At The End of My Yarn

Well, maybe not from hell, that could be stretching the truth a bit but definitely not well thought-out on my part. Just finished the Crystal Socklets from Knitty last night and while I’m pleased with how they turned out, I don’t think I’ll be doing another afterthought heel in a hurry. This was my first time trying that technique, as is called for in the pattern, and I shouldn’t have tried it in the dark gray Kroy I used for the main color. Trying to pick up 28 stitches on either side of a partial row of waste yarn is not the easiest thing to do in low light. I knit the first one in the gallery where the shades are drawn to prevent excess glare on the artwork and the second at home with similarly low light. I did the first heel the way the pattern intended by picking up stitches on either side of the waste yarn by threading a spare needle across the row, then using a second needle to pick up the stitches on the other side, then crossing my fingers and removing the waste yarn. By the time the second sock heel came around I gave the usual method a go then said screw it, I’m going for it, and picked out the waste yarn, leaving the surrounding stitches wide and free, crossed my fingers, and picked them up from there.

They turned out pretty well, I think. The cuffs are a little loose, but there’s no ribbing to keep them close to the ankle. The yarn I used for the heel, cuff, and patterned sections was Cascade Heritage Prints in colorway heck if I remember, and according to some reviews it shrinks a little easier than it should, so we’ll see how it turns out when I give these their first wash. Hindsight would say maybe I should have tested the yarn out before I knit something that gets frequently washed, but sometimes (lots of times, really) I throw caution to the wind and just do it!

Well, no, but it sure seems that way. Guess who flew 500 miles to Maine for a week and neglected to pack her laptop? Also neglected to pack socks, but due to that person’s status as a knitter and the proximity of sock yarn the lack of socks was easily rectified. Sorry. Yikes. I’ll be up in West Virginia for a few days this week, but I assure you I’ll slow down on the packing and go fully equipped.

It’s been a busy week! My father and stepmother live in Brunswick, Maine, so I flew up there last Saturday and stayed the week with them. My stepmother is into fiber as well, and she had been telling me about Swans Island Company so we took a trip up to Northport. Most of the store is dedicated to bags and blankets but they had a room full of yarn. I picked up one marked skein of Natural Colors in Winterberry, a cool-ish red, but fell down entirely in their seconds bins and got a lovely blue and white ikat dyed skein of….something…and two orangey-red skeins of….something else. None of their seconds have labels, and while all are at a discount (hence the falling down) it’s tough to tell exactly what you’re getting. I can tell all three are wool, but the orangey-red is a different type than the ikat dyed. Massive skeins, too. If the marked labels on the other skeins are any indication, I have at least 900 yards of the orangey-red, perfect for a large shawl.

After that, we ended up in Belfast, where I visited Heavenly Yarns. They’ve moved to a different storefront since the last time I was up there, but their old store had a seriously steep staircase leading down into the store, and since the last time I was there was the dead of winter under a blanket of slippery snow, I do appreciate the lack of stairs to tumble down. I try to get yarns I’ve never knit with before when I go on destination yarn trips….uh, I mean visits to see family, funny how they coincide like that, so I picked up Brown Sheep Wildfoote in Mountain Path, a green/grey/black three ply, and also Borgo de Pazzi Bice (website seems to be entirely in Italian) in a tonal brown and white, reminds me of lichen. Also grabbed another skein of On-Line Supersocke Norweger Color II in a gray/blue/white self-striping that brings to mind Scandinavian glaciers. Sure, I’ve knit with Supersocke before but often do you take a trip to Maine? And I’ve never been one to listen too hard to my own rules. I also found the holy grail of knitting needles, which for me is size 000 eight-inch long double-points, perfect for a pair of fitting socks at my gauge.

The week wasn’t all about yarn, of course. We took a trip to Prospect, Maine, to check out Fort Knox. No, not the one that Goldfinger tried to irradiate, but named after the same General, and the theme song to that movie was stuck in my head the whole time. Pretty creepy place, actually. It’s so dark inside the actual fort, once you get past the earth mound surrounding it. They encourage using a flashlight to explore, so I had the one on my phone on, and with every turn you take you expect ghosts around every corner.

I have to say, once you’ve seen one seaside photo of boats at a dock, you’ve seen them all, but it didn’t feel right not to include at least one. Come Tuesday I leave for the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, one of my favorite (and very haunted) places to visit.

When does a work-in-progress (WIP) become an unfinished object (UFO)? At what point do we stop thinking of a project as something that will eventually be completed, and start thinking of it as languishing, taking up space, stressing us out slightly with the mere presence of such unfulfilled potential?

After much deliberation, I frogged my Wallis Cardigan from Sweater Girls. It’s a gorgeous sweater, but I started it sometime last year and knit about 20 percent of the left front and put it away, never to be picked up again. I think in this case it was less about the pattern itself that made me cast on, and more about the fact that I have an almost full cone of JaggerSpun Maine Line 2/8 that I picked up from Halcyon Yarns. That’s slightly more than 2000 yards of a heavy lace weight yarn, and it was burning a serious hole in my yarn stash. Now, having accepted the reality that I was very unlikely to ever finish the cardigan I’m staring at the cone again, but this time I have an idea. This morning I read an article on colonialism in British manor houses on the BBC and that makes me want to knit something from Victorian Lace Today which coincidentally is full of beautiful photos of English manor homes. Don’t get me wrong, I also learned a lot about colonialism in the English countryside and finding the best way to represent that history without sugarcoating it, but I also want to knit a grand lace shawl. And I have just the yarn to knit it with!

And yes, before you ask, I did thunk my foot down on the desk at the gallery when no one was looking and took a picture. I’ve been working on a pair of Crystal Socklets from an old issue of Knitty. I’m still on an ankle sock kick, and have some pretty prodigious sock yarn scraps to use up, and I went for a pattern that was all about color. Mine are less bright than the colors used in the pattern, but I had some Heritage Sock Prints lying around with seriously striking colors that I thought might be toned down by some charcoal gray Kroy. Regarding the Heritage, it wasn’t until after the trigger was pulled that I read the reviews and apparently it’s not as superwash as it says on the label and it felts pretty easily.

Of course, me being me, the smart thing to do would be knit a swatch and treat it how I would the finished product, or knit something from it that doesn’t need to be washed often, but me being me I chose to use it in a sock. I figure that using little amounts would lessen the heartache of pulling baby socks out of the washer. Don’t question that logic, It made sense at the time.

This was my first go at an afterthought heel, where stitches intended for the heel (in this case, about half the width of the sock) are knit in waste yarn, then after the rest of the sock is knit you pick up stitches from either side of the waste yarn, then remove the waste yarn and knit the heel from there). It was a little dicey in the low light of the gallery picking up a bunch of stitches in dark colored yarn, but it turned out fine.

“Mention the phrase ‘cable knitting’, and most people — knitters and non-knitters alike — envision textured ropes, twists, and braids winding up knitted fabrics. Typically, these cable patterns are vertically arranged, beginning at the lower edge, meandering though a knitted piece, and ending at the upper edge. (…) Do you know, however, that knitter can also create circular, closed-ring shapes with cables? Just imagine: curlicues, rings, swirls, knots — even intricate Celtic-inspired motifs — all richly embossed on knits! Unlike vertical cables, these patterns suddenly appear in the middle of a plain fabric and just as dramatically disappear. Along the way, they twist and turn, seemingly at will, forming either simple, or very intricate designs. Watching each row build on the one before is engaging, gratifying, and fun. ” —Continuous Cables, Melissa Leapman

This book, a follow-up to her previous Cables Untangled, takes the design principle of a cable that is embedded in the the knitting, like placing a motif, rather than started at the edge and cabled to the other end. Which isn’t to say that you won’t find examples of vertical cabled bands in the patterns, but it’s not the focus of the book. There are a wide range of patterns, from several afghans, sweaters, pillows, and place mats, to thickly cabled bags. There is a stitch dictionary at the back, and instructions for the basic cable stitches.

The only issue I have, and it’s very minor and a bit silly, is that the patterns themselves seem unnecessarily gendered. There is a section devoted solely to women’s clothing, and I do wonder why the author thought she needed to label them as such. There are other patterns, directed towards men if the photographs are any indication, and children’s sweaters (of course, the little girl’s sweater is in pink), but I wonder why the distinction? What makes a cable masculine or feminine? Or little-kid-ine? Having said that, to me it’s a pretty little quibble.

The only thing I see missing from this book, pattern wise, is a good cabled sock, but between the billion-and-a-half sock books I own, I reckon I have that one covered.