But now? Now there are over 2300 unread posts. I give. There is no way. I keep not reading any of it because there is no way I can read it all. I’m marking every last thing read and starting over.

I got this job, see, which is sucking up a fair portion of my knit and crochet time, my blog-reading time, my gamer-dork time, my general slacking off time—you get the picture. I have not knitted or crocheted a stitch in at least two weeks.

I know, I know, your heart bleeds for me, having to work for a living and all. I’m a little bit exhausted, though. Working first shift is a major lifestyle adjustment for me, and I sit in front of a computer typing all day, which makes me not so much want to sit in front of a computer and type in the evenings when I get home.

I hope I haven’t missed anything—aw, hell. I know I missed lots. I need to start over again anyway.

I got my computer set up recently—yay! The laptop I was using was driving me nuts. (It overheats. It is a total drama queen.) I also found a box with photos since then, and since I now have a computer that isn’t driving me crazy, I thought I’d go ahead and scan the photo.

(Maybe this way you won’t notice that I have no crafty things to talk about today.)

This was maybe sixteen years ago. I think it will be obvious to anyone who knows me at all that my sister did my hair and the makeup and that my ma forced me to wear that pink sweater. I have never in my entire life willingly worn anything pink.

Not too long ago:

I don’t think I look that much different apart from looking, well, sixteen years older. And a little chubbier than I was back then, though I’ve lost most of the weight I gained in my 20’s. I kinda want my long hair back looking at that photo, but in reality it never looked that good when I fixed it myself and was a nuisance to take care of.

Ooh, that matches my skirt ever so well, doesn’t it? Kit-Kat is, as always, supervising.

This sock is why I am now so intent making starting second socks immediately after the first sock. I crocheted this sock in, oh, 2005? Somewhere around there. That’s how long I’d had the yarn I made the olive stripe socks with recently—I bought two 100g skeins of it on a trip to Pittsburgh. I have this one sock and most of the cuff ribbing of the second sock. Sometime last year I picked it up again and had major gauge issues with the ribbing to the point where I was no longer sure I was using the same hook I’d originally used, though the hook was tucked in with the unfinished project. I put it away again, unable to face frogging those sixty or so rows of back-loop single crochet and starting again. That is a lot of sc right there.

But one of my Summer of Socks goals, now that I’ve unearthed this project, is to finish these socks. When I first found them today I thought for a while about frogging the whole thing, finished sock and all, and making a new pair of knit socks out of them. But then I put the finished sock on, and I just can’t frog it. It fits perfectly, it’s incredibly comfortable, and I love the contrast between the lengthwise striping on the cuff and the horizontal striping in the rest of the sock. (It’s the In Your Shoes ankle sock pattern at Crochet Me, except that I used hdc for everything except the cuff and changed the cuff sizing to fit me better.)

I’ll have to monkey around with different hooks for a while to get the gauge right to keep going with the ribbing, but I definitely want to finish these rather than frog them.

My current pair of knit socks is moving along at my usual less-than-speedy pace. I keep getting faster at knitting, but I’m still nowhere near as fast at it as I am at crochet. (I’ve also been slowed down this week by emergency oral surgery. I’m on the mend now, but I was in a bit of a fog for a few days what with not eating solid food and all.) I turned the heel of the first sock yesterday and am working on the foot now.

In technobabble-ish news, the email address I used to have on the sidebar (yarnification at daisywreath.net) is now defunct. It was attracting a lot of spam. That was never an address that I gave out much, but if that’s the only email address you have for me, please note that there’s a new one over there in the sidebar. (It forwards to my regular address. I always try to do that with addresses I put on things like this blog so that when the spambots inevitably get hold of it, I can just kill the old address and set up a new one.) I’d also like to point out here that Project Honeypot has a great script that will help obscure your email address to keep it from being harvested by spambots. It’s what I used for the email address over there, though I tinkered with it to make it wrap instead of being on one very long line. For one thing, it’s a very long address and looked silly at first, and for another I just have to tinker with things. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t do that.

The beginnings of my first pair of Summer of Socks socks:

The yarn is Marks & Kattens Clown, which is a cotton/wool blend, in colorway #1688, lots of pretty sky blues. Happy happy.

I have not given up on the candle flame shawl, which is in time-out at the moment, or the Seraphina.

I still haven’t decided just what to do about the Seraphina, though. I got lots of great advice in the comments to the last post. The two main trains of thought there were:

• keep going till I ran out of yarn (which I did very shortly after finishing the row I was on when I posted that photo) and then either block it to see how big it ended up or finish it off with black

or

• frog it while consoling myself with alcoholic beverages and possibly having a good cry while I’m at it, then redo the shawl using one strand of the red and purple and a second strand of black

I’m torn. On the one hand, I think it would look pretty cool finished off with black, and Knitpicks has some fingering weight black yarn that’s exactly double the weight of the laceweight at 220yd/50g and which is very inexpensive (budget being a major consideration here).

But for slightly more money and aggravation (okay, well, a lot more aggravation) I could frog what I’ve done so far, get some black laceweight for not very much more money than the fingering weight would cost, and be more sure of getting a result I’d be happy with. I’m still thinking it over.

Another project I have in mind, now that I’m unpacked enough that in the foreseeable future I might be able to dig out the sewing machine, involves the background to that photo up there. The only problem about losing fifty pounds, it turns out, is that clothes you love don’t fit you anymore. I sent a lot of things to Goodwill before I moved that were in good shape but just too big for me, but I kept some things that I really loved with an eye toward doing something or other with them. That B-52’s t-shirt that I cut up and refashioned recently was one of them, and another was a whole pile of peasant skirts. The sock is lying on one of those skirts, which I’m wearing today while everything else is in the wash. I can’t really wear it out of the house, though, because it looks a bit silly. It’s very big, and I have the waist pinned with safety pins to make it stay up because I can’t pull the drawstring tight enough otherwise.

These skirts—I really love these skirts. Now, most of them came from thrift shops and I didn’t pay more than a couple of dollars apiece for them, but they have all this great fabric in them. I keep thinking over what I want to do. I could, say, take the waistband off this skirt, remove an entire gore from it, and make a new waistband, and it would probably fit perfectly after that, with enough material taken out to line a bag or something clever like that. Or I could just use it as raw fabric and make a cute top (or two) or a completely different skirt out if it. I don’t know. But I want to do something with it and the other skirts I’ve saved.

There’s also, for lack of a better word, a thing going on where the yarn flashes in places. Mostly the two separate strands mellow out the intensity of the colors, but in places there will be a stretch where the red lines up with the red and the dark purple lines up with the dark purple, and I can’t decide whether I like that or not. It’s happened once so far, for about four rows, and is starting again on the row I’m working on. I think I’m okay with it as long as it ends up looking as though I meant it to look like that, but I’m not sure.

Anyway, see for yourself before I babble about it some more. See how little yarn I have left?

I am of two minds here. I could:

• Keep going and see what happens. It might just turn out to be big enough after blocking, and though I probably will not have anywhere near enough yarn to edge across the top, it will probably look okay without edging. The flashing might look like I meant for that to happen. Qué sera, sera. I do not have to exercise obsessive perfectionism over everything I make.

or

• Frog it. Untangle and re-ball all that yarn (440 yards in each ball, folks), find some inexpensive black laceweight and start over again, using one strand of this yarn and one strand of black. This would fix both the running out of yarn and the flashing color problem.

Either way, this yarn is going to be a Seraphina. I love the colors, I love this pattern, and one way or the other I’ll get it to work. I’ll be sitting over here thinking on it for a while. I might crochet till I run out of yarn before I make a decision—if I frog, it’ll be a nightmare to get it all untangled and balled up, but that’s true whether I start from where I am right now or wait until the yarn runs out.

I became frustrated with the lace shawl—okay, I know I was going to talk about crochet, but this is how I got to the crocheting. This knitting project is kicking my ass. I’ve never had any real trouble following complex crochet patterns, but I can’t seem to follow the instructions for this knitting pattern. I broke it down into knitting-for-dummies, putting individual line instructions on their own index cards, no more than three things to a line and each in a different color of ink to make it easier to keep track of where I was. That made me feel ten different kinds of stupid, but it worked. For a while. Right now I’m having difficulty figuring out what went wrong in the last row I did, and it has been put aside until I can return to it with a more Zen-like approach. Or at least without breaking out in hives.

In the meantime, I need something to do here. While I caught up reading blogs, I saw Sara say the magic word: Seraphina. I’ve made a Seraphina shawl before, and I absolutely love it. It is not summer-weight, though. It’s made out of very warm and somewhat heavy yarn.

I immediately co-opted the red-and-purple laceweight that was intended for the Janet lace shawl. (I’m thinking the Janet shawl will be done in the a solid-color laceweight that doesn’t have a project intended for it yet. And yes, that is an awful lot of laceweight yarn lying around the house for someone who has not successfully managed to knit any lace yet.) I started swatching with an F hook but came up with something so stiff I could probably have sided a house with it—I’m using two strands held together so the colors blend better, but didn’t take that into account when I first started swatching. I kept going up until I got to a K hook, and the bit up there is the beginnings of the shawl.

Y’know, I think my knitting problem is at least 50% due to my listening to that voice in my head that keeps suggesting that maybe this is a bit more than I can handle. Every time I screw up that shawl and start over again, I start to believe it a little bit more. But you know what? The directions for the first several rows on the Seraphina shawl, the part before you get the pattern repeat memorized, are just as complicated as this knitting pattern, and I’m not having problems with that. So it can’t be that I just can’t follow the directions.

The other 50% of the problem? A combination of things. I never noticed this until fairly recently, but I tend to mix up the directions in my head. I keep reading certain sections of the Seraphina pattern, for example, as “ch2, dc, ch2″ when it’s actually “dc, ch2, dc”. I’m good enough at crochet that I don’t generally mix up the stitches even though I’m reading the pattern wrong and tend to notice and fix things right away when I do screw it up, but I’m not at that point yet with knitting. I’m also not yet as good at fixing knitting mistakes as I am at crochet mistakes.

So. Crocheting this shawl because I need a relaxing project, but planning to get back on the horse after I’m done with this.

As a side note, that little voice also suggests that this color combination might possibly look like technicolor barf, but I am steadfastly ignoring it. I like red and purple, and I’m trying not to be such a wimp about color.

This is the latest attempt at the candle flame shawl. One more row of garter stitch before I get to the lace pattern. Doesn’t look like much yet, but I have hopes. I’m using a much nicer needle than the aluminum straights I used for the previous attempts, and I’m hoping that’ll make it easier when the lace starts up.

I haven’t yet worked out how to get around all the other problems I was having before, like my microscopic attention span and tendency to lose track of what I’m supposed to be doing, but we’ll see what happens.

As seen around various blogs, though I can’t recall who exactly I stole it from:
Go to Google and write “your name looks like” and pick the best result from the first page to post.

The first two I get are:
Oxeye daisy looks like the typical daisy.
and
daisy looks like she is just crammed full of personality.
(That sounds almost painful, doesn’t it?)

This morning I’m suffering from severe caffeine deprivation. I’m wandering around in a fog over here. After I post this I need to go to the grocery store and buy something that contains caffeine. (I may need an IV drip at this point. I dunno.)

I finished the current pair of socks yesterday. I opted not to obsess over making them match. Well, that’s not precisely true. I started the second sock, got halfway through the cuff, and decided to start over with a different section of yarn because I thought they might match if I tried over. They ended up not really matching, but I like ’em.

The colors aren’t quite what they look like in the photo, or maybe it’s my monitor. The olive stripes seem to look brown in photos.

[Edit: It’s Generation T: 108 Ways to Transform a T-Shirt, though I probably didn’t do it the same way as the project in there that looks like this one because I don’t actually have a copy of the book. There’s a website for the book that has a couple projects, too.]

I love this t-shirt, but it was way too big for me and had shrunk weirdly so that the printing was off-center and it was really, really wide compared to how long it was. It fit like a potato sack. I was complaining about how it fit, and around 11:00 last night I decided I was going to do something about it once and for all.

Before:

A few snips and some pins, then I tried it on to make sure I wasn’t making it too small:

I cut some fabric off the sides, made strips from the piece I cut off the bottom, stretched them out to make them curl, snipped holes in the edges, and laced it up. The raw edges will curl up in the wash—t-shirt fabric is forgiving that way—so I’m not to worried that the collar and the bottom edge aren’t quite straight.

After. I could’ve made it a tad smaller, but much better than before:

I desperately want to restart the candle flame shawl but haven’t gotten around to it yet. I’m still trying not to irritate that shoulder with too much repetitive motion. It’s just about better now, but there’s still a twinge here and there if I move it wrong or lift something too heavy or work at the computer for too long. This shoulder has a history already—I had to see a physical therapist for a somewhat different problem several years ago—so I’m trying to be good to it. Physical therapy is expensive. Though as it turns out I do still have the dorky stretchy band and the list of exercises from when I had to go before, and likely most of that would be helpful again now that I’m mostly better.

My current crafting dilemma has nothing to do with the non-matching socks or the shawl that I keep starting over, though. It’s this: I have a number of balls of Plymouth Encore, DK weight, black. This is the yarn I’ve been using for the several failed attemtps at this tank top.

Now, I love this top. I love this top so much that I want to marry it and have children with it and grow old with it and spend our twilight years sitting on the front porch drinking iced tea and kvetching about these kids today. As such, I’d really like it if I could work out my gauge problem and have it come out in a size and shape that more or less resembles me.

I’m pretty sure the yarn called for in the pattern is DK weight. The yarn I’ve been making it with is also ostensibly DK weight. The pattern calls for a yarn that has 109 yards per 50g ball and a gauge of 5 sts/7 rows per inch on size 6 needles.

The ball band for the yarn I’m using says it should work up at 5½ sts/inch on size 6 needles. The band also says the yarn is 150 yards per 50g ball.

I am having massive gauge issues with this project. To begin with, it boggles my mind that, although it has 41 more yards per 50g ball in my yarn than the recommended yarn, the band claims that it works up only a half stitch per inch smaller on the same size needles.

Next problem: On size 6 needles, I was getting about 7½ stitches per inch. On size 7 needles? Also about 7½ stitches per inch. Both sets of needles are cheap aluminum straights.

I gave up on the aluminum needles and started swatching on a Knitpicks circular that I got for my birthday with size 5 tips. Size 5. Smaller than what the pattern recommends. Two sizes smaller than the largest size I’d tried.

I’m getting 6 stitches per inch.

I think my head is going to explode. Granted, the knitting is much easier and more pleasant on the Knitpicks needles. They’re smoother (and as an aside, I have actually worn the paint of part of the tips on the cheap aluminum needles, which was probably not helping matters any) and I seem to knit more loosely with them. But still. This is beyond weird.

Do I just go with it and do a bunch of math to figure out what size I should make on this needle? One st/in difference times 19 inches = 19 sts more to cast on, which would have me making the 46″ size rather than the 38″ size, and if either my math or my gauge swatch is wrong I will have a potato sack, albeit a potato sack with lovely short-row shaping at the bust and hip, and I will be forced to take to my bed in despair.

There’s also the fact that my first two gauge swatches relaxed a bit in washing, so maybe this one will, too, and maybe, just maybe I’ll have 5 stitches per inch after washing the swatch and can cast on the 38″ size.

Pertinent fact: I need the same size 5 circular for the lace shawl, so it’s got to be one or the other if I’m going to do the tank top on that size needle, though maybe I can use the longer cable for the shawl and the shorter one for the tank and just swap the tips back and forth.

Head. Exploding.

Here’s the first one:

The problem? This colorway has a wickedly long repeat, and it’s a single 100g ball, not two 50g balls, so I don’t know if I can start at the same part of the colorway on the second sock and still end up with enough yarn to finish without re-attaching the yarn in a way that would mess up the striping.

See? It doesn’t repeat until the arrow:

It looks like it repeats sooner, but when I really looked closely at it, what I had was this:
1 olive stripe (cast on started where the gray met the olive)
3 blue stripes
2 green stripes
2 olive stripes
2 green stripes
2 olive stripes
2 blue stripes
2 green stripes (heel flap)
2 blue stripes (or 3 maybe, where the heel turned and the instep started)
3 olive stripes (the third one is where the striping starts to repeat itself
3 blue stripes
etc.

So the patterning doesn’t repeat until nearly halfway through the foot.

On the one hand, I don’t know if it’s possible to make them match. On the other hand, I can be a little compulsive about things like this and I’d really like them to match, particularly since these are a gift, not for me. What would you do?

In the meantime, I’m going to cast on the lace shawl again on one of my Knitpicks circulars. I think it’ll go much better than on the cheapie aluminum needles, and it’ll be easier to run the lifelines through.

Oh, and buy some groceries. Everyone here seems to expect to be fed on occasion—go figure.

In other news, I finally updated/fixed my links list. It hadn’t been updated for probably two years, and it was a mess. A long time ago, Vera advised me to just use Bloglines to do the list so it’d update automatically to my Bloglines listing, but I was very attached to all the pretty link buttons. Unfortunately, updating it by hand seems to be something I never get around to doing, so I finally went ahead and did it through Bloglines. I know I’m missing some links—a while back I set up a different Bloglines account and have since lost the login info for my old one, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t manage to import all my old subscriptions. If I used to link to you and you’re not there anymore, please let me know. I’ve been poking through other people’s blogrolls trying to find some of the blogs I’ve lost track of, but I haven’t found them all.

For my next amazing feat, maybe I’ll fix the broken images in all the posts from before I moved the blog and re-do the archives listing in the sidebar, which is terribly sloppy-looking these days.

Oh. I wasn’t going to talk about that, was I?

This is what I did yesterday—I needed something portable to take to the doctor’s office with me:

There’s a lot more green in there than I remembered—I pulled it out of the stash thinking I had some mostly-blue sock yarn. I like it though. Plymouth Sockotta, which is a cotton/superwash wool/nylon blend, color #621.

I know you think this yarn is hideous. I was a little skeptical myself when I started the sock, but it’s grown on me.

This is more of a Where’s Waldo? than a photo:

Baby robins. Can you see them? It’s near impossible to get a clear photo of them because I’m doing this through the window screen. They’re right outside the bedroom window. If I open the window suddenly, they pop right up with their beaks open hoping for food.

New socks aside, I’m trying not to overdo the knitting. Like I mentioned up above, I had a visit to the doctor yesterday. You know how I said I was better after that fall on the steps? Not so much, as it turned out. The doc said things like “bicep tendon stenosis” and “ulnar neuropathy”. I am supposed to try not to irritate my shoulder while it heals. Feh.

I have a doily in mind that I think I’m going to start tonight. I’m starting to miss crocheting with all the knitting I’ve been doing lately, but I did need to go on a big knitting binge so as not to forget the new things I was learning almost as soon as I learned them.

Right now I’m working on the candle flame shawl. It might be overstating things to say it’s in progress because I haven’t gotten back to the lace bits yet. But I’ve finished that first eighteen rows of garter stitch (for the third or fourth time) and am now threading a lifeline through the eighteenth row. I have learned the error of my ways and do not want to have to frog all the way back to the beginning again.

I thought, last night when I got out the darning needles and a ball of #30 crochet thread, that the lifeline would be a quick thing and I’d be off and running on the lace. But it’s taking me forever to get it run through. I really need some itty bitty darning needles, I think. I’m using my smallest one, but it’s still fairly big. Not as big as the ones sold in a pack of five as “yarn needles” but about the biggest size that came in the pack I once got that had a variety of small sizes. The rest of the pack is gone—seems the smaller the darning needle, the less likely I am to be able to keep it in my possession for more than a week or two.

I thought about trying a quilting needle since they’re so skinny—I have a pack of those that I bought to string beads on crochet thread for a project ages ago—but I decided I’d make a mess of the yarn because they’re so sharp that they’d split the yarn instead of going underneath the stitches.

I think I need to find some sort of little plastic tube to store those needles in. I usually just keep them in their original cardboard package, but that deteriorates quickly being knocked around in the big plastic tube with all my crochet hooks. Needles eventually start falling out of the package, then I dump everything out looking for my #5 Boye steel hook, and *poof* some poor innocent darning needle vanishes, probably condemned to death by vacuum cleaner.

Anyway. I thought about showing you a photo of what I’ve got so far, but it’s not much to look at. It’s all squashed up on a straight needle, and it’s, er. Garter stitch. In pretty laceweight yarn, but still it’s two inches of garter stitch squished up on the needle. I’ll take a photo once I get through a repeat of the lace pattern, though.

I do have my doubts that this thing is going to block out to eighteen inches wide as specified in the pattern. I mean, I’m trying to have faith in the process and hope for the best, but I’ve gone up a needle size (I do knit tightly) and it still doesn’t look like it’s more than 16″ wide. It’s hard to tell with it squashed up on a 14″ straight needle, but if I spread it out across the whole needle, it looks like it would be an inch or two wider than the needle.

Can it really pick up that much width in blocking? Or is it going to be a rather wide lace scarf? We’ll see what happens.

(They are the same length. I don’t know what’s going on in that photo.)

I’m much happier with the toes now. They don’t match perfectly, but what I ended up with is fine by me. The first time they looked very silly next to each other with one ending in a whitish stripe and the other ending in a brownish stripe.

I love them. It’s almost—but not quite—enough to make me wish the weather were chilly enough to wear them today. I’m really very happy with how they turned out. You can see in the photos there are mistakes, but I learned a lot of things along the way.

What I might do differently next time: Maybe cast on fewer stitches—not many, maybe four. They fit really well on my left foot (which makes sense because that’s the foot I kept checking them on) but as it turns out my right foot is half a size smaller than the left, something which can only dealt with by making very slightly smaller socks or by having a left sock and a right sock. (The second option isn’t reasonable. I have enough trouble remembering the difference between left and right without it being possible to put socks on the wrong feet.) I also plan to try with a set of five dpns instead of four to see if that helps me make the ribbing tighter and less prone to laddering.

The numb finger is pretty much better today. (I have to confess that I finished the socks last night, but I did wait until it felt better before I picked up the knitting again.) I’m blaming the numbness partly on excessive knitting plus forgetting to take my B vitamins a lot lately and partly on the fact that I fell on the deck stairs the other night. All I paid attention to at first was that I had landed on the part of my back that always hurts (ouch) but I also landed on my wrist in such a way that I wrenched my neck and shoulder a bit due to the angle I landed at, and I’m noticing more and more that I have this sort of tingly nerve-pain thing in part of my hand and arm. I think I pinched a nerve/irritated something that is pressing on a nerve/something along those lines. What with it being in my arm too, I figure it’s got to be at least partly something in my neck or shoulder that’s causing it.

With any luck it’ll be back to normal soon. I’m trying to do lots of gentle stretching and stuff like that.

This looked very silly. If they’d been non-identical socks to begin with it wouldn’t have mattered so much, but I’d gone to all the trouble of making sure I started with the same part of the colorway on the second sock, and they’d been nearly identical up to the toe.

I decided I could not live with the very silly toe discrepancy, so I ripped out a whole bunch of rows, cussed a lot while I put stitches back on the needles and had to fix things with a crochet hook because I’m not particularly adept at this ripping/picking up maneuver, worked a few more rows before the decrease, and it’s much better matched now. It’s still not perfect—I may have done one or two more rounds than the first sock this time before starting to decrease—but it won’t look ridiculous.

The end is in sight, but I’m holding off till tomorrow to finish due to a threatented resurgence of Numb Finger of Doom. The last time that happened, I kept working on a thread crochet project for three hours after my fingertip started to feel the slightest bit numb, and as a result I didn’t regain feeling in my fingertip for close to three weeks. I want to finish the sock, but having sensation in all of my fingers is probably a higher priority. I think. I really want to finish the sock tonight. Maybe I’ll give it a rest for a few hours and see how it’s feeling.

In order to maintain a balance and not have one sock remarkably better-looking than the other, things seem to have gone a bit awry when I turned the heel. It’s not the wrong shape or anything, but things look a bit floopy. I think I was mixed up about ssk again for a little while there. But then it’s unlikely that anyone’s going to turn me upside down and inspect the heels of my socks for floopiness, so I’m okay with it.

I wonder whether it’s possible to finish the sock tonight. I’m still greatly entertained by the sock, but I want to knit lace, too. And crochet granny squares. Everyone seems to be making some sort of very cool granny project or other, and I’m feeling inspired to make squares.

Ooh! I just had a thought, one that involves the granny square skirt from Hip to Crochet, the one that has a solid part at the top and then the rest of the skirt is made up of small grannies done in sock yarn, with the shaping done by changing hook size? I have been wanting to make that skirt since I first got the book ages ago, but I’m not about to run out and buy the quantity of sock yarn called for in the pattern. But. If I’m not too fussy about it having a slightly crazy-quilt look to it, I bet I could, over time, make the whole thing out of leftover self-striping yarn. I had probably nearly a quarter of the first skein left over when I finished the first sock, will have as much left of the second skein, and that’d make a handful of little squares, I bet.

This could turn out to be a Really Bad Idea, I suppose, but there’s only one way to find out, right?

I’m glad I started right in with the second one. I’ve crocheted exactly one complete pair of socks and about 60% of another pair. The second pair has been awaiting completion for well over a year and a half, though in my defense the pattern I was using called for a separate cuff made of single crochet in the back loop, which I like for sock ribbing but which feels at the time like it’s never going to end. I didn’t want that to happen with this pair, and I’m determined to finish the second sock before flitting off to another project. (Never mind that these socks are wool and therefore won’t actually be worn until fall. If I don’t do it now, I might not ever do it.)

So far, things are much the same. I had nearly identical problems with the ribbing. I’m pretty good at ribbing on straights, but on dpns I have issues. Bad laddering between the second and third needles. With the first sock, I wove some yarn around to tighten it up, and it doesn’t show badly when the sock is on, so I think I’ll do the same with this one. It’s probably just a matter of getting better at it through experience, and there’s so little ribbing compared with the rest of the sock that I didn’t get as much practice on the first one. I can live with that. I’ll get better eventually.

Though I am, like I said, determined to finish this sock without being distracted by other projects, I’m very excited about having another go at the lace wrap now that I’ve learned how to do ssk decreases the right way. I’m now convinced that’s 99% of what I kept doing wrong. The other 1% of what I was doing wrong was not putting in lifelines—I was totally unable to salvage any of it after frogging the messed-up lace because the stitches were so tiny that I couldn’t manage to pick them up again without ending up with some stitches from one row, some from the previous one on the needle. It was such a mess that I had to rip out all eighteen rows of garter stitch, too, and just start over. Three times, if I recall correctly. This time, a lifeline’s going in on the eighteenth row of garter stitch and then after every lace repeat. Maybe after every few rows on the first lace repeat, even. I cannot face ripping out and re-knitting those eighteen rows of garter stitch again.

Why is it that I can cheerfully knit miles of stockinette in the round (all knit stitches) but garter stitch on straights (also all knit stitches) drives me completely bugnuts?

I hope you will not be struck blind by the terrifying paleness of my leg. I will still be that pale in August. I have learned to live with it.

I’m still working out how to get decent photos without the sun washing them out. I probably need to read the manual that came with the camera.

I went back and watched the ssk videos at knittinghelp.com per Dawn’s suggestion, and sure enough I was doing the ssks wrong all along. I was sticking the left needle through the back of the stitch instead of the front. The toe decreases are infinitely better-looking than the gusset decreases on account of I actually did them the right way. The toe is slightly wobbly where I did the grafting, but Kitchener stitch was another first for me, so I figure that’ll go better next time.

I used the sock recipe from Knitting Rules and didn’t change a thing other than using size 3 needles instead of size 2 because I knit and crochet more tightly than most people. Maybe I’m just wound a little tight? I’ve learned from experience to start with a needle one size bigger in knitting and a hook two sizes bigger in crochet because the recommended size is pretty much always too small for me. Still, I was much relieved that the sock turned out to fit well—I was halfway convinced I was making it too big.

How long did that take? Less than a week? I thought for sure it’d take a few weeks to finish the first sock. Now to cast on the second one…

It looks a little funky because of the needles forcing it to fold—by the next time I post I should be far enough along to get a better-looking photo.

It’s a relief knowing I can use my phone without opening it ever so very carefully so as not to disturb the glue/crack or break the hinge any more than it already is. I can set the new phone to vibrate, too, which is nice because I oftentimes don’t hear it ring if it’s in my pocket. I couldn’t do that anymore with the old one—any time it was set to vibrate, the glue would loosen up and I’d have to perform surgery on it again.

So. Anyway. I am back at home, and we both got new phones for not much money what with rebates and extending our contract and selling them maybe the tiniest portion of our souls and things of that nature. I heart my new phone. It’s red! It is absolutely adorable. The salesperson totally nailed me with that red phone. I was leaning toward a different phone, one that would’ve been more expensive in the long run but cheaper today because I wouldn’t have had to wait for the rebate, and she, apparently having noticed my red sweater and shiny red combat boots, said, “Why don’t I show you this one in red?” and came back out with one. I may have squealed a bit when I saw it, but I will deny that later.

But my knitting bag is still in the car. I was so absorbed with playing with my shiny red phone on the ride back that I abandoned the sock in the car, and now Don has gone to work. In the car. And so my sock is not here to take a photo, and I can’t knit. It is very sad. Maybe I’ll cast on the tank top yet again and see if I can get it right this time.

How the sock is going: I turned the heel, I picked up stitches, I made decreases, and now I’m working on the foot. Yay! The side of the sock that has the k2tog decreases is pretty decent loooking, but not so much the side with the ssk decreases. I am so not good at that ssk thing.

I noticed something interesting while I was working on this, something that is probably the reason why I have to frog parts of that lace wrap every time I work on it: Every time I make an ssk, I end up twisting the stitch I worked right before the decrease. Is that normal? It doesn’t look normal. In the lace wrap, I didn’t see that I was doing this, and I kept running into problems. With the sock, I could see it—bigger yarn, stitches in different colors—so I was able to untwist the stitch when I came back around. Once I caught on to what was happening, that is. There’s a little bitty spot in the sock where things maybe look a little peculiar.

I’m off—errands to do, towels to wash, shiny red phone to play with. I’ll be back tomorrow with a sock photo.

Since Dawn and Stacey both said they like the colorway of this yarn, I meant to post what it was, only it turns out I don’t read German so well and the only part of the label that’s in English just says it’s machine washable and that sort of thing. It’s Regia 4-ply sock yarn, though, the multi-effect colors line, and, er. Farbe means color, right? If so, the color number is 5376. (I’m pretty sure the other number is the dye lot. Heh.)

Lighting is wonky, no sunshine today. That’s all, gotta run around and do some errands.

After I did that, I was bored because the power was out (for four hours—a transformer blew on the next street over. Sounded like a shotgun went off over there), annoyed because the power was out and I had to rip out that tank top and couldn’t face casting it on again right away and also feeling generally incompetent. I contemplated crocheting a doily, since that’s something that usually doesn’t make me feel grossly incomepent the way most some of my knitting has been lately.

So I found myself with a ball of #30 crochet thread in my hand, leafing through a pattern booklet, but I couldn’t find one I really wanted to make because most of my patterns are still packed, and I couldn’t go online to find one because the power was out.

What wasn’t packed, though, was some sock yarn—because of a stop at a yarn store in Findlay on the way to Ann Arbor a few weeks ago, where the very nice lady who owns the shop both congratulated me on persevering to learn how to use dpns and advised me that knitting socks is a thoroughly worthwhile activity—and my copy of Knitting Rules, which I’d been reading during the move. I figured that since I was going crazy what with all the things I’d planned to do requiring electricity, I’d risk another blow to my crafting self-esteem and try another sock. (There are posts back in the archives somewhere talking about my previous attempts to knit socks. It wasn’t pretty.)

And lookee here! (Carefully arranged to hide the rather dreadful laddering in the ribbing. It’s much better now that I’m on the stockinette part. I’ll work that out on the second sock.)

It has flaws, some of which I will probably fix and some of which I will accept on the grounds that a first sock is not perfect. It’s interesting how the laddering was absolutely dreadful in the ribbing but completely vanished once I got to the stockinette part. I need to try some different things in the second sock to see if I can figure out how not to make that happen, but for now I’m absolutely delighted to have made this far knitting a sock in the first place.

Oh. Edited to add the a plug for that yarn shop in case you’re ever passing through that part of Ohio. It’s The Yarn Farm, on township road 180 outside of Findlay, and it’s a great shop. The woman who runs the shop is really friendly and encouraging and I will absolutely stop by and show her the socks she helped encourage me to make when I’m in that area again.

Yet another edit: In a bit of sock-serendipity, after posting I was catching up reading at Bloglines and found that Vera is having a blog contest. If you love knitting socks, go on over and read this post and tell her what you love about sock knitting.