Sunday, March 16, 2014

Double screen computers

It's been a couple weeks of knitting intensity over here, my lovelies.  I've plowed through the Polar Bear Chullo (I finished it yesterday and it's mostly dry from the blocking it received), I started a new portable sock project, and last night I started work on reindeer leg warmers.  Wanna see?







Fuzzyhead is modeling the hat, but it's a gift for Slim Jim (stop reading now, Slim, otherwise you're spoiling your birfday surprise).  I'm really pleased with how it turned out, the patterned sections are all slightly different and they look really nice and smooth.  The polar bears are adorable, but it was tricky to maintain even tension over those areas, and they're the ones that turned out a little wonky.  Blocking helped a bit, but they're still not perfect.  Oh well.  I know I much prefer colourwork projects with nice even sections of colour, where I don't have to twist the colours every few stitches. 

But, despite knowing that, I've picked up another colourwork project where the floats are not all perfectly nice and even.  Enter the reindeer socks, which I am knitting as leg warmers.


To get them a little larger and slouchier, I am knitting them with fingering weight yarn (Knit Picks Palette in Cream and Hollyberry) and using 2.75mm needles.  The needle size choice was mostly because both of my 2.25mm sets are currently in use (hexipuff blanket and my latest sock project), and my 2.5mm are being used for my one row at a time socks.  I think I might need another pair of 2.25mm needles, but for now I am actually pleased with the size and tension the 2.75s are giving me.  It's nice a loose, with lots of stretch for pulling up over ankles and calves. 

As I was working on the polar bear hat with a side of hexipuffs, I realized I was lacking a portable simple project to take to knit nights.  There were too many colours and colour changing, and too much chart-following with the polar bear hat to make it a good talk-while-you-knit project, and the hexipuffs are fiddley and require that I travel with a small handful of stuffing in my knitting bag.  I also recently found out that Slim Jim's boyfriend, Stash, would love and cherish a pair of hand knitted socks.  Huh.  I had no idea.  I think every knitter needs her/his friends and family to proclaim their interest in receiving knitted items.  I would never knit something for anyone if I wasn't sure they would love it and appreciate it, but if you don't speak up, how do I know?  So I dug through my sock yarn bin and pulled out this little beauty from my original Rhinebeck trip in 2012.






This is Sock82Me in Bronze.  Slim Jim told me Stash would appreciate any sock-type item in a brown colour since that is the colour he wears most often. 

The pattern I chose is a simple boy-approved pattern called It's a Guy Thing, and I started the socks some time two weeks ago, in time to bring them out to a knit night.






The socks can be made in pretty much any size, from itty bitty kid size to XL adult man.  The pattern is simple and easy to remember, but more interesting than straight stockinette or basic ribbing.  The seed stitch panels are separated by thin two-stitch cables, which are done in a different way from how I've ever done cables before.  Instead of doing the cables with a cable needle, or even doing the cable motion without the needle itself, these cables are formed by knitting the two stitches together, and then knitting the left stitch again before dropping both stitches off the needle.  It looks just like I did traditional cables, but it's a little more seamless in the knitting process than stopping to move stitches around for cables.  Neat.

I've also hammered out some rows on the One Row a Day socks today while scrolling through pinterest and watching my stories.

Here's the March 5 update I should have done on March 5:


And the March 12 update:



And don't forget, I've still got yarn floating around from the Knit Picks order for a pair of Nordic mittens, and I have yarn from my Rhinebeck trip in October for a shawl.  I may need to pick up a large project to keep on the go, but for now I'm pleased to have something colourwork-y and something super simple.

Onward,

vrock

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