The Knitting Pirate

The first of the handspun socks should be done in the next day or so! I have half an inch more stockinette to knit, then two inches of ribbing. I am so excited to try this sock on and see how well it fits! The down side to knitting a toe-up sock is that after the heel, it’s impossible to try on without putting all the stitches onto waste thread. The needles just don’t give enough room to get the sock on.

Now that the first sock is almost done, I’m starting to have those little niggling apprehensions. What if it doesn’t fit? What if the socks fit, but they felt in my shoes the first time I wear them? What if they wear fine, but they’re accidentally washed? What if they don’t last very long?

I am a worry-wart, but I am doing my best to conquer that tendency. It doesn’t do me any good – the socks will be just fine, they will fit fine, they will wear fine if not as long as socks knit from yarn with some nylon content, and no one will accidentally wash them.

And they will be awesome. Absolutely amazingly fantastically handspun awesome.

I have the yarn to knit Revolution, from the Fall 2005 issue of Knitty, but the more I look at the pattern, the less I actually want to knit it. It’s a cute pattern, but I think I’d quickly get frustrated with the split stitch. Someone’s project notes on Ravelry say that the stitch is hard on the wrists, which is not something that appeals to me at all. And where would I wear it, anyway? I think I’d like a more classic sort of sweater, if I’m going to knit a sweater for myself.

So now I’ve got a lot of Lamb’s Pride Worsted: eight skeins in “Wild Oak,” a rich medium brown, and three more in “Old Sage,” a subtle muted green. And I’ve got a few ideas:

Perhaps the pullover version of Eris would look nice in the brown, or a Ribby Cardi so I could use both colors. Maybe the Monk’s Travel Satchel would be a good addition to my bag collection. I’ve been wanting to make felted bags that I could hang on the wall of my spinning nook to store fiber and tools. A hot water bottle cozy would be great (I’d just need a hot water bottle!) to help keep my toes warm in the wintertime. Pirate-Husband likes to keep the house cold at night, and I usually freeze. The Norwegian Star Earflap Hat (Ravelry link) has been in my queue for some time.

Leftovers can go to make a Coronet or Foliage (or both) hat. There’s also Fuzzy Feet, which don’t take a lot of yarn but look comfy-cozy!

If I wanted to get really enthusiastic and take on a giant project, I could try knitting a Hemlock Ring Blanket. I certainly have enough yarn to make a really big blanket, but I’m not sure I want to!

If all went well, we now have threaded comments up to ten levels deep, so that you’ll be able to reply to other people’s comments in addition to commenting on my posts. Pretty nifty! (Please feel free to test the system.)

I’ve been planning to go to Stitch ‘n Bitch tomorrow, but I’ve had a sore throat for about a week. In the last few days I’ve started coughing. If I’m not feeling better by morning, I’ll have to put it off another week. Phooey. I was really looking forward to it, but I certainly don’t want to infect anyone with this cold.

Next weekend I am taking a quick trip up to Philadelphia, and I’d love to visit a yarn store or two while I’m there. Can you recommend one? Loop is already on my list. I enjoy buying souvenir yarn when I’m traveling. Later, when I knit it up, I can reminisce about my trip. And even after that, when I’m wearing the finished product, I think, “These are the socks I knit with the yarn I bought with Michael in Ottawa, in that neat little shop on Bank Street that’s closed down now,” or something like that. “This is the hat I knit with the yarn that I bought when Janis and I snuck off after dim sum to splurge at Woolwinders. This is the–”

I remember where I bought most of my yarn, actually. Even though there’s so much of it now.

Over the weekend I turned the heel on the handspun sock, using a short row heel with 50% plus four stitches, two from each side. I am curious to see how well it will fit! I am keen on toe-up socks for a couple of reasons: one, that it’s almost impossible to run out of yarn before having something that could be called a completed sock, and two, the math for a short row heel makes sense to me where the math for the heel turn in a flap-and-gusset does not.

In a flap-and-gusset heel for a top-down sock, you have to start by knowing how many stitches are going to be on each side of the heel turn. Every time I try to make it up as I go, I end up with an uneven number of stitches. Fourteen on the left, perhaps, ten in the middle, only twelve on the right – whoops, went too far, rip it back and start over. How do you know how many stitches to work? Is there a simple formula to which someone can direct me, so that if I’m ever knitting patternless (or making up my own) I can just turn a heel without thinking too hard about it?

In a short row heel, you take 50-60% of your stitches. Divide that number by three. Knit to the end, wrap and turn. Purl back, wrap and turn. Do that until one third of the stitches are wrapped and on the right, one third are wrapped and on the left, and one third are unworked in the center – then start working your way back up. Your sides are always even. (These instructions won’t make sense unless you’ve done a short-row heel already. Wendy Johnson explains it wonderfully in her “Generic Toe-Up Sock Pattern“, which is what I’m using.) As long as you pick up your wraps, the short-row heel comes out well every time.

I picked up two stitches in each corner of the heel turn to avoid gaps and holes, and had to fudge the decreases to try to make it work. Now that I’ve taken an objective look at it in the daylight, meh! it’s a sock! No one will know if I don’t point out the stitches to them! They’ll just say “ooh a sock” and I’ll say “Yes, I knit it from yarn I spun,” and the fudged stitch or two won’t really matter at all. Besides, it goes on my foot. Who’s going to look so closely at my foot? (And really, it doesn’t look so bad at all.)

When I pulled up the driveway this afternoon, I could see it on the front steps – my package from Discontinued Name Brand Yarn! I tore it open as soon as I got inside. Wow, this is red. It’s very red. It’s very, very red. I love it, partially because no one expects me to be the sort of person who’d wear something very, very red.

I like doing things that no one expects me to do. About five years ago at a convention, I complimented a friend on her pink cargo pants and added, “I would so wear a pair of pants like that.” Twenty heads swiveled around and what seemed like twenty voices chorused in unison, “You? YOU would wear PINK pants?” …so I went home from the convention and bought a pair of pink cargo capris. Here is photographic evidence of me wearing the pinkness in Philadelphia the following summer.

Anyway, it might be some time before I start the huge task of knitting the Rhiannon socks. I have three pair of socks on the needles as well as some other projects, and at least one piece of babywear queued up (the baby’s not even a glimmer yet, but I know he or she is going to be announced relatively soon). But they’re right up there. I’d like to have them done in time for next September. That gives me a year. I should be able to knit them in a year!

These are them! My new dressier shoes to show off handknit socks! Of course it’s been in the 90s this week and way too warm to wear handknit socks, but I will have them ready for fall. I’m stupidly excited about these. It’s hard enough to find shoes in size 10.5, and even harder to find ones that don’t make my feet look like pontoons, and nearly impossible to find shoes that look good with socks. But here they are! (Photo from Zappos.com, the bestest shoe store on the internet. Free shipping. Free return shipping. A huge selection. I am in love with Zappos but not affiliated with them at all; this review is purely an expression of my happiness.)

If the shoes are as comfortable as a preliminary walk around the house indicates, I’ll buy another pair in brown. They do need heel-grip pads, but most of my shoes do. I have a narrow heel, I guess. When I was a kid I always had to special-order narrow shoes.

If I had normal-sized feet, I think I’d spend half my salary on shoes – but then again, if I had normal-sized feet, I never would have started knitting my own socks, so it’s all good.

I know I said I didn’t need any.

I know I said I would only buy yarn at festivals.

I know I have enough yarn, especially sock yarn, to keep me knitting for at least five years.

But I didn’t buy any yarn or fiber at Pennsic, and yesterday there was a sale on Louet Gems Fingering at Discontinued Brand Name Yarn, which is just the stuff I need to make Cookie A.’s Rhiannon socks. I could not resist the incredible price of $3.49/skein, marked down from $13.95/skein, and so I bought five skeins in *cherry red*, which should be the most awesome color for knee socks ever.

I bought this pattern (the picture is from Cookie A.’s site) back in September, when I attended her top-down sock design class, and I’ve been waiting for the right yarn to show up ever since. Nothing was quite right – it was too expensive, it was the wrong color, it had the wrong feel to it. But now I’ve got the right stuff! It may take me forever and a day to knit these monsters, but I am really excited about them! Doesn’t everyone need a pair of cherry-red knee socks? I’m already daydreaming the outfit to go with them – maybe one of those cute flared black skirts, a blouse with just the right red to match. Most likely it’ll take me as long to find the right pair of shoes as it will to knit the socks, so I’d better start looking for those now. It’s not always easy to find affordable size 10.5 shoes that aren’t terribly ugly.

Pirate-Husband thinks that I should wear them as thigh-high socks with the tops unfolded. I’m not so sure, but he can be awfully convincing sometimes…

With very little complication, the second edition of the Brother Sock is well on its way towards completion. I did have to futz with the heel numbers a bit – how do those numbers work? They never seem to come out even when I try to make them up myself. I bet there’s a formula… or maybe it will just become intuitive with time and practice.

I really like the colors of this yarn, sand and blues and peaches in random striping. It’s Trekking XXL in colorway 90, which Janis gave to me as a present some years ago. I’d started a ribbed sock with it that came out way too tightly, but with 80 stitches instead of 64, it’s fitting much better now! I deliberately made the leg of this one on the short side, so that I won’t run into the same problem as the last time I knit a sock with Trekking XXL. There’s always the possibility of reknitting, if I find I’ve got lots of yarn left over at the end, and if I decide that I really do want taller socks after all.

A note: the full-size pictures are lots clearer than the thumbnails. Click to see!

I hadn’t gotten very far when I realized that without ribbing, the sock was going to be way too large at 72 stitches, so I horrified my onlookers by blithely tearing out the work I’d done and beginning again. Fortunately I got it right the second time, and now I’m knitting my standard 16-loop, 64-stitch toe up sock. I tried to explain by saying that I hated doing gauge swatches and that instead I just knit the toe as a swatch; if it fits then it fits, and if not then I can tear it out and try again. Better to start over than to have a beautiful sock that’s too large for my foot, right?

The socks are warm and soft so far. Even the spots where the yarn was a little overtwisted seem to be all right. I hope they wear well and don’t felt too badly on my feet!

I really enjoyed having so much free time to just sit, knit, and socialize with people I only get to see once or twice a year. While there’s no way I could ever meet a “52 pair plunge”, in which really fast knitters manage to churn out a pair a week for a full year, I could definitely knit a pair in a month if I really put my mind (and all my free time) to it. But then, I’ve got other things to work on as well, and knitting so constantly on top of 40 hours a week at a computer would probably destroy my arms. Still, I admire anyone who can stick to it!

When people hear that I am involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism, they almost always ask if I’ve been to any of the local Renaissance Faires. I have, but the feeling I get from Faire is completely different. At Faire, I am a tourist even if I’m in garb; at Pennsic, I am a part of the event. At Faire, people ask, “I like your (mug/pouch/skirt/necklace), where did you buy it?” At SCA events, people ask, “I like your (mug/pouch/skirt/necklace), did you make it yourself?” There’s an amazing emphasis on making things yourself, on learning crafts and skills. Because it’s an ongoing society rather than a one-off event, if someone’s good at what they do, one can get recognition and even awards for their work.

Every year I go to Pennsic and see the things that people are making, doing and teaching, and it motivates me. I always leave with a feeling that there is so much out there for me to learn, and I have a wonderful opportunity in the Society to be surrounded by people who are willing and happy to teach.

I’ve been talking about learning to dye fiber and yarn recently, and then I thought, why not learn to use natural dyes as well as modern acid dyes? I put a few books into my Amazon wish list, and a few more into my shopping cart. If I don’t see them at any of the Pennsic book sellers, I’ll order them when I get home.

My goal is to cultivate a dyer’s garden and enter my handspun and dyed yarn into an Arts & Sciences display or competition at next year’s Pennsic War.