MarQ1

Please refer to last year’s post for the same day, and increment by one.

In the last two and a half weeks I have completed two knitting projects: a pair of socks and a scarf. Each project has used about a skein and a half of yarn. In the same period I have purchased enough yarn to make four pairs of socks, two hats, a scarf and a lace shawl.

And I have no doubt that I’ll buy more before the week is out. I’m not entirely happy with the laceweight.

I know I said lace is next, but I picked up Nancy Bush’s Knitting Vintage Socks (Interweave Press, 2005), and now I want to do socks again. I can do both. Besides a shawl won’t fit conveniently in my desk drawer at work. Socks are portable if nothing else.

I also picked up some Brittany Birch dpn’s and some Crystal Palace bamboo dpn’s. I like the shortness of the Brittany dpn’s, but like the finish on the Crystal Palace ones. Both outclass the Clover bamboos by far.

After I got in today from buying yarn and needles—it was a beautiful day for doing so—it was clear that I needed to organize the stash again and clean up all the loose bits of yarn, the notions and the needle sets lying around. I wound almost all of the hanks of yarn into balls—fourteen of them. Took forever. Most of it will become socks. Rather bright socks.

Will a Seal-a-Meal work for yarn?

Off to Boston tomorrow.

Day two of my vacation and it finally stopped raining. Around three o’clock it was nice enough outside to open up the apartment and let some air in. Rain again tomorrow. It doesn’t look like I’ll be biking this week, as we’re driving up to Boston on Wednesday and then out to Ptown on Friday and coming back on Sunday.

I’ve Kitchenered the second toe and woven in the ends and I have these:

Notice that they don’t actually match. At least the swirl is in the same direction. The cause is the use of two different hanks of Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock, in Camouflage. At first I thought it might be my gauge, but the pattern is consistently different and one sock doesn’t feel looser than the other. One foot is bigger than the other, but that’s another issue.

What to Do Next Time

1. Try to get two socks out of the same skein.
2. Try a different rib. K2p2 is not my favorite.
3. Stop the rib at least an inch and a half from the heel flap. Ribbed ankles look puffy.
4. Knit the heel flap in a denser stitch.
5. Use 2mm-2.5mm dpn’s (#0 or #1 US). I used 2.75mm and the fabric is looser than I would like.
6. Use shorter dpn’s that do not have the manufacturer’s name stamped on them. The yarn occasionally snags on “Takumi”, and a seven-inch needle is a bit much for 14 stitches. One of the idle needles would occasionally get caught in the sock as it got longer.

Next up, something lace. Something done on one or two needles, not five.

• • •

I’ve been cleaning up the posts that I imported from the old Blogger blog, consolidating all the images on to this server, turning off the comments—all I ever get is spam on the old stuff—and standardizing the HTML. It’s a geeky thing to do, but what do you expect.

Tonight’s dinner was inspired by an old post, Tamale Pie. The picture looks really good and it’s been over a year since I made it, so that’s what I made for dinner. Not quite the same recipe, though. Rather than use cornbread mix, which was too sweet, I made my own cornbread batter, halving the sugar. The flavor was wonderful, but the result was a bit more rustic. To make the dish, you spread half of a double batch of batter on the bottom of a baking dish, spoon the cooked and still hot meat filling on top of the batter and then cover with the remaning batter. The homemade batter was significantly more responsive to the heat of the filling than the the packaged mix. Before I could get the dish in the oven the bottom layer had risen to double its volume and threatened to spill the meat and top layer over the rim. I pushed it all back toward the center, but lost some of the asthetic appeal in the process.

• • •

Yesterday I dealt with the offensive Silk Garden. I wound up all the excised lengths and laid them out so:

I found the ends that most closely matched, felted the ends together and wound it into a useful ball. It weighed in at 26g on the kitchen scale, which is half the weight of a full skein. The scarf could have been another 16 inches or so longer.

Bedtime. I have to take the car in early for inspection and service.

Thus I name the camouflage socks, for the number of times I have ripped back the heels. Twice this morning alone.

And the sock is coming along nicely too.

I took a short break from the socks—mainly because it’s time to count rows to check the rib length—and produced the above-pictured scarf, which is Edgar from the Fall, 2005, Knitty. It was fast, relatively easy, and watching the color changes in the Noro Silk Garden saved the garter stitch from boredom (I don’t like garter stitch in scarves).

What I hated about the scarf was the Noro, specifically the poor quality control (color 226, lot A2). The point of this scarf, besides the simplicity, is the gradual change in color that one should expect from the Silk Garden. Every scarf should flow and be unique. The first skein had a knot in it, which apparently is not uncommon. The shift in hue between the two yarns was slight and I cut the knot and felted the ends together with no lack of continuity. I was able to feft the end of the second skein smoothly while only loosing a couple of yards. I thought this was fairly lucky. The second skein was a disaster. Halfway through there was the ugliest felted join between a darkish green and a beigeish grey. The color change was abrupt and the felted part was twice as thick as the rest of the yarn. I had to discard 60 ft. of yarn—I measured it—to get the colors to match up again. Then, one half of one repeat shy of the eleven I wanted, I ran into another knot. These two colors were on opposite sides of the color wheel and there was nothing remaining in the skein that could be blended with the light pinkish beige being worked. I had to frog back and finish up with the tenth repeat.

I’m still quite p—ssed, and I don’t mean drunk.

This is what never made it into the scarf.

If I had been making a felted bag, or something else large where the color changes were less of the point, I might have shrugged it off, but this just made me mad.

I made this scarf mainly because it was a small project where I could try out the Noro Silk Garden, which many people seem to like very much. I didn’t even have a recipient in mind. Well now I know. I’ll need a very compelling project that’s not dependent on the even color changes to convince me to use this yarn again. And if the project’s not dependent on the color changes, why bother with something so expensive?

I gave the scarf to my coworker A—, who, not having to deal with the yarn herself, wasn’t prejudiced against the scarf and liked it anyway.

If the Noro Blossom I just bought has knots, it’s going up in flames.

One reason this scarf was just a brief interlude between sock knitting was because I got a software upgrade at work Monday morning. My PDA stopped sync’ing and the install trashed all my SQL-dependent applications. I live on SQL, so this wasn’t a good thing. Half a day with tech support, remote and in person, and I finally got my SQL back, but the Palm still won’t sync. Knitting was about the only thing that could be done.

And I missed an appointment this afternoon because my Lotus Notes calendar refuses to remind me of anything. Usually, my PDA does that.

I slid a sl2tog-k1-p2sso over one stitch to the left ten or so rows back, so I’ll be a froggin’ instead. Not the sock; something else.

It was a lovely weekend, by the way. Got in some biking and some more potting and tossed the pencil cactus I hated. And still managed to fit in 7 hours at the office. Loser that I am.