Yarnification

Okay, so if I can’t post a sock photo I gotta post a photo of something. So here ya go:

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.

I was just about to get out the sock for its daily photo. (I don’t think I’ve ever taken this many photos of a something-in-progress, ever. I am ridiculously and inordinately proud of this sock.) Then I realized: My knitting bag is in the car because I was knitting while I rode to the cell phone store with Don so we could get our phones upgraded since his was at least five years old and pretty messed up and mine was about four years old, had a massive crack that I kept gluing back together with superglue, and I couldn’t turn it off, ever, because if it was turned off the screen wouldn’t work when I turned it back on until I’d turn it on, then off, and so on, until one of those times I lucked out and the screen worked.

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.

Daily sock photo:

This is really moving along much faster than I thought it would. I’m reading about what to do next after the heel flap. I read it once already last night, but I’ve learned that it’s not possible to read the directions too many times when it comes to patterns. I tend to skim and miss important bits of information.

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.)

Why, yes, I do plan to post daily photos of how the sock looks now that it’s ever so slightly longer than it was yesterday.

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

Yeah, so I was knitting a tank top. I ripped it out again yesterday due to a combination of profound annoyance, a nagging suspicion that I was still making it the wrong size, and the fact that I found two fairly large mistakes. I wasn’t that far into it, so the most reasonable thing to do seemed to be to frog the whole thing.

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.

I have the proto-tank-top-front off the needles. It is supposed to be 19″ across the bottom at the hip. It measures 17″. If I give it a lot of encouragement, I can convince it to be 18″. Since the first swatch gained a little width in washing/blocking, I think it probably would be more like 18″ after washing.

18″ is the measurement for the next smaller size.

Looks like I’ll be starting over here. Probably making the next size up rather than using bigger needles—I like how the yarn’s working up on this size. There will be no photographic record of my lesson in gauge.

At least I was only 4″ in when it occurred to me to measure it, right? It was, like, a really, really big swatch. And I learned how to do short rows. (And also now not to do short rows.)

I’m knitting this tank top. I didn’t get the gauge right with the needles the pattern called for, so I just went up a size and started knitting the top rather than another swatch.

I’m several inches in and finally measured. I seem to be getting the exact same gauge I was getting with the smaller needles. This is a little baffling. I had washed the swatch, though. Maybe it got wider when I washed it?

I’m also unconvinced that I’m making the right size top. I keep thinking to myself, No, go on ahead, the 38″ one is the one that’ll fit around your hips. You’re putting in bust darts anyway. The pattern even says to put in bust darts. What could go wrong?

Tomorrow I’m taking the thing off the needles to try to check the gauge without it being all scrunched up. Will post a photo of the amorphous bottom few inches of the top if I can get one to come out, and then after all that I’ll try to decide whether I have an unreasonable idea of what size I am.

Found at Kari’s…

Hmm. Twenty-four hours later, Bloglines has still not listed my last post. Wonder what’s up with that.

I just bound off the first gauge swatch for the tank top, need to wash it, block it a bit, measure it. This is possibly a bit of a farce—I’m sure I need to use bigger needles—but I don’t know if anything weird is going to happen when I wash it.

It will also delay me from beginning the second gauge swatch on bigger needles, which will prevent me from slacking off at the things I’m supposed to be doing. Like unpacking all my stuff and writing that resume.

First things first. I got tagged by Cetta: List five things you are obsessed with, then tag five people to do the same.

1. Crafts of various kinds. Lately I’m most obsessed with knitting because I’m still learning and I feel like if I stop I’ll forget how, but I have a longstanding obsession with crochet.
2. Music, mainly bluegrass, punk, country, folk, that sort of thing.
3. Writing
4. Reading
5. Learning new technogeeky stuff

Am I a terrible person for being incommunicado for so long and then tagging people when I’ve probably not responded to other taggings while I was busy packing and moving? (I saved them in Bloglines, I promise!)
Tagging:
Marvie
Kari
Lori
Deneen
Mandi

Or, y’know, if you feel like doing it, consider yourself tagged. I’m flexible that way.

In other news: I’ve been holding off on the lace knitting attempts until my life is slightly more settled because knitting for five minutes here and five minutes there is not conducive to reading a chart or complicated instructions.

But since I have new-project-itis and since I have a bunch of DK wool blend I got the other day with my yarn store gift certificate, I’m spending my bits of knitting time today doing a gauge swatch for this top. Isn’t that cute? Given the yarn I’m using, it’ll probably be more of a chilly evening thing or for layering under other clothes in fall—I can’t picture wearing it on a summer day. But it’ll likely take till fall before I finish it, anyhoo. I’m a little slow with the knitting.

That’s all for now—gotta run.