The Knitting Pirate

Last night I was knitting on the Wibbly-Wobbly Jaywalker when I noticed my stitch count was off; I’d forgotten to make an increase two rounds back. Rather than unknit the three rounds to fix it, I took a deep breath, took up my crochet hook, and dropped down to the wrongness. It took a few moments for me to visualize the right way to pick up two stitches into one, but with some concentration I was able to figure it out. Hooray for intrepid knitting!

After a few more rounds of Jaywalking I decided to begin the second Stripey Striped Sock. It’s been a good six months, if not more, since I finished the first one; it’s probably time for me to grit my teeth, knit the second sock, and get it off my WIPs list. I don’t like the yarn at all, but I love how the colours play out, and I seem to remember that the first sock fit me perfectly. I’ll be very, very glad when it’s done, and I think the two matching/mismatched striped socks will look great together.

I’ve mastered the Figure-Eight toe, I think, since this is the fourth time in a row that I’ve gotten a good toe on the first try, without dropping a stitch or mis-counting. I knit the first two stripes last night, and the next two stripes will see the end of the toe and beginning of the foot, at which point the Second Stripey Sock will become my traveling companion. Whatever else I may think about the Kureyon Sock yarn, it travels much, much better than the softer Felici does!

The Tour de Fleece doesn’t start for four more days, but I’m getting excited about it – perhaps overexcited. I’ve been looking through my fibre stash and deciding on what to spin first, in what weight, with what technique, and wondering just how much of this fluff I’ll be able to get through in twenty-three days. I’m making plans, but of course those might totally fly out the window once I get started.

At the very least, I’m planning on starting with this six ounce sampler of Jacob roving from Firefly Farm. When I was in Canada in February, I admired the earflap hats with colourwork that so many people were wearing, and swore that I’d knit one for myself before next Winterlude. This pattern (link to .pdf) looks cute and interesting and would make use of the three colours of wool that I have to work with. It should be easy and quick enough to knit with only two colours per round. I also like the Norwegian Star pattern (Ravelry link), but that only calls for two colours. If the hat comes out too itchy, I could knit a lining out of a softer wool, or perhaps sew in a fleece lining. Lining the hat would make it extra-warm, which is always a bonus for me.

After that, I’m not sure what will come next. Perhaps some of the older fibre in the stash. I’d like to try chain-plying one of my yarns to keep the colour progression. There’s one that I will spin up thick and quick, and one that’s meant to be socks. I have more to choose from in the stash than I could possibly spin in a month, so I’m not running out to buy more fibre just yet…

Okay, I did it – I signed up for the Tour de Fleece. I joined three teams: Rookies, because it’s my first year; Kool Kromskis, because I’ll be doing most if not all of the spinning on Grace the Sonata; and Lantern Rouge… because with this mysterious ankle injury, I might not be able to spin every day. But I’m going to try my whole-hearted best, and if I don’t make it, at least I have a good excuse.

I haven’t yet decided what fibre I’m going to spin first. There’s so much to choose from – and that’s the main reason I signed up for this crazy thing, because I’m not letting myself buy any more fibre until I’ve used up some of what I’ve got. July’s challenge in Spinner Central is chain plying/navajo plying, so I think I’ll give that a shot. Other than that, I really have no plans past “spin, spin, spin, and spin some more.” I just want to use up some of the beautiful fibre I’ve got and try some new things in my spinning.

Most of what I produce will probably be sock- or DK-weight yarn, because that’s what I most like to knit with. If I finish up the sparkly blue stuff I have, that’ll be more of a worsted-weight – at least, if I want the second half to match the first. And the finn/mohair batts were never meant to be a fine yarn, not with how chunky they are. I’ve been joking for a while that I want to have a “Drunken Spinning Night” during which I have a glass or bottle of wine and spin completely without any perfectionism. Perhaps towards the end of the Tour de Fleece, I’ll be more than ready to do something like that.

The Tour de Fleece (Ravelry link) is a spinning challenge that parallels the Tour de France. The guidelines – not rules, just guidelines – are as follows:

1. Spin every day the Tour rides, if possible. Saturday July 3rd through Sunday July 25th. Days of rest: Monday July 12th, Wednesday July 21st. (Just like the actual tour)
2. Spin something challenging Thursday July 22nd. (The Tour’s toughest mountain stage from Pau up the legendary Col du Tourmalet)

There are different teams that one can join – some, many, one or none. If I do decide to go for it, I would be eligible for several! Team Rookie is for first-time Tour de Fleecers. Team Peloton is for everyone! Team Lantern Rouge is for spinners who might not be able to spin every day of the Tour, but still want to participate as much as possible. There’s a team for Kromski owners and one for “stashbusters” and one for just about every other thing you can think of, including people who use social media and people who like Doctor Who.

Some entrants are setting specific challenges for themselves; some are just setting the goal of spinning daily. If I do sign up, it will just be for generalized using up the fibre stash. I know better than to get specific! If I try to fine-tune a goal, I’ll want to do everything but that. If I just say “spin nearly every day” then I have a chance of making it.

It really does seem like a lot of fun, and I can probably commit to spinning for at least a few minutes every day for a month. I certainly have no shortage of fibre to spin up… and perhaps it would be good exercise for my sore ankles!

P.S. It’s all Janis‘s fault that I’m even considering this. You evil, evil temptress. :)

This may look like the first of the Timey-Wimey Jaywalkers, but it’s actually the second. Yes, I knit the second sock before the first. Time can be wibbly that way. I’m exceedingly pleased that I’ll have just enough yarn to make the first sock match the second exactly; for a while I thought it wasn’t going to happen! It will come out with just a few yards to spare. I’ve cast on for the first sock right after I finished the second, and measured the tails together. They’re within two inches of each other, so I should have some very closely matching socks indeed.

Right now I’m not wearing socks at all; I’m wearing a pair of Vibram FiveFingers KSOs. They’re super-comfy shoes that are about as close as it gets to being barefoot. I love wearing them in the yard and climbing around on the boulders, and also out in public. Some people might think they’re horrifically ugly, but I’ve gotten more compliments on them than complaints. So even if I can’t wear handknit socks with them, they’re still pretty cool. I’d need to knit some really fine-gauge toesocks to wear under these, which is probably not going to happen.

And now, I’m off to work the ribbing of the second – no, the first – Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey Jaywalker.

I have a good excuse for not finishing the first of the Timey-Wimey socks this weekend. Actually, I have two good excuses and one sorry one! The sorry excuse is that I have been taking Celebrex for my ankle injury, and I feel like a zombie. If I sit down, I have a tendency to fall asleep. I did knit for a while and I’ve started the toe decreases. I think that I might have measured properly so that I’ll be able to have matching socks. It’ll be within a few yards, but I think it’s possible. Fingers crossed!

This is my first good excuse: in my efforts to stay awake, I went down into the garage with Pirate-Husband and worked on the next set of our wine bottle lanterns. We got the idea from Gerardot & Co. via Make.

We’d made one of these lanterns last fall, and had some ideas to improve on them for the next set. Our house is right in the middle of Virginia wine country, so we’re going to collect a variety of our favourites from local wineries. To keep the labels from peeling off, we’ve given the bottles a coating of clear polyurethane from a spray can. I drove some sturdy sticks into the ground, then slid the bottles onto them so that the bottoms could be sprayed as well. They’ll get a second coat some time this week. The humidity caused the spray to give a hazy finish, which I actually like better than if they’d come out clear.

The original instructions suggest using a cap to keep the wick dry when it’s not in use. Our first lantern lost its cap in less than a week, and has acquired a few inches of water underneath the oil in the lantern. To keep the cap from getting lost again, I got out “ye old chainmail kit” and made a chain of ten links. An eleventh link was soldered to the top of the cap, then hooked up to the rest. At the other end, the last link was put around the split ring hanger. The cap may still fall off, but at least now it won’t be lost! I discovered that I really enjoy soldering when I took a stained glass class, and this was a fun opportunity for me to play with molten metal again. Pirate-Husband deserves thanks for letting me do much of the soldering work, because I know he likes it too.

Unfortunately, the shiny copper-plated hardware didn’t weather as well as I would have liked. Real copper turns a beautiful green in the outdoors, but this stuff just sort of looked dirty. Rather than spray it with the polyurethane so that it stays shiny, we hit them with a flat black spray paint. Pirate-Husband is going to teach me dry-brushing techniques to make them look properly weathered, and then the clear polyurethane will seal in that look.

And this is my second good excuse: Sunday evening, just as I was settling in to finish the sock toe, we heard a rumbling from outside. Pirate-Husband’s former co-worker had somehow gotten his deuce and a half up into our driveway, and asked us if we wanted to go for a ride. There was really no thinking about it; I dropped the yarn and off we went on the loudest adventure ever! Even though I was wearing ear protection, I still feel slightly deafened. We drove to where the paved roads end and kept going, forded a small creek, saw a small spotted fawn, and had a wonderful time. I hope you don’t hold it against me that as a result I have no knitting to show today – and if you get the chance for an adventure like that, I hope you’ll also drop your yarn and run to meet it!

Everyone knows that the yarn diet goes out the window when a friend announces a pregnancy, right?

I’m pleased that the solid red matches the red in the variegated colourway so well, and I’m curious to try knitting with this yarn. I generally don’t like cotton yarn, but it’s so good for babies’ sensitive skin. This yarn, Cascade Fixation, has 1.7% elastic in it. Will that help mitigate the harshness of knitting with cotton yarn, or will the elastic only make it even harder to knit up?

There’s really not much to blog about the project yet, since the yarn is still neatly wound up just as it came from the store. It will soon become a little hat and a pair of booties, but first I want to finish the Timey-Wimey socks. The baby isn’t due until late December, so I’m not hurried at all.

In non-knitting news (there’s such a thing?) I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I live on top of a mountain, and I thought it might be nice to share the view from my window. It was just luck that I had my camera on the table with me, since it’s usually nowhere in sight. But I’d just taken the pictures of the yarn and still had the camera out. When I saw the deer drinking from my fishpond, I grabbed the opportunity to shoot this quick video. Hope you like it! :)

Two more stripes went onto the Timey-Wimey Jaywalkers last night, and I decided that it was time to try them on.

Eek.

Felici is slightly finer than what I think of as ‘standard’ sock yarn (Opal, Regia, Lang, etc.) and so the sock barely made it over my heel. It fit just fine once I’d tugged and pulled and cajoled it on. What a relief! A good blocking when the socks are done will help with that tightness, so I’m not worried about it at all.

I am a little worried about running out of yarn on the second sock. Because the two skeins that KnitPicks sent started on different colours, I’m going to have to cut out three stripes from the beginning of the second skein in order to have matching socks. I’ve cut it really, really close, and my fingers are crossed that my measurements are on the short side instead of the long side. KnitPicks has totally sold out of the Time Traveler colourway, so if I run out I will either have to beg for a length of the proper stripes or have a mismatched sock toe.

Knitting Vintage Socks has been on my wishlist for quite some time now, and I finally gave in and bought it for myself. While there are several patterns in the book that I could see myself knitting, it was really the Evening Stockings for a Young Lady (Ravelry link) that finally did it for me. These stockings are beautiful; every time I see another pair completed, I want to knit them for myself. For those of you without a Ravelry account, here’s a link to a picture of the socks on Flickr. And here’s another, showing the delightful calf shaping. I love how the ribbing goes down into the heel flap, and the ‘seam stitch’ formed by purling down the center.

Disappointingly, many of the patterns seem to be one-size-fits-anyone-but-Pirate, so I expect that I’ll have to make some adjustments to get a proper fit. Extending the length of a sock foot is easy enough, but what does she mean by “fits a size 7 foot”? Is she referring to length or width there? Swatching will almost certainly be a necessity for most, if not all, of the stitch patterns. I’m not a fan of the “just go up a needle size” theory of enlarging socks, but I can figure out where stitches can be added to or subtracted from a pattern to make it slightly larger or smaller, and I’m not afraid of tinkering with a pattern to get it to fit well, whether the adjustments need to be in length or width. Hooray for intrepid knitting!

There are other patterns in the book that I’d like to knit as well, but I think the Evening Stockings will come first. (After I’ve worked through some of the patterns that I’ve already queued up, I mean.) I’ve been really into the idea of kneesocks lately, even though I know they will take forever to knit, and there are several patterns in this book that fit the bill.

The book includes a variety of heels and toes, with detailed instructions on how to make them. This will definitely come in handy when I’m designing more of my own sock patterns! I think the only other sock book that is missing from my shelf (for now) is Cookie A.’s Sock Innovation. I’m not as into the patterns in Cookie’s book, but its real value is in the wealth of information about designing socks.

In actual knitting news, the Timey-Wimey sock is coming along. Although the Felici yarn doesn’t travel well at all, I’ve brought it with me today to keep me occupied during the farewell lunch that we’re having for a co-worker. We’re a fairly large group, and whenever we go out to lunch together it seems to take forever to get everyone drinks, take orders, and bring out the food. My co-workers might look at me funny for knitting while we wait, but I’m glad to have something to do with my hands that doesn’t involve eating large quantities of breadsticks!