Socktober- an update

So, we are now (almost) half way through Socktober, and I’m ahead of schedule! Woot! So I finished the first sock…Wednesday, I think it was. And it fits, and I love it, and it’s amazing and the pattern rocks.

Due to an inadvisibly busy social schedule however, I wasn’t able to start the second sock until yesterday, when I was so tired I defaulted to my usual toe and had to throw it out. I did start it again today at my spinning club, and got a decent chunk of the foot done (no pic because it’s dark now, but you can imagine really). IT’s a fun and engaging little knit, and I’ll definitely be doing this heel again if not the pattern (atm I don’t want to redo it, but in the future, we’ll see how things go).

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Sock-it Sunday- test knit edition

So I got the sock pattern to test knit on Sunday, and I was very well behaved and didn’t start it until Monday. Then I dived right in, and didn’t really surface until today. It’s been a very strange feeling, following someone else’s pattern, with all their indiosyncrasies (John increases for the toe the other way around to literally every other person I know, which was weird and threw me for a loop (I didn’t)), but fascinating to see my own unconscious biases about the ‘correct’ or ‘wrong’ way to do things.

The pattern itself is cute and easily memorised (mostly). So much so, that I accidentally went past where I was supposed to start increasing and had to frog a few rows.

I was supposed to start at 3.25 inches from the back, here I am closer to 3.

And here I am with the heel turned!

I love this heel. It’s a gusset and short row heel, and I had to frog because apparently I am unable to count, but it only involves wraps (or the German replacement I use) on half of the heel, and the other half you just turn and work back again. I was very skeptical, but it works and I think I will continue to use this heel later on in other situations. 🙂 Just not in self-striping yarn bc I absolutely hate the random colour change that results from heels. I’ll keep sticking to afterthought/contrast heels for those.

If you click on the pic for a larger version of this, you’ll probably see the pattern a bit better. It’s a very subtle travelling cable thing. (Very precise, I know 😉 ). I love it, it’s simple enough to really get into it, but interesting enough to keep me entertained (think similar to Hermione’s every day socks).

The only thing I’m not very happy about is how little I’ve managed to do…I remember when I could bust out a pair of socks in a weekend, and here I am pootling along slowly. I kinda want to make these socks longer than normal too, which may involve increases for my thighs…*facepalm*

Ahh well, I’m off to go knit some more.

Let’s pretend it’s Frida, because I have some finishes!!!

Two, to be precise.

Firstly, I finally got around to doing the heel on the socks! Go me!

I can now give them to my friend on Tuesday, (assuming she’s there…) If not, they’ll keep I guess. No idea what to do with the left-over yarn, maybe list it for destash on ravelry. I don’t mind it (but it is a bit splitty), but it’s completely different to the rest of my sock yarn so I don’t think it’ll really fit into any of the scrapy blankets I’m doing.

The other project I’m calling done is the pocket.

Peacock feather! But rather than the blue and green normally associated with them I decided to do the whole thing in silver and gold. There was a bit of an explosion with the silver glitter but I sorted it out. It’s also shedding glitter everywhere, but hey ho. That’s what glitter does really 🙂 Now, hopefully I don’t lose my scissors any more…

A finish, an almost finish and a new start

Firstly: the finish. I finished the seagull! It isn’t finish-finished yet- no doubt it’ll be added to my pile of Christmas things to deal with later. Unfortunately, the other cross stitch I brough to do is my mother’s, so either I start that and kinda ruin the surprise (she’s the only one here who would notice, so clearly I’m a double muppet at times).

Secondly: the almost finish. I decided to make a pocket hoop to store my scissors, which have this really irritating habit of going missing…So I cut up a pair of jeans I can’t wear any more (I wore out the inseam horrifically…) and stuck that in a hoop with superglue. It’s good enough as it is, but I’m pondering two things

1-what embroidery do I want to do on the pocket? I think it needs brightening up somehow, but I have no idea what. Any suggestions??? I’m thinking sparkly- glitter or beads….or both?

2- do I need to do anything on the back? At the moment it’s bare and I feel as though I should do something, but I’m not sure what. Again, suggestions? Note to self- don’t do the back until you’ve finished the front

And thirdly: the new start. After finishing the seagull I wanted something that wasn’t on plastic canvas and didn’t involve beads. So I rummaged around in my small stash here and pulled out a very small house cross stitch I acquired at Yarndale many moons ago. Stitching on 18 count without a hoop is very fiddly (and there’s so much brown…)

 

This is what it will look like when it’s finished. It’s going to be tiny!Oh, and a bonus thing! I bought some more sock yarn- for a good cause, I swear! One of my friends (tumblr account) is dipping his foot into designing, and therefore needs a sock test knitting. How could I say no? Well, except that the design he made really wants a solid coloured yarn…hmm… new yarn shopping! I was very good and only bought one ball in this purple-grey-blue-brown yarn. Pretty enough for me, solid enough for the socks 🙂

July/August goals

Gah!!! How did July fly by??? (Don’t answer that, I know the answer). Life got crazy busy then for a while, and it’s going to stay busy in August too. Blah. Anyway. July’s goals were (slightly optimistic)

(Yes, this is wildly late. Life has been throwing a ton of stuff my way. Unfortunately, none of it is going anywhere until September. Then normal service can resume!)

1. Knit a pair of socks before my mother’s birthday (they’re interesting so this should be doable)
   Done! Not as early as I had hoped, but they were gifted to her on her birthday and she loves them (even though it’s far too hot to wear them…)
2. Get cockatoo brae to the yoke (the pattern is the other side of the room, but given how much zoomies I had on this last month, should be doable!)
   Haha, nope. Probably won’t even happen in August, given the number of trains I’m going on (as well as the issue I might be having with the gauge…)
3. Finish the plastic canvas ‘Let it snow’ cross stitch ornament (probably the best way to stave off burnout on the wedding sampler is to finish something else…)
   Doneeeeeeee!!!!!!
4. Blog post about buttonbox mods (hopefully will start this after I finish cokcatoo brae, I need to be prepared!)
   Doneeeeeeeee!!!! How does the idea of starting buttonbox before I finish cockatoo brae sound? It might need frogging…
5. Bonus: sew Kita’s pillowcase together…
   Nope. Blargh. I need to just sit down and do it at some point…
6. Bonus: crochet the octopus
   Nope, and no motivation to do it either
7. Bonus: Mildred’s socks
   Nearly! I just need to do the heel now, so naturally I’m procrastinating over it…

 

 

Ok, onto August goals. Easy, tame and relatively mindless are the words of this month. I have lots of train rides coming up, so yay for socks I guess!

1. Finish Mildred’s socks. This is getting stupid now. They are also the last things (on the needles) to give other people, so double incentive to finish them!
2. Sew Kita’s pillowcase together. The procrastination is wildly strong on this one…:/
3. Work out what on Earth is going on with my cockatoo brae. If it is my gauge I’m going to be annoyed…
4. Work out which socks have the most left to do that are mindless for all the train rides (4, or 5 if you count connections as separate trains) (If I finish the Mildred socks this is totally a good enough excuse to start new socks…)
5. Bonus: get to the yoke of cockatoo brae, depending on what is going on with it.
6. Bonus: work out what everyone’s getting for Christmas, and if it’s crafting work out a plan of attack for them…

Ok, hopefully they’re all easy enough to do. Unfortunately, I can’t take cockatoo brae on the train trips, I don’t have much space for yarny things in my luggage on each of them.

Ooh, remind me to do a blog post about my sponsored cycle ride…(preferably before I do the damn ride…)

An update on project birdsocks

Project birdsocks, for people who are new to this blog, is my attempt to knit my mother socks so whe will stop borrowing mine… WestYorkshireSpinners released a range of 9 self-striping socks inspired by various birds, and for each one, they also suggested a solid colour which would work for (e.g) constrasting toes, heels and cuffs. So here I am knitting 18 pairs of socks for my mother.

Two pairs have already been finished and are awaiting her birthday, I aim to have a third pair finished (I figure three pairs of socks makes a good sized present).

The third pair of socks, I duly cast on at the start of June, and then prompty ignored them…*facepalm*. The problem was that I had chosen this wonderful entrelac pattern to really hightlight the colour changes, but I had forgotten how to knit backwards, and with 5 stitches a go the turning of the work was constant, and irritating. Anyway, having gotton around that problem by relearning how to knit backwads, after a few rows, another problem became evident. The thrice-cursed thing wouldn’t fit over my ankle, which was rather irritating, since I love the idea of this sock for scrap yarn. I may try again with an extra stitch in each square and see whether that solves the problem or not.

So, here I was with part of a sock done (uselessly)(it may or may not get frogged, more likely it’ll just go in the rubbish), and a time limit starting to breathe down my neck (my mum’s birthday is near the end of July). What is a person to do??? The answer: take a leaf from ym friend Jon’s book (he’s doing a pair of socks a month this year, in a bid to reduce his sock yarn stash), and knit something relatively vanilla, but with a bit more interest than that.

So here we have the main points about these socks:

toe up, short row heel, predominantly vanilla in a self-striping yarn. Looking at what other people have done with this yarn (very little), there is a narrow band of two colour yarn between all the other bands of colour. So I decided to purl the dark blue bits of that. I.e. when the yarn about to get wrapped around the needle is dark blue (intuitive rules about when it changes colour part way through the stitch), it will get purled rather than knitted. Having done a few sections, it might have been better to purl when the stitch on the left needle is dark blue, but it works perfectly well this way 🙂

WIP…something day? Scatter brained edition

Ok, so, phew, I survived my three weeks of slight insanity. Umm. Crafting kinda fell by the wayside, with the result of it all wanting attention NOW. Unfortunately, my holiday is now over and therefore I have to do the work thing…

Anyway, what has been happening? Well, I was in York at the weekend for Pride, so much knitting was accomplished on cockatoo brae (long train trips are made longer by delays…amusingly, the train ticket I had was a complimentary one due to the delays I had coming back from York from my viva…this makes claiming compensation rather awkward…) Anyway, cockatoo brae is coming along well ahead of schedule! As well as all the rows I planned to do this month, I have started the increases as well 🙂

(Isn’t all the brown lovely. Find the sarcasm in the last sentence…)

This weekend I will be teaching my aunt how to crochet jellyfish for premature babies. Naturally, this means I a) need more yarn(and crochet hooks), and b) need to crochet one in the first instance so I know what’s going on. 4ply yarn and a 2mm crochet hook are fun! Fiddly, but fun.

My mother’s socks have been started…just. I really need to get on with these, but I can’t take them home this weekend, since I’m visiting her…These will become my priority when I finish Mildred’s socks.

Speaking of Mildred’s socks, I have one finished and the other one past the toe. Before Pride at the weekend there were three members of knitsoc in a cafe, all knitting socks, all from the toe up, (two on circular, one on DPNS), in various colours and patterns. It was rather surreal to be sat there, and have someone ask what we were knitting, and all three of us saying ‘socks’ in unison. Anyway, these socks need finishing soonish. 🙂 They’ll be coming with me at the weekend.

Finally, the cross stitch wedding sampler has been ignored. But you can have a picture on what was done before but not photographed. Hopefully I’ll come back to this after the weekend (it’s probably a little bit optimistic to think it might happen before the weekend, given how it’s all going!)

Right, that’s me pretty much caught up I think (except for what I’ve been spinning/knitting but that should end up being a blog post by itself sooner rather than later…)

Update of all the things!

Naturally, the only thing to do upon finishing two things is immediately start more things! Three to be precise.

 

Firstly: more socks. See, I didn’t have a portable project, since my mother’s socks require two balls of yarn and a book for the charts. Therefore, I needed a new pair of socks, preferably ones with a basic or non-existent pattern. These socks fitted the bill, and I had a great time starting them (I’ve modified the pattern somewhat):

Secondly: my handspun stripy colourwork scarf. I decided it was time to start. And now I’ve done a bit, I need to start over, I want 27 stitches (25 for the colourwork patterns, 1 stitch either end), and I’m also thinking that I don’t want to pair the blue with the yellow… I’m also thinking that my handspun is wayyyyyy too overspun/plied, but I can’t exactly frog and respin yarn…

Thirdly (and most impressively): new cross stitch. After I finished the wolf, naturally I had to make a start on the next cross stitch on my to-do list. This currently has…not an insignificant number of hours in it. I’m currently in the ‘ooh, new start, fun’ mentality of it, and it’s lovely to stitch whilst ‘watching’ the commonwealth games, so it’s getting a lot of attention at the moment.

This new start will eventually become this:

 

As well as all this, I also finish-finished the wolf cross stitch. After two failed hunts, I found the perfect frame in TK Maxx! So yay me!

SO Sunday- double edition

Two things to talk about today! Aren’t you all lucky 😉

 

Firstly: new socks! This weekend is 4 days due to all the bank holidays we have floating around! And how better to spend it than b starting a pair of green Spring socks? (Other than working, but I couldn’t do that thanks to my building being shut 😦 ). So, new socks! I am particularly impressed with how the ribbing ended up being framed in the way it was- I was willing to do a complete new colour in order to do it, but it turned out that two colours being framed like this results in 1 inch perfectly 😀

And the pattern is just flying off the needles. The thing I am most excited about project bird socks is pushing me so far out of my comfort zone. I’ve borrowed a number of sock books from someone in my spinning group, and I chose patterns as best I could based on what traits in the yarn I wanted to display (so Spring colours for this green), without looking at how the sock is constructed. I’m looking forward(ish) to doing new things I haven’t done before (or maybe only done once or twice, and then ignored). Here’s to learning new things!

 

The second thing is also about learning new things, or at least experimenting. For my OLAS cardigan (the big cabled thing), I want to put in pockets, but not afterthought ones. Which got me thinking about what has been written about knitted pockets (not much), and what is possible. So now I’m experimenting with different pockets, and will discuss each of them on the blog. (As mentioned in the last blog post, where I mention my monthly goals). And how better to try new things than by killing two birds with one stone, and knitting it left-handed??? (I want to learn proper left-handed, which is different to knitting backwards to avoid purling so I can teach a lefty properly 🙂 More on this at a later date). So here I am knitting essentially a gauge swatch, but will have a trick up its sleeve later, feeling a lot like a beginner again!

FO Friday- March goals edition

Another month gone…where are they going??? So, before I get inot the goals, firstly I want to show off my new finished things.

Socks! Who doesn’t love socks? This pic is of them drying after they’ve been worn for the first time, because I had to wear them straight away!

This pair have afterthought heels, which I really dislike because of the kitchener stitch…

And secondly, another sewn card! (Note: I say another…it’s been quite a while since the last one I did. These are done by punching holes in the card with a large stabby needle, then sewing them in a set pattern with a smaller needle and metallic thread. The companies which produce the cards are form-a-lines (for the A6 size) and…I thought there was a sister company for square cards but I can’t find them again so maybe I imagined it or something…)

This is for a couple I know who are getting married in April. I had to change the pattern slightly so that both hands are holding top hats- in the original design the hand on the right had a handkercheif. I’m very pleased how this came out in the end.

Finally: a bird! This is a generic one done to see how large they are when finished- I think it might be a smidge too large for the planned use, so I’ll have to go down to embroidary thread and *very* small knitting needles (1mm I’m thinking)

So, the March goals I had:

1) Finish my mother’s first pair of socks. Done! The ends are even woven in, that’s how done they are:)

2) Carry on the wolf cross stitch. Done! I hit 75% at the weekend, so go me!

3) Sew the wedding card. Done! See above 🙂

 

4) Get gauge on cockatoo brae. Done! Sleeves are half(ish) done! More up to date picture of sleeves so far:

5) Stick all my sock yarn (not the stuff for project bird socks) on ravelry and find projects for them. Done! See my ravelry account. (Link opens to my stash page filtered to only include yarn with projects associate with it in a new tab). Obviously, this isn’t all my stash, but it’s all my sock yarn here in Bristol. Bonus: I actually also added all my yarn here in Bristol (including my handspun, although I’m not convinced I’ve done that bit correctly…), and found patterns for almost all of it (including my mothers bird socks). This brings me to a total of 28 projects in my queue, of which 26 are socks…

So, next months goals..

1. Finish the sleeves on cockatoo brae
2. Carry on with the wolf cross stitch (I’d like to finish but think it unlikely given that this final quarter is more complicated than the last and I only just hit 75%)
3. Knit up and write a blog post about afterthought pockets. (I want to in the end do a series on different pockets, and I figure that an afterthought one is probably the easiest to start with…)
4. Knit another pair of the bird socks (or at least get the first one done. I’m planning on doing the socks in their pairs, so this next pair will be cardamon main colour and bluetit cuffs, heels and toes).
5. Bonus: start knitting something with my handspun… This one is slightly terrifying, because it’s my handspun…But I also know that knitting it will allow me to see what’s going on with the yarn a lot more clearly than just eyeballing it! Bring it on! (I reserve the right to not talk about how bad it is if it’s truely awful…)