Steadily on

But.

I have made significant progress on that hat.  Not only have I completed the cuff, but I’ve even changed colors.

Only six more inches to go!  Which means I might even finsh tonight.  Then I’ll order the wool for the shawl I want to do next – I found a lovely lacy cable wrap, which therefore combines two things I want to learn.

“It” is the wool/alpaca watchcap I’m knitting for my husband.  I don’t know how many times I’ve restarted it, I don’t know how many times I’ve ripped it.

I did some knitting on the train on the way home from dinner with the inlaws, and I got to this point where it just looked wrong. I tried turning stitches and dropping and redoing stitches and nothing helped.  So I put it away, and took out the socks again. 

When I got home, and frogged back, I found out what had happened – I’d turned it around or inside out or something and was knitting in the wrong direction.  Since it’s a k1p1 rib, that’s not hard to do.  I got the stitches back on the needle and recounted and started knitting and missed some stitches I’d dropped when reinserting the needle.  So I had to rip again.

On the plus side, I’ve been experimenting with a new way to wrap the yarn around my left forefinger, so that the working yarn is in front of the finger, not behind it, and it’s working better – I don’t need to rewrap so often. It makes traditional purling a little harder, though, but I seem to have found a solution.  My purls are mounted in the opposite way and I purl through the back loop, as if I were knitting in reverse.  This produces an untwisted stitch that’s very, very easy to do.  This will probably not work for lacek, but it’s very nice for this rib.

I also purchased two skeins of Patons Kroy  solid grass green sock yarn and a pattern book with two shawls I’d like to make – one simple cable wrap and one more daunting lace.  After T”BA, I’m going to get the DK weight suggested for the first wrap and hope to get it done before Rosh Hashanah.  I’m thinking about Knitpick’s Classic Merino Fog, since that will go with everything and be elegant besides (and cost effective.)

I got a solid color for the socks so I can do a lace pattern.  Funny how I have to be assured I’ll have something to do right away, isn’t it?

There were 5 US 0 Brittany Birch 5″ dpns. And they were fine – a tad grabby, but they were easier to manage. Only problem is, I have strong hands and I grip hard. So, I broke one. In my hand.

I rescued the stitches and knitted it all back onto the 7″ bamboo dpns, which are bent because, well, strong hands, hard grip, but not broken after two socks. And a friend told me that Brittany will replace the broken needle for free, so I’m taking advantage of that.

This is the state of the current sock (I can stop any time I want to. Really.)

I like that colorway in terms of knitting – the bright, crayonlike colors are fun. There’s also a bright green stripe in there that should show up soon. But in terms of wearing – I wear skirts. Always. The only exception is when I go to my martial arts class, and then I only wear the uniform pants in class (or under a skirt.) I can’t flash bright socks under a pants leg – if I wear them, they will be seen. This might work at an SF convention – in fact, it will work at an SF convention – but in the real world? Not so much. If they come out well, I’ll donate them to Interfilk.

You’ll also notice my continuing affair with stitch markers. In this case, it’s color coding as well as counting – the top of the foot is in a k3p1 rib, the sole is in plain stockinette. The pink rings are the top; the blue are the bottom. The locking stitchmarkers are reminders, too. This is necessary because I decided the socks would look better if I purled the last stitch on the sole, just for symmetry. I tried to show stitch detail, but it didn’t work well. Anyway, when the locking stitch marker comes up, I know it’s time to purl the last stitch before changing needles.

But those are such pretty colors.

I’m also knitting a hat for my husband. It’s slow going because I keep getting it wrong – math and the needles and just the knitting. I must have begun this four or five times. It’s to be a watch cap in a k1p1 rib, in two colors – burgundy and denim.

This is Berocco wool/alpaca blend, and it feels just lovely to knit. And, yes, not only are there markers every ten stitches, but for reasons entirely obsessive, I had to alternate colors. It was imperative. This 92 stitches because my husband has a yooge head 25″. And I’m still not sure it’ll fit.

And, well, they look like a first pair of socks by a brand-new knitter.

As you can see, they do not match precisely – I didn’t even try matching the stripes, and my tension changed. I did try to match socks, not measurements, but, well, things happened.

The feet are plain stockinette; the legs are a 4×4 check, which I think now was too busy for self-striping socks. Since they’re toe-up socks, I used wrapped short-row toes and heels, and I must have done each one at least twice if not more often. They still left holes on the purl side.

On the plus side, the stitches are actually nice:

And they are wearable and fairly comfortable sock-like objects, which is the goal for the first pair.

I will make the feel of the next pair longer, so that heel feel more in place, and I’m going to do Yarn-over short rows – I’ve already practiced them on worsted and larger needles, and they seem to work.

I’ve started the second pair and I’m still wrestling with Jonathan’s hat.

It’s been a week, but what a week it was.  I’m finally doing the leg of the second sock.  Soon, I will be finished with my first pair!  Wow.

And, yes, I knitted even in the blinding heatwave we’ve experienced this week.  It’s just great for the bus.

I have discovered though, that sometimes it’s best to actually watch tv instead of knit – saving the knitting for the commercials or just not bothering – at least until I can do it without looking.  I figure that’s a couple of years down the line.

Also – after this is done and before I start the next pair of socks (with my new 5″ Brittanys), I’m going to knit the tiny Knitty Practice Sock.  I think I probably prefer the short row heels because they look more…heel like, but I’m going to try this traditional top down sock.

I’m also going to keep trying those short rows.  I have most of it licked, but those purl wraps…maybe I’ll do yarn overs next time.  I’ll practice that first in worsted, though.  Next pair will be, I think, a k3p1 rib because it’s also a striped yarn, and I’ve realized a simple pattern works better. 

And I’ll get a varigated or heathered (I think heathered) sock yarn next and do lace.

I really don’t mind ripping, but last night might have set a personal record.

I’d gotten about two inches knitted on my husband’s watch cap and something looked small to me.  So the night before, I put the hat onto some yarn and he tried it on.

It was too small.  He could get it on, but it was too small.  He didn’t complain – he didn’t want me to undo everything, but I knew I had to.

I knew even more when I put it back on the needles, and there were five accidental yarn overs.  And this is a real problem because I’m working on the cuff – it’ll be turned up and those mistakes will be visible.

So.  I ripped.  And I cast on again, with 92 instead of 80 stitches, and for some reason I couldn’t keep the stitches straight on the needle, and I tried a very silly thing of knitting in all three ends and it was a mess, so I did it all over again.  And then it turned out I’d purled when I should have knit, and the entire 1×1 ribbing was off, so it was ripped again.

This time, I opted for my old reliable long-tail cast-on, using one of the lengths for the two-strand to measure against, although I did have a couple extra inches left over, which is Just Fine.  And, this time I hauled out my stitch markers.

Have I mentioned  how much I love stitch markers?

9 batches of ten plus two more, each separated by a ring, and the last two from the first ten by a white split ring.  If I make a mistake, it’ll probably be only in a single batch of ten, so much less tinking.  And if the batch doesn’t end on a purl, I know something is wrong.

Okay, I made a couple of mistakes – one batch had eleven stitches in it (it ended on a knit, and I counted and that was the problem.  So I decreased.  And that thappened a second time and I decreased again.  But again, I’m much more relaxed about it.

And wool/alpaca?  Feels so wonderful to knit with that I don’t mind knitting again and again.

As in the nice toe I made for the second sock?  Well, that tension thing turned out to be a problem – when I knit at a more normal one, it contracted greatly – and way back in the short rows, I found I had a whole row of purl where there should have been knit. 

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Everyone who sees me knitting asks who the socks are for.  Because no one knits for themselves, right?

The socks are for me. Not because I’m selfish, but because they’re the first ones ever.  This means they’re the practice socks, the learning ones.  No one should have to wear them but me.  Yes, I’m trying to make them pretty, so I’ll be proud to wear them, but the fact is, I’m also going to wear them with high-top shoes, so very little will actually show.

As proof – sock 1.2  is looser than sock 3.2 at the same point, so it’s somewhat larger. It’s also softer.

This is not surprising.  The first sock had twisted stitches as I relearned how to knit and purl, which makes it denser, plus this was the third time I was going to wrestle with short rows and fail.  I was tense, and my knitting tightened.

I was relaxed this time, so looser knitting.

This is because of the stitch markers, which broke the stitches down to manageable numbers.  Instead of worrying about 32 stitches, I only had to think about 8 stitches at a time.  And counting eight is easy – just divide them in the middle and there are four and four, and most humans can count four at a glance. 

And they stayed put while the spilt ring moved, so I never lost track of my wrapped stitches.  More than that – since I would be wrapping 9 on a side, it was easy to see when it was time to turn the toe – the last wrap stitch was on the other side of the ring marker.  I designed away the biggest problem I had with short rows.

Oh, there were problems – the short rows kept slipping off the needles since I did all this on the subway and in my doctor’s office and later on the ferry boat and then on the bus, but I find it easy enough to pick up.  And I knitted an entire row I should have purled, and I spent some time tinking each stitch, reknitting it and then knitting it.  I’m guessing there’s a better way, but I didn’t want to rip and I’d have had to knit each stitch twice anyway.

When it came time to put the work on four needles, I decided I wanted to keep counting easy – I picked up and lost stitches all the time in the first sock.  So, there is now a tiny ring marker on each needle, dividing each one into two batches of 8.  I just pull harder when I go past it, as I do when I change needles.  This was very helpful when I picked up stitches to close holes – when I decided it was time to decrease, I knew just where to do it, because I had two batches of nine. 

So, yeah, relaxed.  Nice.