Category: Gadgets

This past work week was a bit hectic. To compensate, I've done nothing but just what I wanted to do all weekend. There is no better antidote to a crappy week than a Saturday and Sunday spent knitting, reading, playing flute, and cooking with my husband.

The cooking was scallops and grits. Here is the finished project.

Scallops with red pepper, green onion, a little jalapeno, garlic, parsley, and white wine, served over cheese grits. Yum.

Here's the knitting.

I've finally gotten to the last ball of the handspun yarn. I wet spliced it together this morning.

This is a pretty simple shawl pattern, the only challenge will be to guess how much yarn I need for the 12 row garter border. Since this is handspun and hand dyed, I want to use every bit of it that I can.

Out came the trusty drug dealer's scale. The last row I did took 2.6 grams of yarn. I have 126 grams left. Of course the rows get longer as I go, so I'll have to keep weighing as I knit, but I should be able to get several 12 row repeats done still. This should be a nice big cozy warm shawl when it's done.

We're off to the market for provisions, then back to knitting!

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I am a bit of an obsessive-compulsive nerd. Why do you ask?? Click on those to get a better close-up idea of the nerdiness.

I’m at the point in the knitting of the True Blood Albatross Faery Ring sweater where I get to stop knitting mindless stockinette and start the cable charts for the bodice. There are four different cable charts, so I got out graph paper and pencil this morning and came up with this to help keep track of which cable goes where. Here’s the knitting so far.

The color’s really all wrong there. It’s not that pink, it’s more of a bloody red. I have two more rows of stockinette stitch, then I can set up the cables and go to town. This should be a lot more fun and less of an Albatross at this point.

I have one last photo from the Great Knitting Doctor Family Reunion & Train Trip of 2010. I mentioned that we found a yarn shop in Fergus Falls, MN. It was actually surprisingly well-stocked for a shop in a town that size.

I’m off to find the cable needle and my little box of stitch markers!

But first, here’s what’s going on at our house this week. My sweetie, John, had surgery on both of his feet earlier this week. We planned this for a week that I had off, so I could wait on him hand and foot, or foot and foot, in this case. Here’s what he looked like the evening after surgery.

Those are icepacks on his feet, and would you just look at those fashionable shoes! He’s doing pretty well, all things considered. Here’s Lewey, consoling him.

In between running errands and fetching things, I have gotten some knitting done. I have three projects actively going right at the moment. First up is the new sock.

The yarn is from Three Irish Girls, from their Sock Yarnista monthly sock club. This is my first club shipment, and I am more than pleased. It’s very squishy, lovely yarn, and Sharon sent a coordinating contrast color for heels and toes if you’re one of those people, like me, who won’t use the included pattern. The club is a monthly offering, and has either a variegated colorway or a semi-solid, and you can choose on a monthly basis which one you want. The pattern this month is a lovely cabled sock that will look much better in the semisolid yarn, so I’m substituting, you guessed it, my favorite sock pattern over there to your right in the menu bar. I’ve decided to use the darker yarn for the tops, heels, and toes, just for a change.

And the needles, you ask? Those are my latest acquisition, sterling double points from Celtic Swan Forge. It’s hard to get a decent photo of them, but here’s an attempt.

These are just fabulous. They are not for everyone, I’d guess, though. They have a rather blunt tip, for one thing, which doesn’t bother me in the least, but some people might hate them. If you insist on a sharply pointed dpn, these are not your needles. They are also substantially heavier than any other double points I’ve used. They are also very expensive, so you have to really want them. And I really wanted them, so I got them. If you have a special occasion coming up, and need to give your significant other a gift idea for you, this might be it.

Next time: Whatever happened to that Cobblestone thing? Stay tuned to find out!

As promised last time, I have a finished project to show you. Here are the mismatched, not-quite identical Amaranth socks.

If they look a little dilapidated, it’s because I couldn’t wait to wear them before I took photos!

Project Details:

Pattern: My own generic sock pattern. I started these with 64 stitches around, which was too small, then ripped and started over with 72 on the second go around, for some reason that escapes me. I had knit to the heel before I decided that they were too big. I was not about to rip them out again, so just decreased a bit extra in the gussets and ended up with 68 stitches for the foot. For the record, 68 stitches with this yarn is perfect.

Yarn: Madeline Tosh sock yarn, in Amaranth. This is just lovely yarn, in lovely colors. It’s 100% superwash merino wool. It has a very nice “hand” once it’s made up.

Needles: Size 2.25 mm Pony Pearls. Yes, I’m still old-fashioned and use dpns for socks. I could have gone down a needle size with this yarn and still had an acceptable fabric, but this was OK.

Started: November 2007. Really. I’m not that slow of a sock knitter, I just keep getting sidetracked.

Finished: Last week.

For: Me

Modifications: I’ll ask it again, how do you define “modify” when it’s your own jerry-rigged pattern? This one has 2 by 2 ribbing, and a standard heel flap and gusset. Nothing fancy.

What I learned: I’m still a plain-sock girl. And yarn can do weird things when you’re not looking. This yarn came in a single hank, and I don’t think there were any knots. The two socks are knit the same, with the same needles, and the gauge is the same. But look at them. They are just doing that not-matching thing to try to bug me.

And I’m already a good ways into the next sock. Remember that Three Irish Girls yarn I talked about several posts back? Some of the stuff I broke the yarn fast for? It came, I wound, I knitted. It is just indescribably lovely. I want this in every color.

This is their Adorn Sock Yarn, the  color is Eire, and I’m knitting them on my latest needle purchase, the Knit Picks Harmony dpns. These are very nice, and much less expensive than comparable wooden double points. I have a set of Lantern Moons, but I’m mostly afraid to use them for fear of breakage. This yarn is just so squooshy soft and wonderful that it almost knits itself!

I also have another gadget that I got a while ago, but haven’t posted a photo. This is a handmade tin needle protector, which might make me a little less fearful of using those nice needles. Just slip it over your needles with the sock in progress, put the cap on, and toss it in your bag!

Here’s where I got mine, though the home page of the online order site says it’s not working. There’s a contact email on that page, just email Jen and she’ll set you up.

And just to prove that I’m still working on that alpaca silk lace shawl, here’s a photo.

Even though it might not look much different than before, here’s a photo that proves it is indeed bigger.

That used to be 100 grams of yarn, I’m down to 61.6 grams. And I now have around 300 stitches on the needle.

I really need to call this one something better than “that alpaca silk lace shawl”. It’s getting made up using Evelyn Clark’s Knitting Lace Triangles book. I’m going to do a few more repeats of the vaguely flower-like motif, then add a ripple border, then a pointy edging. I know, it all sounds quite technical, doesn’t it? Any ideas for a clever shawl name?

So we’ll get back to knitting!

First up, the socks. Solar Energy is the color name for this yarn (Dicentra sock yarn), and it’s a good name for it. It’s quite sunny in appearance, and for a change it’s sunny outside today. The ducks are out there on the lake doing their little head-bobbing thing around each other, pairing up as couples, so baby ducks can’t be far behind. Well OK, they are a ways off yet, but I can hope.

A reader, Michelle (no blog), asked a week or so ago how I managed to do gussets without holes. I’m not sure I have any magic tricks, but have tried several things in the past. One thing to remember is that even if you get holes at the corners, they tend to disappear with washing and wearing. If all else fails you can always cheat and cinch them together on the inside with a bit of yarn and a sewing needle when they are all done. Yes, I’ve been known to do this. It does get better with practice, so if you get holes, just keep knitting socks. After several pairs, it seems to go away. I’ve also found that mine are much better since I’ve gone down to 2 or 2.25 mm needles for my fingering weight socks.

Here’s what I do currently. I’m a heel flap and gusset girl, all the way, so if you do short row heels, I can’t help you. First, I don’t pay any attention to how many stitches the pattern* tells me to pick up along the side of the heel flap. I do a slip stitch along the edge of the flap, and pick up one stitch for each slipped stitch. Sometimes I end up with 1 more on one side of the flap than the other; no worries, I just decrease more on that side. Trust me, nobody will be able to tell.

So here I am at the corner, after I’ve picked up the stitches along the first side of the flap. You can click on all of these photos to make them bigger.

Now I pick up one extra stitch right inside that gusset corner, sort of like a raised increase. A tiny crochet hook makes this easier. I’ve seen instructions to pick up this stitch in the running thread between the two needles, just to the left of where I’m picking up, but I’ve found that this tends to make a little hole of its own, like a “make one” increase does.

Now knit across the instep stitches. When you get to the other heel flap, do the same thing.

Some knitters pick up two stitches at each corner, the second just opposite the first, so it would end up on the instep needle. I don’t bother with this, as just doing one seems to do the trick.

Here’s my finished gusset corner:

By the way, that little crochet hook is one of my most-used knitting gadgets, and believe me, I have lots of knitting gadgets. It’s got a tiny crochet hook on one end, and a pointy “probe” end on the other.

I use this so much that I have two of them, one in my regular gadget bag, the other in my sock knitting kit. Patternworks has these, though I’m sure you can find them elsewhere. The little probe end works great for getting knots out of things.

I’ve also still been working on the eggplant Jo Sharp sweater, though you wouldn’t know it by my progress. I’m currently marooned on sleeve island. After getting part way through the sleeve increases, I decided I didn’t like the holes that I was getting with the “make one” increases I was using. So I ripped all the way back to the seed stitch border and started over, using raised or lifted increases instead. Increasing inside seed stitch is just a bit more entertaining than doing so in stockinette stitch. Here’s where I am after all the ripping and reknitting.

All those little pins? I think I’ve posted this before, but I use them to keep track of increases (or decreases). If I have to increase x number of times, I string that many pins together and pin it right to the sleeve, then take one pin off and mark the increase as I make it. When the pins are gone, I’m done.

Please ignore all the extra dog hair. We have Rae the neighbor Corgi with us for a few days, and she’s left fur all over the house. I was way too lazy to vacuum and dust before I took photos.

Speaking of Corgis, here’s what happens when you leave a Corgi in a room alone. This used to be the cable needle in the sleeve above.

Fortunately, I have a whole bunch more of these (see gadget comment above).

Next time: My latest knitting gadget.

*I actually don’t often use a pattern anymore for socks. Or, I do, but it’s in my head. Plain ribbed or picot top, stockinette cuff, heel flap/gusset, standard decreased toe, grafted together. The number of stitches I start with at this point is one of those “force be with you” things.