Kiss My Knits!

Diet and autism, knitting, and showbiz.

Super easy, super quick. Afterthought heels are officially my new favorite thing for self-striping yarn. I could actually knock the second one out this weekend. Yay!

I’ll post details after I have an actual finished pair. 🙂

Jayne hats up for: PA, OR, NY

I decided to go ahead and go with socks. I’m doing the ribbing pattern from Knitty’s Thuja, but on fewer stitches since this is sized for a woman’s foot instead of a man’s. Also, instead of that heel I’m doing an afterthought heel. This is also sometimes called a grandmother’s heel or peasant heel. The idea is that you knit some, then you put in a row of waste yarn (that’s the red row on my wrist), then you knit all the way down to the toe. Later, you come back and unravel the waste yarn and put in your heel. Supposedly it makes it very easy to replace just the heel when it gets worn out. I haven’t done one before, so I wouldn’t know.

This particular heel appealed to me for this yarn since it means I wouldn’t have to interrupt the striping along the top of the sock, and because it should create a nice pattern of its own. There’s a pair of striped socks with an afterthought heel in Weekend Knitting and it looks really nice.

I think I’m going to rip back to the heel, though. Now that I’ve had a chance to look at it, I think the heel will work better if it’s in the middle of a color change rather than up on one end. More symmetrical. I said it before, but if the vendor has more of this at the alpaca festival, I’ll get a skein (thanks for the birthday money, Dad!). I might write and ask her to bring one if she’s got it.

These are going to be very thick and warm. I can already see that they’re not pilling like the Koigu, which makes me feel better that it was the yarn at fault and not so much me. If I knew then what I know now, I’d have made my mom’s out of something sturdier.

Didn’t get enough sleep last night, but I’m about to make myself some buckwheat pancakes and plop down in front of the TV to do a little Jayne knitting, so that’ll be cozy and nice.

So remember the skein of handpainted yarn I got at Yarns Forever in Greenville a while back? It was self-striping, but I didn’t realize that until after I bought it and read the designer’s blog. I decided to knit up a swatch today.



SO! PRETTY!

That’s some nice crisp striping! This recommended needle size on the label was 1-3, which seemed a little small to me, but I gave it a go. This swatch is on 3’s, and I got 6 stitches per inch. On those needles, it makes a pretty dense fabric. I think you could go up to a size six needle, easy, although I’d want to swatch it first. The base yarn is listed as “worsted” on several sellers’ sites. I had been thinking “gloves” for this, but depending on how deep the stripes are on a wider garment, this might make a good yarn for a baby sweater. It’s so pretty, I’m not sure what I’ll do with it. I’m open to suggestion!

I do know that this dyer will be selling her stuff at the alpaca festival this weekend, and I am there, baby!

Done!

Pattern: Crusoe from Knitty
Yarn: Koigu KPPPM, colorway P123 dye lot 231. It looks like P123 varies widely from skein to skein.
Needles: #1 DPN
Gauge: 7 sts per inch

Changes: I mainly wear long pants, and thought that the rolled cuff in the original pattern might be too bulky under my jeans. I changed it to a k2p2 ribbing. I also cast on 64 stitches instead of the recommended 48 and adjusted all the math accordingly.

Notes: I started #1 in November and worked on it intermittently. They were both carried around in my purse while I worked on them, and they’ve already fuzzed up some. Last summer I knitted my mom some socks out of Koigu, and looking at them a couple of months ago, they’re also fuzzing up some inside the heel and on other areas of wear. Those were knitted on 3’s, and I thought a tighter gauge this time might help, but apparently not. Is this just a characteristic of Koigu, a result of being toted around for too long, or some other mystery factor that I’m introducing?

Fuzzing aside, the yarn is very soft. I nearly wiped out walking on my kitchen floor when I put them on. Also, I’m seriously considering a trip to the Wide Shoe Warehouse to pick up some really colorful pedal-pusher type sneakers to show these off.

The pattern was clear and easy, and the author is right that this is a good use for super-bright or busy sock yarns to help break them up a bit. I’d knit these again.

My day, my planned evening, and a monkey head.

No school today, so it’s me and the Boo. Hubby went to work late, since he had to go to the doctor again. His bandage is much smaller, so his finger is less protected, and apparently he banged the bejeebers out of it on the steering wheel this morning.

Worked on the doll some more. The button to the right is the button that my daughter chose as a belly button. I actually stayed up rather late working on this, because I decided the head was way too flat on the top, probably because I revised the pattern and… uh… apparently viewed the neck portion as the crown portion and therefore closed it off. Honestly, the pattern wasn’t very clear on what was what. Anyway, since Emily had already seen the head fully knitted, I decided I’d rather stay up late re-knitting it than have her come in in the morning to an unravelled head. I paid for that decision this morning, when my husband couldn’t find his antibiotics and got me up earlier than I would have liked to see if I’d done anything with them. We won’t go into the antics that ensued, but suffice to say that I’d just dug through the outside garbage when he discovered that they were in his jacket pocket. It’s funnier now than it was through my sleep haze.

I’ve been working on the second sock on and off. It’s been so cold I’ve thought of putting it aside to work on gloves instead. Somewhere, I managed to lose another #1 DPN. Hopefully no one will find it by sitting on it. Ouch.

Otherwise, it’s been a slow day. Ran out of ink and paper, had to run to Office Depot for more, as I’ve got more kits to go out and I’m guessing it would be good to, you know, include a pattern. We’re going to speech therapy later today, so we’ll hit the post office before that.

Hats up next for: TX, IA, and WA.

Definitely early to sleep for me tonight.

Or unfinished objects, for those non-knitters.

Yarn! At left is 350 yards of hand-dyed goodness from Yarns Forever in Greenville, SC. She sells her stuff online at Creatively Dyed Yarn. I didn’t realize when I bought it that it was self-striping, but I’m actually pleased to know that. I’m anxious to see how this will knit up.

After realizing the other day that I only had the mittens at right, this will likely become gloves for me. The mittens are in a single fromSerendipity in South America. It’s absolutely butter soft, but pills like crazy. The same mittens, one year on and they weren’t worn that much over the year.

Made some progress on the second Crusoe sock. I’ve turned the heel and am working on the gusset. It reminds me of a mouth ready to gobble something up. A bit creepy, really. I’m enjoying these, but my next pair will definitely be out of something less explosively bright.


I had a hank of Lamb’s Pride Burly Spun in Strawberry Patch, so I decided to cast on for an offering for the Red Scarf project, run by the Orphan Foundation of America. LJ buddy has been championing this cause.

This is a batch of scarves sent out in January to kids in college who have aged out of the foster care system. These kids have beaten nearly insurmountable obstacles to actually make it to college, and just having a little care package to say “someone out there is thinking of you, keep it up!” can make a big difference. I’m doing a chunky scarf which would work for a guy or a gal. It’s in brioche stitch, which is a good choice to prevent pooling in a space-dyed yarn like this. I’m a bit worried that it’s too thick and will be too rigid to flop nicely around the neck, so I’m trying to decide whether to go up to size 15 needles instead of the 13s I’m using. It looks like there’ll be plenty left over, so maybe I’ll pair the remainder up with some black I’ve got left over from this hat for another bulky project.


Time to do another load of laundry, then off to the great outdoors. Sorry, Midwest, but it’s 69 degrees and absolutely gorgeous out, and I’m taking my daughter somewhere to play if it kills us both. It’s just too beautiful a day to spend in front of the computer!

After finishing up another Jayne tonight, I pulled out the second Crusoe to work on. I’m about halfway down the ankle. About a half hour ago, my husband found a thin double-pointed needle (DPN) wedged into the side of his chair and asked, “Are you missing this?”

I looked at it. It was a #1 bamboo needle. This was very odd, since I was already using my full set of 5 #1 bamboo DPNs for the sock I was working on. Or so I thought – upon closer inspection, it looks like I pulled out my #2 needles when I cast on for the second sock. The needles had been in my case because I was using them to knit my daughter’s doll. So the second sock is being knitted on bigger needles than the first.

Great. Just great. Well, it’s only half a millimeter’s difference. Gauge looks to be pretty much the same, so maybe I’ll just switch to #1s now and keep going. I won’t tell if you won’t.

Hats up for: WI, MN, TN