the Cerrillos color way. I plan on using it as the weft for a scarf I'd like to weave with my skein of Big Sur yarn that has been waiting for the perfect project. On the second row on the left are four horn toggles from Buttons! to go along for the Arrowhead Cardigan. I really liked how Rachel of Spincycle Yarns had made that mod to her sweater, so I am going to do the same. To the right of the buttons is a bit of fiber by Chasing Rainbows Dyeworks BFL Dark in the Oaxaca color way I got from the Carolina Homespun booth. Earlier this month Connor had taken me to the Cirque du Soliel show that was in town for my birthday. It was called Luzia: A Waking Dream of Mexico. The Oaxaca fiber just captured the feeling of the show so well I had to have it.

I knew I shouldn't have gotten within 100 yards of the Canon Hand Dyes booth. I have so much yarn from her... but I love it. Of course upon walking by her booth, the yarn sirens called and I gave in immediately. The two striped skeins in the bottom left are Canon Hand Dyes on the Charles Merion Sock base. The grey/red one is called Bucky and the yellow/grey one is called Hufflepuff. The bottom left purple skein is Miss Babs Hot Shot in the Amethyst color way. I plan to pair it with another skein in my stash for some color work socks. In the bottom center of the picture are two orange skeins. The one to the left is Hedgehog Fibers Twist Sock in the color way Monarch. (There's the Luzia influence showing up again.) The orange skein on the right is Material Culture Fiber Arts on the Modern Era base. The color way was an exclusive for the show and it was called Indian Paintbrush, after the flower of the same name.

Along the right side of the picture, you might have noticed some mugs. Pawley Studios was at the show and I couldn't help myself. The top mug is for me and says, "No Skein No Gain." The middle mug is a Hufflepuff mug for Connor. He was pretty excited when I brought that home. The bottom mug I got to help encourage my father with his knitting. It says, "Knit Long And Prosper." I was going to give it to him for Father's Day, but I couldn't even wait 24 hours after buying it to give it to him. I was too excited.

Pucker

When I started the Pucker socks back in the beginning of January, I had visions of finishing them by the end of January. That didn't happen.

I didn't realize when I started that I was going to have to do a 72 stitch sock rather than my usual 64 stitch sock. 22% more sock knitting was going to go into these socks. When I do color work, I often end up doing a 72 stitch sock. No big deal, I told myself. I'll be done in February.

It took a bit longer than usual to get the leg to the length I wanted. I figured I wasn't used to the pattern. When I finished the first heel of the first sock, I read the gusset instructions, which said something like: decrease the gusset every third stitch because mosaic knitting is tighter and you'll need to space out the decreases. Aha! That is why it was taking so long. I needed to knit a third more rounds in order to get the length I needed. All in all, I was going to have to do 55% more knitting than my usual sock knitting amount. I gave up on guessing when I was going to finish.

By the time May rolled around I had come to terms with the fact that I was going to be knitting these socks for the rest of my life. So after finishing some deadline knitting and decided that I was going to be completely monogamous with these socks. Why not? We were clearly going to have to get used to each other now that we were spending the rest of our lives together.

Lo and behold, after spending time on these socks and only these socks, they decided to finish themselves. Maybe they realized how long our lives were really going to be. One sock is slightly bigger than the other. (I'm putting that one on my bigger foot.) And now I can knit new things!

The Impatient Knitter

It feels like an age since I was able to get something off of the needles. Although after looking at my ravelry page, each of my projects are only 2-3 weeks old.

Pucker: a bit harder than I expected. This is the first sock of the pair.

Logically, if I stick to one project, I will get it done faster. This isn't how "knitting brain" works. Knitting brain says, "You should cast on a new project. All your projects will come off the needles sooner if you do." Knitting brain is dumb and should be ignored.

The first plain vanilla sock in the pair. See those shadowy bars in the image? It's knitting prison. I will be knitting this forever.

Not helping all of this is that the project I've been most diligently knitting on, and was a quarter of the way through, had to be ripped out and redone because my numbers were not coming out right. In this case I added an extra increase in a mysterious location. The pattern is still correct. (Yay!) I still have to be precise when testing my own patterns, so ripping was the only way to go. (Boo!)

This shawl has been in the works for 2 years. If this iteration works out, I will high five myself.

A Friendly Cowl With Socks On The Side

Another week, another FO. After six months with low finished project numbers, even I'm surprised. This project started when my buddy Alina came by our place, saw a skein prominently displayed (I was going to make a hat out of it), and told me that it reminded her of camping, forests, and the stars swirling overhead. Clearly this skein needed to be knit up for her.

She expressed interest in a large cowl. I knew I didn't have enough of the skein. (It's a mystery skein, by the way. It was given to me by a good friend. I have no idea what it is or who it is by. It had no tag.) So I bought a skein of Malabrigo Rios in the Purple Mystery color way. There is no mystery about how purple the skein is: it's nearly electric. Seed stitch insured that the colorful skein would look like dappled light once knit rather than something an angry preschooler finger painted. I knit 2/3 of the cowl in the mystery skein and 1/3 in the purple. I think it came out beautifully and Alina was surprised to receive it.

I wore this the day I gifted it to make sure I didn't leave it at home. My Mum saw me in it and wanted to know why I was wearing Alina's cowl.

Promptly after finishing the cowl, I cast on my Pucker socks. I'm using a skein of Hedgehog Fiber's Twist Sock in the Budgie color way and a skein of Baah! La Jolla in the La Perla color way. After buying all those white skeins for my Sheep May Safely Graze socks, I feel the need to use them.

The Pucker socks require quite a bit of concentration, as it turns out, so I've also cast on a pair of vanilla socks out of Canon Hand Dyes' Charles base in the We're All Mad In Here color way. I have knit with this color way before, although in a different base. Those socks suffered the fate that many of my early socks did and the color faded terribly. But since I've started re-fixing my socks and have started using a different wool wash, I have high hopes that these will stay nice and bright.

The Gnomes Are Warm Now

This past Saturday Connor and I went on a yarn crawl. I needed a skein of Tosh Sock in Onyx to match a skein of Tosh Sock in Tart that I bought last week. So we battled traffic and drove to several far-away shops in search of the elusive skein.

At Avenue Yarns, formerly known as K2Tog, I found a skein of Hedgehog Fibers' Twist Sock in the Budgie color way. I'd been wanting to try out Hedgehog Fibers for awhile, but I don't really like to buy hand dyed yarns unseen, so when I saw this skein, I knew it had to be mine. I like Katalogi's Pucker, so I may have to dedicate this skein to my own pair of Pucker Socks.

Then we headed to A Verb For Keeping Warm where I saw some of Brooklyn Tweed's new line of yarn called Quarry. Connor and I discussed what color we might like to wear. We both like burgundies, so Hematite won. Then, with only and hour and a half left before Nine Rubies closed, we crossed our fingers and drove over. Traffic was heavy and we had to pay a bridge toll, but we made it with 20 minutes to spare. We rushed in to learn that they didn't have any Onyx!!! I had misunderstood what I saw on their website. As it turns out, their Black Friday sale had cleared them out. Ah well. I still have two tasty skeins to play with.

In other news, we don't own hats anymore. Sometime during the weekend, we both managed to misplace our hand knit hats. I think the house gnomes have stolen them. I hope they are warm now.