One of J's insanely coloured 'Mouse Masala' socks was finished last weekend. Yet because I am at the moment Extremely Busy (the PG13 version of what I mutter to myself as I'm scrambling about my life at the moment) I am only now getting around to telling everyone about it.
I have to admit that I am also slacking on my blogging at the moment because I am (1) working on a Super Top Secret project and you really can't post pictures or details about something that is Super Top Secret now, can you? and (2) since I have discovered this blog I am in constant & deep mourning that my blog will never - ever - be as beautiful as his, no matter how hard I try or how much I wish it to be so. (Note: I so wanted to be like him that I even went & hunted around on his blog & in his flickr pictures to find out what kind of a camera he used - while I know the man has serious skill in the knitting & photographing department there is the truth that some things actually *can* be bought! Well the sad truth for this knitter is that no, for $900, some cameras can actually *not* be bought after all - and that unless I was photographing such beautiful knits that in fact they probably not only can't be bought but also shouldn't be bought.
So at the moment I am trying to console myself with the reality that I will never have a blog filled with luxurious fibers that are knitted into a dizzying array of amazing shawls and sweaters and socks (okay, at least the socks I can eventually manage myself!) and arranged and photographed in such a way that they, the apartment, and the wearer all look like something out of a Crate & Barrel catalog or a Gourmet Magazine layout spread......
(as I was swimming my thrice-weekly laps today I kept telling myself "quirky blog pictures are okay, really, they are.........")
(and by that I actually mean by the insanity of the colours, not the beauty of the knits!)
Oh god I really need to refinish the floors in that room, don't I? Oh well. Remind me to tell you, my ducks, very soon about my recent adventures in drywalling the stairwell this past week - it's one of my more successful and less hairbrained attempts at home improvement in quite a while...
This is the first sock of J's properly knitted up and finished, yet not blocked. I followed the Interweave Rib & Cable socks (something like that) from a summer/spring-ish 2005 issue (the one w/ the long-haired blonde wearing a pink wraparound ballet-type sweater on the front.........isn't that more helpful than a issue number or date?) and like both the pattern and the results very much. I like the slipped heel and the way that the toe worked. The pattern was a first - everything came together quite nicely without a single snag or hitch for me and I was literally astonished - it was a FIRST! And as I was about 20 rounds away from grafting the toe I remember thinking "this is it - this is actually a Perfect Pattern - I've found one - they're like the holy grail!" and then I realized that if I continued on as the pattern told me to - decreasing four stitches every other row that I was going to be decreasing for a good 100+ rows and that while J's toes are actually freakishly long (no, I'm not being mean, I'm being honest! I'd say it to her face - I have, in fact! - and she'd probably admit it as well - she's proud of them, actually, I have to say...) they're not THAT long. So I radically reduced over about 10 rows until I got to a nice round number and simply grafted away. I have to say as well that I don't know what all the fuss is about grafting - I mean, you
follow the instructions and Kitchner carefully and in just a few minutes the entire toe is seamless and perfect and you're done, with only one tail to weave in. Where's the fuss about that?I've done other toes as well - one that was really fun was a star toe on the Embossed Leaves sock (great sock, but I totally did it in the wrong yarn - I'm going to knit it's mate and then immediately give them away!) but I didn't prefer it any more or any less than a basic decrease w/ grafted toe...
One of the particularly fun things about J's sock(s) so far is the bizarre way that the colours are ending up. The most obvious bit is seen clearly above - it striped for the first part of the leg where I was working on size 2 dpns, and then it switched to a huge pooling effect when I was instructed to switch to size 1 dpns. Now I for one, apparently being a total freak of nature, just love it when colours pool. It's like the whole gasoline-on-water type of thing for me and I just find it stunningly beautiful. And while I like zebras (~ chuckle, chuckle~ actually ate 'em when I lived in Africa, no less!) and other striped beasties as well as the next, I don't prefer stripes overall. So when J's sock went from stripes to pooled I thought that was really neat - then on the slipped-stitch heel it was neat to see how the stripes were very different and tiny - and how that little jog was all it took for the stripes to come back over the insetp and top of the foot despite the fact that I was still using only size 1 dpns. (Well, by then I'd switched to two size 1 circulars, for ease in the whole decreasing/cable design concept...)
And the extra strange thing? I followed Claudia's advice and immediately cast on for the second sock literally as soon as I finished weaving in the tail from the grafted toe (exhausted & bleary-eyed, but I still made myself do it!) and despite all of that the new leg of J's second sock (about 3" long at the moment) looks completely different than the leg of the first. The (purple) stripes are tiny and extremely close together, while if you look at the first one the stripes are fairly wide and decently spaced apart.
But now, now I need to go take advantage of the fact that my son is actually asleep and staying asleep and listen to some LibriVox Northanger Abby and knit like the wind, dontcha' know...
1 comment:
Come sit in our new space soon and knit away while I lay flooring, or hang drywall, or run electrical wires or... Miss you! I need a coffee break.
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