Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Samesamesame........but at least one end in sight!

Wooooooooaaahhhhhhh but it's been a long five days away! My time off was funfunfun - - absolutely no knitting was done except for a few rows that I snuck in when I went to visit R for a clapotis fitting (almost done w/ the increase section - we decided that it truly needed to be 'enveloping' so I'm upping the pattern requirements to a whopping 23 dropped stitch rows before proceeding with the straight section) and a few more that I snuck in while......................riding in a Jeep with the top down....................on our way to Assateague for an afternoon/evening of sand and fun and salt water and sand and hot dogs and shooting stars and More Sand!


(The way that small children can almost seem to hoard sand in the folds of their legs & arms & necks - and even in their EARS - is seriously not to be believed until you have experienced it yourself first-hand.)

(many thanks to my hubby who accidently didn't get the entire Munchkin in the photo, thereby providing me with a perfect creep-proof picture to put in the blog!)

Unfortunately on the knitting front there is almost NOTHING to report. It's so boring I'm bored myself. The clapotis is getting......wider. That's about all I can tell. I'm up to 19 and a half pattern repeats - 23 is the magic number. As far as J's Badcaul socks go, I try and do two or three pattern repeats a night - and they're oddly very slow going - so far I've managed to cover over the ball of my foot. Now if I was working from the cuff-down I'd be thrilled............but as I'm working from the toe up you can see how this is s-l-o-w-e-r than s--l--o--w. . . . . .


BUT!

The silky wool socks are giving me hope. I had figured to keep working on them until I ran out of wool - - rather stop working when I had just enough to work a round or two of 'finishing cuff' and then bind off. But lo and behold last night I tried one on just for kicks and it seemed.... Well, it seemed plenty long enough for me. Now this might just be me - - it might be a perfect example of (to paraphrase the Yarn Harlot who was paraphrasing Elizabeth Zimmerman) "how do you know when you have enough ribbing? When you absolutely can't stand to knit any more ribbing then you have just perfectly enough."



So that might be it - but last night when I tried on the one silky-wool sock that I have so far (and the leg is less than the 6" I thought it would ultimately be, mind you) it seemed to be Just Right. So I've decided that tonight 'twill be the magic moment - - I'll knit a few rounds (4 or 5 strikes me as just about right) of some random ribbing (note to self - remember to write down WHAT kind of ribbing you knit, or else you will have managed to knit an entire sock with absolutely no documentation, making it almost impossible to knit a duplicate one to complete the pair. Which is - you know - what a pair of socks are supposed to be. Duplicates.) and then I'll try the Elizabeth Zimmerman sewn bind-off, being sure to use the Brenda Dayne passed-along tip of turning the sock inside out before doing so.



And then I'll have a sock. And then I'll have a sense of accomplishment. Because my previous post? That cute bunch of colourful loops on a circular needle? That was ripped. And then re-cast-on and finished in only a matter of hours - - a M-D warshcloth (yes, with the R in warshcloth, I know) - but dontcha' know I read the pattern wrong? And while it's lovely and functional I still didn't knit it correctly. A washcloth. I screwed up knitting a washcloth ferpetesake. Ah well - it still works - - it at least got some sand out of the Munch's ears.


So an end is in sight. I hope. And then the silky wool sock will be #2 in my pile of Single Socks. Why can't I be like some others and knit them both at the same time???

1 comment:

Kate A. said...

I've made five pairs of socks now...and in not one case did I keep notes so I could make them identical. I always try to count the sts between shapings (after the fact) so I can match them, and I think I do it right, but somehow they never seem to be quite exact in the end...