inconceivable!

I found myself without any active WIPs on the go yesterday. Since I found the idea of not having any socks on the needles inconceivable (anyone out there who can say that word without thinking of the Princess Bride needs to go and watch that film NOW!) so I cast on for these Cheery Littlebottom socks. It’s the April/May mystery KAL pattern for the SolidSocks group, and I thought of this Regia yarn from my stash as soon as I saw it. I’ve been meaning to cast on since halfway through April but never quite got around to it so I’m glad to finally have it on the needles at last. I think it’s safe to say that I’m not going to get these finished by the end of May!

My Baby Surprise Jacket has been off the needles for well over a week, but it’s still lingering as a WIP since I still have all the ends to weave in and all the buttons to attach. I better get a move on though, the baby is due in a couple of weeks and I still have soakers to knit and onesies to embroider!

I used an applied i-cord to bind off, and I love how it turned out. I always thought that i-cord borders involved knitting yards of i-cord, followed by painstakingly sewing on said i-cord, which sounds like an incredibly tedious thing to do. Not so with an applied i-cord! You’re knitting an i-cord, attaching it, and binding off in one fell swoop, and it gives a lovely polished edge. I’m a definite convert.

There was also a bit of spinning action that went on this weekend. I hand-dyed this fibre a few months ago, and perhaps it’s a touch of Jubilee fever but I thought it looked a tad patriotic (if you squint, and imagine that the purple is actually blue….).

It was a quick spin, started on the Saturday night as a Champions League football avoidance measure, and finished on Saturday afternoon. I didn’t have an exact picture of how I thought the colours would look spun up, but I suppose I thought there would more prominent sections of the undyed white so I was initially a little surprised by the levels of pink. Of course, if I’d bothered to apply any common sense at all I might possibly have realised that white and red obviously blend to make pink, which is why the finished skein has such an overwhelming pinkish hue!

It’s about a 4ply weight, and I was quite pleased that I managed to keep my singles fairly consistent, especially since I was balancing my kindle on one knee and reading at the same time! What can I say, I just can’t put down the whole Game of Thrones saga. I’m not typically a fan of this sort of epic fantasy genre, but this stuff is engrossing! I read the first book out of sheer curiosity from all the hype, and I was completely hooked. I’ve been devouring them all in quick succession and I’m now on the fifth book of the series. Not looking forward to finishing it and having to wait such a long time for the last two books to be published!

Pin It

Sunday Best

I’ve just realised that I never really got around to blogging about my Coopknits mystery socks! They got a little glimpse in my Colour Lovers post, but I think they deserve a little more attention because I LOVE them!

Pattern: UK Sock Knitters March Mystery by Rachel Coopey

Yarn: elephantjuice Super Sock 4ply

Ravelled here.

Coopknits is a sock genius. I’ve admired her gorgeous patterns for a while but this is the first one I’ve knit, and now I just want to cast on for all of her designs. I just can’t get enough of those crisp textures and twisted stitches!

I will admit that when I first saw the charts for these socks I was a little overwhelmed, but the actual knitting of it is very simple, and once I figured out what was going on it became very intuitive. Although there were a more than a few little lapses where I didn’t pay enough attention, or became too engrossed in my book and to do a little bit of tinking!

The only change I made to the pattern was to the toe, where I carried out my usual practice of decreasing every other row until about half the stitches remain, and then switching to decreasing every row before grafting the remaining stitches. It just gives me a toe which is ever so slightly more rounded than a standard “decrease every other row” toe.

On the whole, I really couldn’t be happier with how these came out. I’m so pleased with the yarn too. It was a bit of an experiment so I had no idea how it was going to knit up, and was really curious about how the little splashes of orange would look in a finished knit. It turned out nicer than I could have hoped, and the orange adds a bit of lively interest to the grey.

For a long time while during the knitting of the first sock I worried that I was going to run out of yarn. I was using a slightly underweight skein that I’d decided to keep for myself, so I was keeping a very close eye on the scales to check whether I’d hit the halfway mark before the end of Sock 1. I panicked in a moment of weakness and dyed a backup skein, but I needn’t have bothered because I ended up with a fairly healthy 10g leftover. The practical side of my is telling me to pop it into my pile of scraps for future darnings, but I’m very tempted to use it for a little hexipuff!

I’m not entirely sure that these socks will ever need darning though, because I’m being strangely precious with them! I’m usually so eager to pull on a pair of freshly knit socks and go trampling about outdoors in them, because there’s something so undeniably cosy about feet wrapped in all those little handmade stitches. But for some reason I’m shying away from wearing these lovelies inside of any shoes or boots, and instead am quite content to pad about the house in them, and admire them sitting on the radiator. I’m sure the novelty will wear off soon, but for now they’re my Sunday Best.

Pin It

so near and yet so far

I feel like I haven’t been making much knitting progress lately. I started a little swatch a couple of weeks ago, but it hasn’t progressed beyond a rectangle because I need my 4mm needles, and they’re currently still occupied by…

… my Stripe Study shawl, which is still slogging along. I’ve knit all twelve contrast stripes and I’m now about two thirds of the way through the border, but even though I am so close to finishing, I can’t seem to bring myself to knit more than a few rows at a time. I still love this shawl, but my current feelings towards it are echoed exactly in Pinkundine’s recent post. At the risk of repeating what she has already written, the rows are just so long now, and there is none of the excitement of short rows or stripe segments left to break things up. It’s just become a bit of a slog, and if it wasn’t for my current rush to free up these needles it would probably linger on for quite a while!

Pin It