The Knitting Pirate

Last night I gave in to further temptation and started a new project – the second pair of Fleep-Tops, slightly larger than my pair. I struggled with my notes and the math for a little while until I realized that I was making it much more difficult than it really needed to be: mine were sized down from the smallest size, but these can be knit following the small size of the pattern. I’m using Cigar from Knitty, and then I’ll add mitten-tops a la Gnomittens.

There’s a method to my madness. I don’t need to start a new project now… but these are for Michael, and he’s visiting this weekend, so I can conveniently try them on the live model, instead of guessing at the size and hoping to get it right.

I’ve got the cuff done (right size! woo!) and now it’s on to the gussets. Hopefully I don’t have to make too many edits and adjustments. Maybe this will be something I only knit on when he’s visiting… as long as I can get them done before next February.

P.S. He didn’t sucker me into anything. It was all the yarn. I could hear it calling me from upstairs. *sigh*

I’d been putting off writing out the pattern for the Sibling Socks for too long. There were a few portions of my notes that made sense to me, but I knew that I’d have to be more clear if I wanted to share the pattern. So after I made myself sit down with my notes and just write them out already, I felt that I deserved some kind of prize for getting the pattern published and released into the wild.

There are some things I’m already wondering about – should I have made the heel flap longer on the larger size, or is that the kind of thing that knitters will adjust based on the sock’s recipient? Did I describe what I meant clearly enough? Are there any horrible mistakes or typos? I’m sure it will be just fine, and if it’s not, then surely the first few people to knit the pattern won’t hesitate to let me know if I’ve made an error.

My reward for publishing, with some poking from my sister the Ninja, was to cast on for a new pair of Jaywalkers with the Felici Time Traveler yarn. First, I figured out that if I wanted the socks to match, I’d lose the least amount of yarn by starting with the red stripe. Then I cast on and worked on the cuff while we watched Saturday Night Live. I knit while we watched the F1 race in Monaco, I knit while Pirate-Husband watched the Mazda MX-5 race at Virginia International Raceway, and I knit (and drank beer) while he played Assassin’s Creed 2. I haven’t had a whole day to just sit around and knit in a long time. It was lovely.

I like the Felici yarn, but I’m not yet sure if I love it. It is soft and it smells nice, but it feels just slightly thinner than what I think of as ‘standard’ sock yarn like Regia, Lang, or Lana Grossa. So far I’ve had minimal trouble with it being splitty, even in working the double decreases. The real test will be how well the finished socks wear, but they’re going so fast that it won’t be too long before I find out. (The socks are further along than this now, but it got too dark to take good pictures.)

This snugly-fitting ribbed sock design grew from a shortage of fine-gauge sock patterns. I was working with Trekking XXL to make a pair of socks for my sworn-brother Michael. When I swatched on size 0 needles, I got an gauge of 45 stitches to 4 inches – somewhat incredible, since most of the sock patterns I’ve seen are written for more like 32 stitches to 4 inches. I decided that I would just design my own pattern for this fine yarn, and I called it “Brother’s Socks.”

After I knit the same pattern in a slightly smaller size for myself, they were given a new name – “Sibling Socks” – and I am pleased to be able to share the pattern in both sizes! The ribbing means these would be great gift socks even if you don’t know your recipient’s exact width, since it will stretch to accommodate his or her foot.

SIZE: M [L] (blue colorway #71 shown in size L, brown colorway #90 in size M)

FINISHED MEASUREMENTS: To fit a foot that’s 8.25 [9.5] inches around at widest point.

YARN: Trekking XXL [75% wool, 25% nylon; 100g/459 yards] or any other light fingering weight yarn to get gauge. I needed 1.25 balls of Trekking to knit the larger size, because they’d been requested with longer legs. You could probably get away with only one ball if you make the leg shorter or if you have smaller feet. I made the leg shorter on the smaller size, and had plenty of yarn left over.

GAUGE: 45 sts/42 rounds = 4″ in stockinette stitch

AND ALSO: five US 0/2mm double-point needles and a stitch marker.

Sibling Socks pattern – pdf format

Sibling Socks page on Ravelry.com

Important Copyright Information:

The Sibling Sock Knitting Pattern by Knitting Pirate is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may make copies for your own personal use, but you may not sell copies of the pattern. You may sell the socks you make provided that credit is given to the Knitting Pirate for the design. If you have any questions about what you can or can’t do with this pattern, please feel free to contact the Knitting Pirate.

This is the last yarn I’ll be getting for a while, I think! It is Cascade Heritage Paints in the “Isle of Skye” colourway, and it seems like the perfect colours for Mom. I hope she doesn’t mind the tinges of purple amongst the blues!

I plan to make a simple ribbed sock, 64 stitches around, since my 64-stitch socks fit her just fine. The only measurement I need to get is the length of her foot, and then I’m good to go – as soon as I finish some other projects! (Psst, Mom, can you measure your foot for me please?)

It is becoming more difficult by the day to refrain from casting on for a new project! I’m doing my best to hold out but I don’t know how long I can manage…

KnitPicks has my vote based on shipping speed alone – I ordered this yarn only two days ago, and here it is. That is amazingly fast! This is the first time I’ve seen the Felici yarn in person, and already I’m pleased with it. It feels very soft and smells deliciously of wool. The only disappointment I have is that the skeins don’t begin with the same colour, so I’m going to have to skip a few stripes of one in order to make matching socks with the stripes properly lined up. It will be incredibly difficult to keep myself from casting on for the new Jaywalkers tonight. I haven’t been this excited about starting a new pair of socks in a while!

When I told Pirate-Husband about this yarn, he quipped, “If you knit the socks for me, then you could be The Time Traveler’s Wife.” *groan* Awful.

I came home from the Maryland Sheep and Wool festival with $40 still in my pocket, but I knew that I wasn’t done shopping. I’d kept my eyes open on Saturday for the perfect sock yarn for Mom, and hadn’t found it – so I ordered the Cascade Heritage Paints from WEBS in the Isle of Skye colourway. It’s the perfect bluesy colours for her, with just enough variegation to be interesting but not enough to stripe or pool. Admittedly, I didn’t look very hard for her yarn at the festival, because I was kind of set on getting this brand. I’ve knit with it before and I trust it to be good. While I’m willing to take risks on my own socks, I’m hesitant to do so when I’m making a gift for someone else. Especially when that someone else is a little bit skeptical about hand-knit socks in the first place. (It’s sad that my LYS didn’t have the colourway I wanted in stock; it’s even sadder that it cost the same to order it from WEBS even with the shipping. Why is the yarn marked up $3.00 at the local store? I want to shop locally, but sometimes money matters.)

Then I went over to KnitPicks to check out the new colourways of their Felici sock yarn, and for the first time, one called out to me and *needed to be mine*. The name of the colourway is “Time Traveler”. I’ve been catching up on back episodes of Doctor Who (why I haven’t watched it before is a mystery to me) and I just had to have these socks. The description makes them even better:

Wear these brightly striped socks whether you are going to the office or traveling through time and space. Time Traveler is a colorful mix of purple, tan, red, gold, ivory, and gray stripes. While you can knit some really really long socks, this colorway will not create socks that are larger on the inside than they appear on the outside.

Even better than the description, my sister the Ninja has bought the same yarn and we’re going to have matching socks! She says the colours are perfect, and she should know, ’cause she’s working on one of those extra-long stripey scarves right now. We’ve decided to both knit Jaywalkers, because then the stripes will be sort of straight (like the scarf) and yet wibbly-wobbly at the same time. This is going to be awesome.

As long as I was already shopping at KnitPicks, I bought a set of sock blockers (in large, for my long feet). I’ve been wanting them for a while, primarily for taking pictures of finished socks. It’s not always easy to get good pictures of one’s own feet!

(a note: the two pictures of yarn are from the WEBS and KnitPicks sites, respectively.)

These pictures are a little smaller than usual because I took them with the camera in my phone. I wasn’t expecting any of them to come out well enough to share, but some did! So here they are.

I’ve always thought Jacob sheep were cool, especially the four-horned ones. Some only have two horns, but these all have four. If I ever have a farm, I’d like to have Jacob sheep – their wool is good for spinning, they are good to eat, and horns could be useful for any number of things.

I’d consider having a couple of alpaca, too, but as they’re primarily fiber animals, they seem a little bit less useful. Alpaca meat was once considered a delicacy, but apparently no one eats it any more. They are kind of scrawny under all that hair, but they’re so cute!

Llamas are also cute, but not on my list. This particular fellow barely moved as I walked around and snapped pictures of him. It was a very hot day, and while he’d been recently shorn, I think he was enjoying the breeze from the electric fan that was aimed at him.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get any good pictures of the baby Pygora goats. Now those are cute little useful animals that I wouldn’t mind having a bunch of – maybe not Pygoras specifically, but goats in general. They’re another smallish animal that gives fibre, meat and milk. I’d also consider raising quail and rabbits.

On Saturday, I went to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. My car turned 25k on the way, which is sort of amazing given that I’ve only had it for thirteen months. I drove up by myself and had a lovely time shopping, aiming mostly for things that I haven’t tried before. After lunch of a pretty good, not great lamb gyro I met up with friends Josh, Efrain, Sam and Jen and wandered around with them for a while. I helped Sam and Jen each pick out a drop spindle from Turnstyles, after looking through the selections at several other booths but not finding the ones that were just right.

This is what I bought:

On the left, eight ounces of Ashland Bay merino in “Lapis”. I know this is really standard commercial top, but it’s also quite nice to spin with, and I liked the colour. On the right, 4 ounces of a 50-50 merino/tencel blend from Bonkers Handmade Originals. I’ve never spun with tencel before, but the colours really shine and I couldn’t resist it.

Two four ounce packages of a merino-tussah-bamboo blend from Bullen’s Wullens. Bamboo is another new-to-me fibre. I was only going to get one package, but they were offering a deal for purchasing two, so…

On the left, a six ounce sampler of Jacob roving from Firefly Farm, another new-to-me fibre. I bought this with the thought that I’d spin each one separately and make some colourwork mittens or a hat. Or both, depending on how much yarn I get out of it. On the right, something I’ve been wanting to try for a while – roving that will spin into a tweedy yarn. It’s Corriedale from a sheep named Lilly, dyed with indigo and iron by Handspun by Stefania, with multicolour silk noil carded in to make the tweeds.

Lastly, eight ounces of merino pencil roving from Pucker Brush Farm. I really liked the colours, and I’ve never spun anything from pencil roving before. I think I’m going to like it! At this point, my backpack was stuffed full and I was (amazingly!) still under the budget I’d set for myself, so I stopped buying stuff. I’m sure if I kept looking, I would have found something else that I loved, but I resisted. We all headed back to Josh’s house to sort and crow over our loot, and so I could teach Jen and Sam to use their new spindles. That’s when Josh reminded me that he’d been holding onto a metric ton of roving from his former housemate, and offered to give some of it to me…

Four giant balls of mystery wool roving, averaging 420 grams each. It was processed some years ago by Frankenmuth Woolen Mill. Much of it was marked ‘unwashed’ or ‘rewash’, but there is very little vegetable matter in it. It feels like it has some lanolin, but a lot less than I think completely unwashed wool would have. If I had known that I’d be getting over 3.5 pounds of naturally-coloured roving, I might not have bought that Jacob sampler to do colourwork! I was also given 470g of alpaca blanket, two in brown and one in white. It’s unwashed as well, with some vegetable matter but not much, and it’s a lot higher quality than the second cuts I had at home to play/practice with. And all of that was only about a quarter of what was there! Sam and Jen each took another quarter, and we saved some for Janis.

It was a lot of fun teaching Sam and Jen to spin. They both picked up the basics of park-and-draft very quickly, and pretty soon Efrain was making a drop spindle from a CD and a chopstick so that he could try as well. Sam offered to buy my Ashford Traditional, Patience, from me – but I’m still not sure I want to sell her! I go back and forth about it. I love how she looks but I don’t spin on her since I got Grace, the Kromski Sonata. On the first hand, I have some emotional attachment to Patience since she was a birthday present. On the other, wouldn’t it be better if someone was making yarn with her?

There’s one love that we all share: yarn. Blog about a particular yarn you have used in the past or own in your stash, or perhaps one that you covet from afar. If it is a yarn you have used you could show the project that you used it for, perhaps writing a mini ‘review’. Perhaps, instead, you pine for the feel of the almost mythical qiviut? You could explore and research the raw material and manufacturing process if you were feeling investigative.

I’m a sucker for sock yarn.

There, I said it. You heard me. I can’t resist the stuff. It’s the first and last thing I look at in a yarn store, and of all the yarns there, sock yarn is the most likely to come home with me. Why? Why NOT! It’s not too expensive, and unlike yarn for a larger project like a sweater or a blanket or a bag, I don’t need to have a pattern in mind when I buy it. I just need to get 100g and I know that I’ll have enough to make a pair of socks. (Unless they’re for Pirate-Husband; then I need 150g. He has wide feet.) Sock yarn is the best souvenir from visiting yarn stores in faraway places, too.

My latest favourite sock yarn has been Cascade Heritage. This is one of their “Paints” colourways, but it is available in solids as well. The feel of this yarn was a pleasant surprise. It’s soft and smooth, I had no trouble with it being splitty, and it knit up into a wonderfully squooshy sock with only minimal pooling. The only socks I’ve knit from this yarn as yet were given away as a gift, so I’m not sure how well it washes and wears yet. Reviews that I’ve read say “very well” and that it can even go through the dryer without anything terrible happening to it – no felting, no pilling, no nothing but getting softer.

I have another skein for myself, in this reds and blues colourway, but I’m not yet sure what pattern I’m going to use when I knit it up. Something simple? Something a little more complex? Not only that, but I’ve got my eye on yet another skein in medium blues to knit a pair of socks for Mom, who surprised me with a request for handknit socks. Those will probably be top down and 3×1 ribbing, for the best fit possible. Maybe I’ll knit the pair for myself that way, as well.

I have enough sock yarn in my stash for 20 pairs.. and at approximately three months for me to knit a pair (I’m slow!), that’s about five years’ worth of sock knitting. Is that going to stop me from buying or spinning more? No way! Like I said… I’m a sucker for sock yarn.

Bring the fortune and life of a past finished project up to the present. Document the current state and use of an object you have knitted or crocheted, whether it is the hat your sister wears to school almost every day, or a pair of socks you wore until they were full of holes. Or maybe that jumper that your did just didn’t like that much…

I think for this one I’m going to have to go with the Fleep-Top Mittens, my absolute favourite knitted object(s) ever. Every winter, I go to visit my sworn-sister, the Knitting Ninja, in Ottawa for Winterlude, and we go to a stew cook-off. Well, one year it was more cold than usual, and I couldn’t eat my stew with heavy winter gloves on, so I took them off. What a mistake! I didn’t get warm again for hours, and I swore to myself that I’d knit a pair of fingerless gloves with mitten tops before the next Winterlude.

I used Jo Sharp Silkroad DK Tweed, and a combination of the Gnomittens and Cigar patterns (both Ravelry links) to get the sizing right. They were finished in a month, and they were absolutely perfect for Canada in February. My hands stayed warm, even though it snowed into my stew. It’s possible that my hands only stayed warm because I had those little air-activated heatpacks in my pockets… and this led to near-disaster for my Fleeps. On the drive up to Canada, I’d stopped at a restaurant which offered Andes Chocolate Mints in a little bowl by the door. I took two and ate one, and put the other in my pocket for later. Then I forgot about it. Well, when you put chocolate and wool and heatpack together in a pocket, you end up with chocolate in your wool…

Fortunately, with some hot water, Eucalan, and very careful cleansing, the chocolate washed out and the Fleeps didn’t felt at all. And the next year, I went to Canada with no chocolate and no heatpacks, and was happily surprised that the Fleeps kept my hands warm enough even in -5C/23F weather. The Fleeps are so beloved that I bought the yarn to make another pair for myself and a pair for my sworn-brother Michael, who keeps eyeing mine with some envy. I just have to finish them before next year’s Winterlude.