Finished Object: Fall over you

Needle: Size 4 40" circular {Magic Loop with afterthought heel}
Project Name: Fall over you
Yarn: Patons North America Classic Wool Merino in Colorway Harvest - 1 Skein

These knit up super fast! Just over two weeks and they are complete. Love how fast they were and they are really thick and warm - so I suspect I will be wearing these when I am shoveling snow this winter.

These are an amalgamation of several patterns I have used and kind of a standard pattern I use now.

I prefer magic loop at this point with one long circular need, top down, one at a time.

Since this was worsted weight yarn and knit it on size 4 needles I knew it would be dense, so I cast on 48 sts over two needles, removed one needle, and then began the ribbing.

I did the ribbing for three inches, then five inches of stockinette before placing the waste yarn.

Here is a photo that shows the waste yarn knit in. The first time I chose a yarn that blended with the socks a little too well, so I got smart and found a higher contrast yarn the second time.

I always make my heel before I get to the toe, so that I can try on the sock and fit it perfectly as I go.

 

For this sock I added the heel after I had knit about five inches past the waste yarn, then I try on the sock and see where it is sitting on my toe area. I generally like it to be around the top of my pinky toe before I start my decreases.

I take notes as I go through my first sock and try to duplicate it on my second. I do not count rows, so my socks are not a perfect match ever. But I get close and the notes help make it so my heels are not funky. (Although I have indeed made socks and accidentally put a different heel in the second sock. Doh!)

I am really happy with these socks and I have already ordered a pair of liners for (Fox River Wick Dry Coolmax Liner Socks off of Amazon) so that if my feet sweat when I wear these the liners will wick that sweat away and keep my feet warmer.

I am pretty sure I will be turning to these this winter when I am shoveling all that Minnesota snow.

Finished Object: Tropical Feet Wave

Pattern: How I Make Worsted Weight Socks by Susan B. Anderson
Needle: Size 4 double Points
Project Name: Tropical Feet Wave
Yarn: Mountain Colors Twizzle in Springtime (MC) & Nashua Handknits Creative Focus Worsted in Bud Green

I am in love with these socks! They knit up so fast on size 4 needles with worsted weight yarn. I love the silky feel of the Twizzle (85% Merino, 15% Silk content) and I think the Nashua (75% Wool, 25% Alpaca) is a nice contrast texturally to the Twizzle. This was my first time knitting a contrast yarn on the ankle/heel/toe

The ribbing on the ankle is Knit 3, Purl 1, which is different for me and I really like it. The socks are snug - but in a good way. Comfortable and not bunchy.

I had never used this pattern before and I found it was more of a guide than a tutorial. Meaning - I followed it along with her How I Make My Socks pattern (which is for fingering weight rather than worsted) and I also used my go to Sock Recipe: A Good, Plain Sock by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee,
and my own sock knitting experience thrown in to boot.

I am just happy as a pig in mud about these socks and I suspect they will get much wear this fall and winter. They are dense and warm and modeling them in 80°F temps was sticky and unpleasant, so I know when the fall weather arrives I will be seeking these out.

Finished Object: Don't tread[mill] on me Socks

I finished my Don't tread[mill] on me socks!

Yarn: 235 yards of Knit Picks Felici Sport Self Striping in the color "Depths". 

Needle: US 2 - 2.75 mm

Pattern: Loosely based on Sock Recipe: A Good, Plain Sock by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee with an afterthought heel.

 

With all the mistakes and craziness of these socks I was thinking they would be shoved in a sock drawer and forgot about when I finished them, but when I tried them both on together I found I actually really liked them! They are cozy and comfortable and even though they are kind of a mess, I am thinking they will be great with jeans this fall/winter.  

 

 

I did some of the ribbing and most of the knitting on the treadmill. I think I figured out at one point I was getting about an inch and a half of knitting done in a session on the treadmill, and I walk fairly slowly, so about three miles of walking for an inch and a half of knitting. 

I am learning more and more about sock knitting and am getting better at picking up the stitches for the afterthought heel. The first sock I did pick up the wrong leg of the knit stitch all the way across the foot. It was really hard knitting and it twisted the stitches across the ankle .

 

And I don't know what I was thinking on those toe decreases, but when I put them on they felt good and they are really comfortable, so I guess all the weirdness is forgiven. I learned a lot about sock construction and what works for me, and got a bunch of miles on my treadmill to boot, so I guess it's a win win!

 

 

My Three Socks

I currently have three pair of socks on the needles all in various states of doneness and all in different yarn weights. So I thought I would post about my progress a little bit.

1. Don't tread[mill] on me

 

These are my Sport Weight socks and I have knit them largely while walking on the tread mill. I knit heels and toes when I am sitting comfortably somewhere with good light and Internet access. I still need directions for the afterthought heel and suspect I always will. I am finished with sock one and am inserting the heel on sock two at this point. It looks a hot mess - but I have a system. Since I cast on the heel before I do the toe, I take the working yarn (on the toe end) and ball it into the sock and hold it there with my working double point. Then I work the heel with a circular needle using magic loop. This works really well for me. So once I finish the heel I will try it on for length, and then knit the few more rows I suspect I will need to do and then I can try and duplicate the very odd toe decrease I did on the first sock. 

2. Socks Appeal

This is knit with fingering weight yarn and, just like the last sock, I had a standard heel in it and ended up ripping back and going with an afterthought heel. When I did the frogging on this sock I ended up keeping the circular needle in it and have been knitting this magic loop ever since. I am getting close to where the toe needs to be placed, so I will need to insert the heel so I can get the toe placement right. I know I need to be about 5½ inches past my life line in order to get the toe right, but I never trust my measurements and prefer to knit to fit (try on try on try on) to be sure. I think partly because I am knitting so many socks in different weights and I am still fairly new to sock knitting. 

This is still sock 1 and I have been knitting this on the treadmill as well. At this point I think I have done all I can on the treadmill with this - so I really need to insert the heel and measure so I can finish it up and move on to sock 2. 

3. Tropical Feet Wave

And this is my worsted weight sock. Singular. As in - one down one to go. I have to say I am super in love with this sock and am anxious to finish these up. This is the first time I have knit socks with a contrast color for the toe/heel/cuff and I really like it. I like the look and I like the yarn I chose. The only bugger was more ends to sew in, but small price to pay. I think these will really keep me warm this winter. 

So that is my sock status. I make progress on one or more every day right now as I am hitting the treadmill every day. I thought I would have plenty of time at time for heel and toe additions, but I am backing up in that department. I am thinking rather seriously about casting on another pair. I am almost done with the blue socks, I have a lot of toe/heel work to do on the green ones, and I am not really keen on knitting the worsted weight socks on the treadmill for some reason. I knit those while couch surfing and while grilling in the yard - so it seems wrong to get them involved with the treadmill for some reason. 

Stay tuned!

Finished Project: Socksocksocksocksock

I finished another pair of socks! YAY! This is the second pair I finished this year. GO ME!

Pattern: Sock Recipe: A Good, Plain Sock by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
Project: Socksocksocksocksock
Cast on: June 15, 2014
Bind off: July 30, 2014
Yarn: Knit Picks Felici in Building Blocks (288 yards)
Needle: Size 2 Double Points

Am in love with them. This yarn is great and I love striping socks and I love the colors in these socks. I wish this yarn had not been discontinued! The only bummer about this project is that the second skein of yarn had dye speckles throughout the skein, so there was some sort of heathering/speckled look. Kind of tweedy.

The above picture shows what I mean. There was dye splotches through out this skein. Annoying - but I didn't notice it until I was well into the sock and I was NOT going to rip it back at that point!

As much as I love these socks, I am even more in favor of doing an afterthought heel in self-striping yarn. The heels look fine (I did Eye of Partridge), but I really like how an afterthought works with the striping yarn. You don't get the thin stripes around the ankle like you do when you work a more standard heel. But all in love, I consider these a success and am quite pleased!

Don't tread[mill] on me - UPDATE

 

 I thought I would talk about the progress I have made on my "Don't tread[mill] on me" socks. And by progress I really mean I want to talk about how to rip out a heel! Yes. I decided to rip out my heel on these socks and go with an afterthought heel. 

Part of the reason for this is that I am knitting these socks in Sport weight yarn rather than Fingering weight yarn, so I cast on 56 stitches rather than 64 stitches. All fine and dandy, but when I got to the heel area I got a little confused about counts, took poor notes as I went, and realized after I finished the heel that duplicating a "lets just wing it!" heel on a second sock a week or two later would be a bit of a challenge. Especially if I want the fit and look to be similar. So here is my journey to Frog Town. 

Above is the heel completed. I went with eye of partridge for the heel - which I think is very pretty and I like the weight of it. I also think the eye of partridge heel is a bit easier to pick of stitches with. 

 

I grabbed a circular needle one size smaller than my working needle (a size 1 in this case) and a couple of rows below the heel I went around the entire sock picking up the right leg of each stitch.

 

And here you see all stitches picked up on the circular needle. It looks a bit messy with the double points still in, the circular needle, and the line of yarn, but it will look a lot neater in a minute! 

 

Here is a close up of the picked up stitches before the frogging. The legs on the needle are right slanting and there were no gaps. If you see a gap in the stitches as you pick up you want to make sure you didn't miss a stitch. I also count all the stitches when I am done to make sure I have the correct amount. It should match your cast on count unless you increase or decrease for fit or a pattern.

 

Here we see the Double Point needles have been pulled out and the frogging has begun!

 

 And here is my frog pond (pile of ripped out yarn) and my frogging stopped at the stitches I picked up on my circular needle, which acted as a life-line. You will see I use the plastic clip from a bread bag as a bobbin for my yarn left over from my cast on. This keeps the yarn from tangling and fuzzing up while I am knitting my sock, and when I am finished I have a nice length to weave in.

 

At this point I measured the length of my stockinette section to see if I was at a distance that would be easy to duplicate on the second sock. I was at a nice even four inches, so I was good to insert waste yarn for the afterthought heel.

I found a contrasting color of yarn in the same weight (there is no yellow in this sock) and knit on half the length of the stitches (cast on 56 / 2 = 28 stitches) and then I started knitting at the same spot I picked up the first yellow stitch from with the sock yarn as though I never knit that yellow line. 

 

This picture is a little blurry, but you can see the blue line of stitches I knit right over the top of the yellow stitches. You just keep knitting like normal from this point until you reach your toe decreases. Which means I have several inches of stockinette to knit on the treadmill! Yay!

I think afterthought heels are the way to go for treadmill knitting - as you just have to insert a piece of waste yarn at the spot you want the heel, and the bulk of the knitting is stockinette - no messy picking up stitches. I can knit like a crazed beast, and then do the toe decreases and the afterthought heel at night before bed for my "down time". I also really like how afterthought heels look with striped yarn. 

I did place the yarn back on the double point needles I was using since I wanted my sock to be the same tension throughout the sock, and since I used a circular needle one size down from my double points to pick of the stitches. 

Now I am ready for the tread mill!

 

 

Progress report - Socksocksocksocksock

I am trucking along on my "Socksocksocksocksock" socks. I am trying to knit a stripe a night while unwinding before bed. I think I have another stripe or two and then I can make with the toe decreases. Happy to be making progress!

I FINISHED A PROJECT !!!

Project name: Ghoul School
Pattern: Sock Recipe: A Good, Plain Sock
Yarn: GnomeAcres Sparkle Gnome Fingering/Sock in “Smell My Feet”
(You can find Gnome Acres shop HERE)
Needles: Size 2 (2.75 mm) Double Points
Start Date: August 25 2013
Finished: July 6 2014

So much went wrong with these socks - honestly I am just happy to have them done.

♦ Lost notes for Sock one - so had to largely eye ball sock two. YIKES.
♦ I kneeled on one of my needles - so I had to knit a large portion of sock two with one bent needle.
(see the bent needle there? It felt WEIRD to knit every round with one needle bent!)

♦ The yarn on sock two started to feel brittle about two inches past the heel. My feeling is that it was over-dyed and I am a little concerned it will wear poorly.
♦ I forgot I did eye of partridge heel on sock 1 - and did a standard heel on sock 2. Yup - these socks have two different heels. Nice.

♦ The pooling on sock one is vastly different from the pooling on sock two. Is it because I knit these over a year? Is it the yarn? Is it my heel snafu? No idea.

And the fit is just a tiny bit looser than I like.Which is a bummer as I actually did a swatch and did math to get the right fit - debated the needle size and then let the math decide to go with a 2 rather than a 1. If I knit these again in this yarn I would probably use a size 1 needle just to get a bit snugger fit.

I am not in love with these - but have a sense of relief that they are off the needles and finally completed. I wanted a pair of fun socks for fall and Halloween - and I think these fit the bill.

Socksocksocksocksock

 

I have been knitting! YAY! So right now I have three pairs of socks on the needles. I thought I would talk about this pair today. I named the socks "Socksocksocksocksock" because when you cast on a third pair of socks, you know this is the chant running through your head. Obsessed much? Naaaaw.

So the pattern I have been using is Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's Sock Recipe: A Good, Plain Sock. 

I love this recipe - it's well written and it's my go to sock pattern for a good, basic sock. 

The yarn: Knit Picks Felici in Building Blocks. Sadly this is discontinued - but it's a great yarn! I stocked up on it when it was clearanced out.  

Needles: US 2 - 2.75 mm double points.

I cast on 64 stitches over two double points held together to give it some room. You don't want a tight cuff! Then I knit 2x2 rib back and forth for two rows before joining in the round. This allows for the join to not get twisted. For some reason I struggle with joining socks in the round. Not sure if it is the ribbing or what? When I am done I just use the tail to join up that little gap.

I knit the 2x2 ribbing for 1½ inches and then knit 3 inches in stockinette before I hit the heel. 

For the heel I am favoring Eye of Partridge, I think it looks nice and I find the stitches are a bit neater to pick up when I use that heel. On this pair I knit 32 stitches before I start the heel stitches on the last 32 stitches remaining. I did this partly because the blue stripe I was knitting when I got to the heel was only two rounds in, and I wanted one more row of that stripe on the sock to make that stripe a little more substantial.

 So this is where I am at. I dropped a stitch when I was working the heel - so the pattern is a little funky, but I am OK with such things. I really love this yarn and I think I am going to love these socks when they are finished.

I was able to knit a little bit of them on the tread mill which I find really exciting as well! I don't think I would try the complicated bits, like picking up stitches or decrease rows on the tread mill, but I had no problem with the ribbing and the stockinette portion while I was walking, so that is happy news. Knowing I can work on portions of my socks while walking may mean an increase in sock production!

Hot Child in the City

 

• Project Name: Hot Child in the City
• Pattern Name: Cabled Hot Water Bottle Cosy by Alexis Layton. 
• {This is a Free pattern on Ravelry found HERE.}
• Yarn:125 yards of  Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Bulky in the color Wine. 
• Needles: Size 10 double point needles and a cable needle 

My Ravelry project page can be found HERE for anyone interested in greater detail.

I have been wanting to knit a hot water bottle cozy for many years. What could be more comforting then a hot water bottle with a hand knit cozy? So I dug through patterns on Ravelry and came across this one. The pattern is written to have a tie at the top to keep the cozy secure on the bottle, but I preferred the ribbed turtle neck look to the tie down look. I also think having no tie is just more practical for us. Nothing to get lost or separated.

 

The pattern calls for 5 repeats of the cable pattern, but I had a smaller hot water bottle than the one in the pattern, so I did the cable pattern 3.5 times which brought me to the top of the bottle's body. Then I did the k2,p2 ribbing until I was to the to the top of the spout of the bottle, did a knit row as a kind of turn row, and then switched my ribbing to p2,k2 so it would lay nice.

 

I kept ribbing until I had the length of the neck/spout area covered and was back to the body of the bottle, then bound off in the ribbing to keep it nice and neat. 

I am really happy with how it turned out. The yarn is a ball of Knit Picks that was was in my stash for years, so I was able to Stash Bust to make this as well - so that felt good too. 

And I think I may be giving my bottle a test run today. It's so cold out that all the schools in the state are shut down and my boss called me last night and told me I could stay home if I wanted too today. (Uh, yeah I want to stay home!) So it's nearly 11:00 and I am still in my jammies playing on the Internet. Not a bad day after all!

Monkey Mittens 2013

I try to knit a pair of mittens for my niece (aka: "Monkey" ) every Christmas. This is a picture I took of this years mittens before I sent them off.

Yarn: 87.9 yards of Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thick & Quick Stripes in the colorway "Tigers"
Needles: US 10 - 6.0 mm
Pattern: Wool-Ease Mittens by Stephanie Taylor

This is the 5th time I have made this pattern and I just love it. It's really easy and the results are wonderful.

You notice I used 87.9 yards of yarn? The Wool-Ease Thick & Quick Stripes comes in a skein with 87 yards. So yeah - I had to use less than a yard of the second skein. Add to this that I wanted to start the second mitten on the opposite color of the first - and my left overs turned into three balls of just under one skein's worth of yarn. Sort of a bummer, but what are you going to do? If I had made the cuffs a little shorter and hadn't cared about how the yarn lay - I would have been able to do this in one skein. But I was picky about how the thumbs were and I wanted the mittens to be kind of opposite.

Love how they turned out and my niece was happy to get them as always. WIN!

Tree Planting Hat

And I finished a hat! I actually started this back in May when I went up to do some tree planting at my Brothers house. I wanted a simple project to work on in the car and while we sat around after the planting was done and just chatted.

The pattern: Countrywool Rolled Brim Hat on Ravely - or if you are not on Ravelry you can find it HERE.

The yarn: Adriafil Knitcol I used 44 grams which is about 121 yards (111 m) on size 7 (4.5mm) needles. I love this yarn as it does all the color-work for you! So you get to look fancy with no effort. Awesome.

This is the fifth time (at least!) that I have made this hat. Love the pattern. It's just so simple and perfect. My Ravelry page can be found HERE for anyone interested in the notes I have there. The pattern is really easy though and written well. Highly recommend!

Jaded Dreams but Warm Hands

Another pair of mittens finished! I once again used the Wool-Ease Mittens pattern by Stephanie Taylor. This was knit with 100 yards of Brown Sheep Lambs Pride Bulky yarn with size 10 double point needles. These are really warm and the fit is perfect. If anyone wants the details on my project pop on over to my Ravelry page. (I did very minor mods on the pattern - the pattern is pretty much perfect just as it was written!)

I keep making mittens in an effort to stop my hands from cracking and bleeding so much. Sadly - it's not helping too much. I am still struggling with chapped and bloody hands. BUT I will keep trying to wear mittens and moisturize in an effort to stop this.

 

Temperatures are well below normal here in the Twin Cities. It's been cold and the roads have been awful to drive on. Every year I wonder why we live here. It's just bitter cold and miserable. Maybe I will have to look at pictures of my garden from this summer. Summer in Minnesota is awesome. 

Malabrigo Mittens

I finally have a finished project to share! I haven't had a ton of knitting time lately, but Winter is here (it's snowing out RIGHT now) and my hands have already started to crack and bleed, so mittens seem like a good thing to make. Here are the details:

 

Project name: Malabrigo Mittens
Pattern Name: Wool-Ease Mittens by Stephanie Taylor (A free pattern on Ravelry)
Yarn: 85.3 yards (82 grams) of Malabrigo Chunky Yarn
Needles: US 10 (6.0 mm)
Size made: Large

I have made mittens from this pattern several times now. It's a great stash buster and the mittens work up pretty darn quick. It's just hard to go wrong with a chunky mitten! I know knitting a heavy wear item like a mitten from Malabrigo is just asking for it. I suspect these guys will look like pilled up messes before the winter is over, but for the time being I am enjoying these soft and warm mits!. Some times you just have to go for it!