The Knitting Pirate

It occurred to me, as I was angling the spinning wheel (an Ashford Traditional) into the back seat of my car, that a portable wheel would be really nice to have. Something small and foldable, that I wouldn’t have to buckle into the seat because it would fit into its own little carrying case. Then I cracked my head on the doorframe and stopped thinking about it until I had to reverse the procedure to get the wheel out of the car. I swear, the thing seemed small until I had to try to fit it into the car.

Then again, I don’t really take the wheel many places. I’m not so good at talking and spinning at the same time, so I wouldn’t try to spin at SnB – it’s all I can do to talk and knit there! Spinning outside seems like an exercise in futility if there’s any sort of breeze. I’d certainly bring a wheel to Pennsic, though.

So I’m eyeing the Kromski Sonata and thinking that if I really get into spinning, if I find that I’m spinning almost every day and really wishing I could take the wheel with me everywhere, if I totally outgrow the Traditional… It’d be nice to have a double-treadle wheel, in any case. But I’m not getting one now, just sort of thinking about it.

Marie, from the weekly knitting group (the one I never get to go to anymore) invited me and a half-dozen women to spend the weekend at her beach house in Maryland. What a fun time we had – and what an amazing view! We knit, spun, talked late into the night, and ate *so* much food. Marie’s house is absolutely beautiful. It’s a three-story Victorian right on the water, with so many little details that I kept noticing.

I arrived on Saturday afternoon. After a wonderful lunch of lemon chicken, we knit for a while and then ventured out to a local yarn store, Crazy For Ewe. It took some serious self-control, but I didn’t buy anything. The only yarns that really tempted me were out of my budget – like some Schaefer Heather, and some sock yarn that I would have had to get two skeins of for just one pair of socks, and some hand-dyed laceweight from Ellyn Cooper’s Yarn Sonnets that glowed with color and had metal spun in with the yarn. It would make a beautiful shawl, if I could afford it! I did have fun touching all the yarns, and everyone else bought something, so I didn’t feel bad about keeping the store open after its scheduled closing time.

We had grilled salmon for dinner with potatoes au gratin and green beans, and then got back to knitting and spinning! Jinann and I both brought our wheels, and I got started spinning some of this merino. I’m planning to make a three-ply sock yarn with it. There’s eight ounces of the stuff, so no concerns about having enough. I don’t know if I’m spinning tightly enough for sock yarn, so I plan to run the singles through again and put some extra twist in before plying.

This morning, Marie made us French toast with raspberry butter, and there was more knitting and spinning before a lunch of shrimp over pasta with a saffron cream sauce. I finished the second skein of yarn on the baby blanket, which was my goal for the weekend, and got started on the third skein. The Bloo Sock did see a few new stitches, but as it’s meant to be my airplane knitting in a couple of weeks, and it doesn’t have the deadline that the blanket does, I tried not to work on it too much.

What a fantastic time! I hope that we can all get together again soon and do it again!

The ribbing on this new sock is not really working with the pattern. I think I’ll give up on it – I’m not really liking the size 0 bamboo needles, but my aluminum size 0 DPNs are otherwise occupied for the next 90% of the second Bloo Sock.

I don’t mean I’m going to give up entirely, just on the ribbing. My new plan is to knit the rest of the pattern repeat on the bamboo needles as a test swatch, try it on to be sure it fits, then rip it out and begin again with different ribbing on the aluminum needles. Frustrating, perhaps, but I’d rather have this thing look *good* than have a design element that doesn’t really flow. I might just go with a 1×1 rib.

Meanwhile, I’m way behind on the baby blanket. I’ve knit ten pattern repeats in the last three weeks, rather than twenty-one as I should have been doing one per day. I’m not getting as much done in the carpool as I’d hoped, but the due date is only a month away so I’d better get cranking on that!

Today I attended a six hour sock class taught by Cookie A., hosted by Nature’s Yarns in Fairfax. It was a lot of fun! It was half lecture and half working on our socks, first finding a stitch pattern, converting it to be in the round if necessary, charting it out, and figuring out how to apply that pattern to something that’s roughly the size and shape of a sock.

Cookie talked about a lot of the little details that make a good sock into a great sock, like how to adjust when some pattern stitches (like cables) take up more yarn than others (like ribbing or lace), where to hide increases, how to decide which stitches go on the top of the foot and how to deal when your chosen stitch pattern doesn’t neatly fit anything you want to do.

I had swatched the yarn for this sock on size 1 needles, and was getting nine stitches to the inch. After some poking and prodding and hrrm’ing, I decided that the stitch pattern and the yarn both would benefit if I went down to size 0… but my only set of size 0 DPNs was already occupied, so I bought an emergency set in bamboo. Sixteen rounds later, I feel like I made a good choice (and that the socks I make will actually fit me).

What I really found fascinating was how much of the lecture portion of the class seemed to be permission to play around with stitch patterns, to make adjustments, to change and work and fudge things until they’re really yours and really right. I have a tendency to follow patterns fairly closely, and I know some other knitters who do too. I wonder how many people walked away from today feeling a sense of freedom that it’s okay, they *can* change whatever they like.

P.S. I bought a copy of the Rhiannon pattern and Cookie signed it for me!

Yarr! It be International Talk Like a Pirate Day, me hearties! I would cast on for a pirate-themed project, but I have too many on the needles already and another slated to begin on Sunday. I’ll just have to settle for saying YAR(n) every so often.

Earlier this summer I set Mom up with the pattern for the Ostrich Plumes scarf that I’ve been working on. She admired it quite a bit and wanted to make a stole for herself. Unfortunately, because most of her knitting time is in the car or in front of the tv, she was finding it a bit too complicated. She asked if I knew of a less complex pattern, and after a quick search I sent her the English version of the Upstairs stole. Hopefully that will work better for her!

Also speaking of Mom, her birthday is coming up this week. I’m giving her a certificate for a pair of hand-knit, custom-fit gloves. If she doesn’t pick the pattern, I’ll probably choose something out of the Selbuvotter: Biography of a Knitting Tradition book that I recently bought.

As for cameras, I’m leaning towards getting the Canon PowerShot 870IS. It seems to have gotten the best reviews, and it fits into my price range fairly well. I would really like to show you some of the works in progress that I’ve got, so unless my old camera miraculously reappears, I’ll probably be ordering the new one this weekend.

There are thirty miles between the office and the strip mall parking lot where my boss and I meet to carpool. It takes about forty minutes to drive that distance, during which time I can knit three rows, or 75% of one pattern repeat, on the baby blanket. I can knit faster than that when I’m not in the car, but I have a tendency to get headaches if I don’t look up between stitches to watch the scenery go by.

It has been too dark, or I have been too tired, to knit on the way to work. We meet at 06:30. The sun is barely up, and the days are only getting shorter. Perhaps I’ll give the morning knitting a try tomorrow; 75% of a pattern repeat per day is not going to get the blanket done very quickly at all.

I cast on for the second Bloo Sock and knit the first four rows of ribbing. Unless I knit on it with every spare moment I have, it will not be done by mid-October when I hoped it would be done. The blanket has a much firmer deadline, which means that I have to focus on it instead of the socks.

And speaking of socks, I’m starting to get really excited about the class on Sunday with Cookie A. There’s even a socktailcocktail party afterwards! It’s going to be so much fun. I can’t wait to get the pattern knit and written up so that I can share it with you all!

Unfortunately there will be no new pictures for a week or so. My camera has gone missing. I think it may be lost and gone forever. I will be replacing it, almost definitely with another Canon PowerShot, as soon as I decide which model I like best.

I know that knitters are exceptionally nice people, but it’s always great to have that re-proven to me.

After I finished the first of the Bloo Socks last week, I had the bright idea to weigh it. Then I weighed the remaining yarn. Then the sock again. Pirate-Husband came home and asked why I was cursing, so I weighed both the sock and the remaining yarn for him, being sure to zero the scale first.

The next day, I spent several hours contacting yarn stores to try to find another ball of the same color and dye lot. I’d originally ordered the yarn from WEBS, but they were sold out. There was someone on Ravelry with a ball up for trade or sale, but I contacted her mere hours after she had sold it, and she hadn’t yet updated her stash. I called all the local stores and wrote emails to all the ones on the internet which offered Trekking for sale.

Several stand out as deserving of recognition for their help:

Romana from Yarn Cloud, who called around in search of the right dye lot for me, even going so far as to contact Skacel to see if they had any more left (they didn’t, but still).

Pat from Yarn Barn, who forwarded my emailed plea for help to a mailing list of yarn store owners, so that the request would get to more people.

Judy from The Knitter, who did have the right yarn and immediately set it aside for me! It arrived today, and I am so happy! It’s all I can do to keep myself from casting on right now, but there are some non-knitting-related things that I need to take care of before I can get started. (Like dinner. Darned inconvenient, having to eat several times a day. Cuts into my knitting time.)

Pictures of the first sock will be available as soon as Pirate-Husband gives me my camera back.

The yarn is beautiful, and the lace pattern is beautiful, and they complement each other beautifully. There is just one problem… if I knit this sock top-down, the pattern will be upside-down. I’m taking a top-down sock designing class.

Just one thing to do, or so I thought – design a toe-up sock with this lace pattern, swatch another yarn for the top-down sock class, and do something else altogether. I figured I would try again with this Tess Super Sock & Baby yarn in amber. There’s 450 yards in the skein, which should be enough for a good-sized pair of socks, I told myself.

And then I showed the swatch to Pirate-Husband. He looked at it. Turned it upside-down and right-side-up again.

“So it will be upside-down,” said I, “if I knit a top-down sock.”

He turned the swatch over a few more times. “I think it looks really good upside-down,” he said. “The points should go right down the center of the foot. It’ll look just fine.”

With commentary like that, how could I do anything but continue with the original plan? So this will be the top of the foot panel. He’s right. It’ll look just fine.

I’m swatching this yarn from Ellen’s Half Pint Farm for the sock class I’ll be taking this month, and it is absolutely gorgeous. The color shades in very subtle ways, which I think will be perfect for the lacy pattern I’d like to use. It’s a twisty bouncy squooshy delight at nine stitches to the inch on US 1 needles, and I’m excited to be designing socks with it!

I’m testing out a stitch pattern that my mom used to make an afghan over thirty years ago. I’m only six rows into the pattern so far, but I have greater respect for her as a knitter, knowing that she made an entire afghan like this. I’m only working the pattern over 25 stitches; she had a couple of hundred! Her “Big Blue Afghan” is still in good shape, and I still curl up underneath it when I visit my parents in the winter.

I made sure to split the yarn into two equal balls (thank goodness for having a kitchen scale) before I even got started. Wouldn’t want to run out of yarn before the second toe again!

Last night I went to SnB for the first time in six months. It was so good to see everyone again! I’d like to try to get back there more often, if possible. The timing and location aren’t so great for me, but I love being surrounded by two dozen awesome knitters. I got one pattern repeat done on the baby blanket while I was there, which is half of what I’d hoped to accomplish. The pattern row wasn’t too hard to do even with all the conversation and distraction, which pleased me.

I gave some thought to the sock design I’d like to make up, and I think the lace pattern I originally had in mind might not work. The pattern is a multiple of 24 stitches plus one, which would mean having it repeat three times around the sock. How would that work over the instep? I’ll swatch for it just in case, but it might not be the best of ideas, so I’ll go to the design class armed with a couple of different stitch patterns.

Pirate-Husband continues to be awesome. I took out the yarn that I’m going to use in the sock design class, and was fussing with the scale and ball-winder. “What are you doing?” he asked. When I told him that I was splitting the skein in two and winding it up, his first response was “But the class isn’t for three weeks! Should you be winding the yarn up now? It isn’t good to have it under tension.” I love that he knows these things about my hobby and that he’s so supportive, but I reassured him that three weeks of being wound up wouldn’t make much of a difference to the yarn.

The first Bloo Sock is almost complete. I hope to get it done tonight so that Michael can try it on this weekend. I am a little anxious for it to fit well, so I can knit the second sock without worrying that I’m just going to have to rip it all out and start over. Anyway, I’m meeting up with him in Philadelphia to do touristy things and drink beer. The women at SnB last night were recommending Philly yarn stores to me. I may try to resist, as I’m still supposedly on a yarn diet!