Socks

One FO and Getting Ready for the Heel on the Sock

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Tin Can Knits Flax baby sweater is done! I wish to color was better, blame my phone :(. It goes from dark brown to light brown to cream to white. It’s really a nice striping yarn, I give more info on the yarn here, you’ll need to scroll down a bit. I just did a reg bind off on the sweater bottom without following the knits and pearls, not sure I like that, so I did the bind off on the sleeves following the knits and the pearls, and I like that better.

My sock is almost ready for the heel, I have two more rows before I start it. The heel is always the fidgety part for me, maybe someday will be use to it :).

My back is slowly getting better, herniated disks that decide to bulge are a pain, literally. My son will be picking up the love birds they gave me because cleaning up after them (they are very messy birds, they love to chew up paper, which is fine but it gets under the cages so that I have to get on my hands and knees to clean up the larger paper strips before I can vacuum) and with my back it’s getting too hard. They were his and his husband’s before they gave them to me and I’m sure they will make a spot for them again. I will miss their unique calls and sounds, but not necessarily cleaning up after them :P. I will still have my cockatiel, who is much easier to clean up after and is much more quiet :P.

Hope everyone is having a nice week end and that all the fathers have a great Father’s Day!

Summer Sock Camp at the Ready!

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I decided to do the Summer Sock Camp with The Crazy Sock Lady. She has a podcast on youtube this is a link to her video about the Summer Sock Camp. Her channel is fun. I haven’t knit socks in over a year, maybe 2, and thought it would be fun to knit socks again. If you like to knit socks and are interested in being entered for some pretty nice prizes, go check her out. This goes on from June through August.

This is her vanilla sock pattern and she has a video on using 9″ circs for this. She also has videos for using two circs, the flex flips and magic loop techniques, top down and toe up. I prefer the 9″ circular needles and I like the bamboo because they are a bit more grabby and my yarn doesn’t slip off the tips. I have to go down an additional size so I use a 0 because I knit loosely anyway and knit even a little more loosely with the 9″ circulars. I chose her vanilla sock pattern (available in her Etsy for $2.00) because I am using Threads and Loops Perfect Pair sock yarn and I wasn’t sure a textured pattern would show well or maybe even be over the top with the color designs in this sock yarn. The Crazy Sock Lady (Kay Litton) has some truly beautiful sock patterns on Etsy. Hope to see you over there on her podcast :). Let the fun begin!

A Gift from a Friend

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A friend who’s knitting podcast I follow on YouTube (was the Knitting Samurai is now called Adoreknit and yes she is the one I buy the lovely stitch markers and progress keepers from on Etsy (The Mandalorian, Harry Potter and many more) you really should check her out, I love all her knitting adventures) knit me a pair of socks, and oh my how beautiful they are and I love the cable detail she designed on them, and they fit perfectly!! I’m awed that she would do that for me. She also snuck in some tea and candy (yeah I ate some of the candy before I took the pictures LOL) and a very sweet letter with some color catchers in it incase my colors run when I wash the socks. Knitting friends are the best!

I got my dad’s car from his estate, I didn’t want to do the long drive from the desert southwest to the midwest so I hired a transportation company to bring it. Yeah it’s expensive but not really a ton more than flying down, and driving back with the cost of gas, motel room (it’s a little over a 2 day drive) and food and all the hassles going through the big cites on the interstate hoping you don’t miss a turn off :P. Family will get together sometime late spring or early summer to do a wake for him. I miss him and it will be like he is riding with me whenever I drive his car.

Hope you all are getting ready for Easter, I love Easter and Spring time.

2 FO’s and New Needles

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Finished the baby socks.  As you can see they are definitely not matchy matchy ;P, but close enough that you can tell they are a set.  I used Knit Picks Options double pointed needles size 0, and the yarn was Premier Wool-Free Sock yarn in the Vegas Lights colorway.  They were well loved.   Anyone know if they make baby sock blockers?

I bought some yarn for a Chemo hat for a friend who is dealing with breast cancer.  I went to Hobby Lobby and chose Yarn Bee Snuggle Up in the silver colorway and Yarn Bee Cloud 9 in the cream colorway, Hobby Lobby had a sale on their yarn and I like their yarn :).  They are both soft yarns and together they are extremely soft.  There is another hat pattern I want to knit and the designer said she will put it back up on Ravelry.  I will post more about it when it’s up.  Raverly is such a wonderful knitting community where we all share our love of knitting, crocheting, spinning and other fibery creativeness.  This pattern I used is a Lion Brand Yarn free pattern called Fun-Fur – Mircospun Knit Chemo Cap.  I used a size 10 bamboo 16″circular needle and a set of size 10 double pointed needles when I got to the crown.

Flexi Flips

 

I bit the bullet and bought a set of bamboo Addi Flexi-Flips size 0’s to knit socks with and they came in the mail today (my local yarn shop didn’t carry them.)  Altho’ I enjoy knitting the socks, I hate the using the regular double pointed needles and I never learned to knit using the magic loop method.  These are kinda like a combination of those methods and I thought I would give it a try.  They are a bit pricey at $32 dollars a set.  There are 3 needles in the set with a flexible cord that bends so that you can knit small radius round items items like socks. 🙂  Hopefully I will enjoy this method much better.

Spinning Wheel Acquisition

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A friend of mine passed away a couple of months ago and her husband said she had asked that I be given her spinning wheel and all her fiber.  I wasn’t sure what kind of wheel it was and when I received it today I had to put some of it back together, but it is a Kromski Polonaise.   It’s a beautiful Mahogany finished wheel and will look much nicer when I get it cleaned up from all the dust that has taken up residence on it,  I honestly don’t know that she ever spun on it but she loved fibery things.  I will figure out more about it and add it to my wheel collection and spin on it.  This one appears to be able to be used as a double band drive or a scotch tension.  There was a number (wheel number?) date and signature on the bottom, will have to investigate that.   The band was not on the wheel so I will try to figure out making it work as a scotch tension, but I can say the wheel moves very freely, I have a feeling this will be a really nice wheel to spin on.  Hehe , I think my Rick Reeves wheel is a little jealous, you can see it in the back ground doing a photo bomb :).

I did start the 2nd baby sock.  Starting little socks is not my favorite thing to do because it is easy to twist when joining in the round with so few stitches on double pointed needles so I take extra time and care when starting them, hate frogging (for my non knitting friends, frogging is ripping it out, think ribbit, ribbit to rippit rippit :P).  The rest should be much more relaxing to knit ;).  Hoping to have it finished by Friday.  🙂

HFO!

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2nd Pair Baby Socks HFO Ok, I finished the first sock in the new yarn.  Still larger than I hoped for but a little smaller than the last one.  I got all the colors in the one sock lol, but the color changes are short so it all works out, and looks like I won’t have to do too much yarn management to start the 2nd sock in about the same place.   I did a kitchner toe on this one instead of just pulling the stitches together as per the pattern, because I didn’t like the original toe.  This one looks so much nicer and rounded :).

Looks a little weird to have all the reds, oranges, pinks and yellow for them to have thrown in a green – looks a little out of place to me, but they didn’t ask me :P.   I will start on the 2nd sock, probably tomorrow, too tired tonight to deal with casting on tiny socks on tiny double pointed needles and making sure I didn’t twist anything.  They might not end up being matchy matchy, but I think they will be close enough.

 

1st Robin, It’s Spring! + Drop Stitch Shawl KAL

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Soooo happy!!!  I have been waiting to see the Robins return, and I saw my first Robin today!!  Welcome Spring!!!  Sorry the color in the picture is not very good :(.

I follow a blog Muddling Through Life and she is having a KAL, (knit-a-long for my non knitting friends.)  It looks so pretty, so I dug out some very deep (meaning I’ve had it a very long time :P) stash.  The above picture shows the yarn, it is a synthetic yarn unfortunately, but it is a fingering weight.  It is some my mom sent me from South Korea when she was working for the Air Force as a non military personnel civil Service employee, years ago.  It is a large skein at 8 oz, it is a beautiful light lavender even tho it shows up like a grey in the picture.  I did have to go buy some new needles because I didn’t have any 40″ needles.  I now have a pair of ChiaoGoo size 7 red lace circulars. 🙂  The pattern calls for a size 8 but I have to go down a size to get gauge because I am a little bit of a loose knitter.  I wanted some ChiaoGoo bamboo needles (my needles of choice) but they were out and I wanted to get this started so I settled for the stainless steel.

I have also started the Welcome New Born Socks , from a previous post, now using the new sock weight yarn (rather than the baby weight) and they are definitely smaller :).  I’ll post a picture of my progress in a couple of days and we should see the answer to my one of my questions about how much of the repeatable colors you can get in a little sock :P.

FO!

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I finished the socks I was knitting for an infant I am watching for a few months.  Altho’ these went pretty fast (because they are small :P), they really were not small enough to be newborn, they would probably fit more like a 12 to 18 month old.  But maybe it’s because I used a baby yarn that is a bit thicker than a sock yarn.

So, to give this pattern the benefit of the doubt, I picked up a sock yarn from Hobby Lobby (they were having a 30% off all their yarn sale this week :)).  It is Premier Yarns, color Vegas Lights and is acrylic, so her mom can just throw it in the washer and dryer.  I will give this another try before I move on to another pattern.  I’m interested to see how the colors work up in a very small pair of socks.  Wondering if I can even get all the colors in one little sock or if I will have to do yarn management to get them to turn out more or less the same.  Otherwise she can be like the teens and have mismatched socks, which have been the rage for more than several years.

I haven’t seen the robins yet, but maybe I just missed them?  I usually see the males staking out small territories they then defend from other males so they can try to lure a female Robin to their area. The females show up  2 weeks after the males.  I expect to see the male Robins very soon, we have been having upper 40’s and lower 50’s days , it is so wonderful!!  I love Spring!

HFO Object and Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

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I started this “newborn” sock on Friday evening, so much for it being newborn tho’.  I used some (very) deep stash, Red Heart Pompadour yarn, and size 0 double pointed needles (because it’s too small for my 9 inch circs), but honestly this is not a newborn size, this would fit a 12 to 18 month old :(.  It was a different kind of heel so that was interesting, but this won’t fit the little one I knit it for for several months out :P.  I did start the 2nd sock so I won’t have 2nd sock syndrome 🙂 and it’s all sock practice, right?  They are a pretty quick knit, because they are so small :P.  I’d rather not go down to 00 size needles, so maybe finding a finer yarn would be best for my next try.  Still a nice sock tho’.

I can’t give you the pattern info because I forgot where I got it, ugh!  I looked but couldn’t not find the source, I did post the first page so if you feel inclined to search farther than I did on Ravelry and the internet (and I did search), you can do that.  The copy-write says 2013.

I woke up to about 2 inches of fluffy snow this morning.  It was starting to melt by the time I went to Church and was blowing off the trees because it was a very light powder snow.  I was so excited by the warmer weather I forgot we can get snow here through April.  On Friday, I also saw some geese, the Robins can’t be far behind :).

One More Contraption to Wear on the Road to Recovery.

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splint/brace Well, had my hand Dr appt. today and the cast is off!  I will now be wearing this for at least the next 4 weeks.  Plus starting Thursday I will be having physical therapy appts, where I will find out what my new physical therapist determines will be the duration of my torture, I mean therapy sessions.  The dr was nice enough to prescribe me pain meds for the upcoming therapy sessions after he bent my little finger to see it’s flexibility after being in the cast for 6 weeks and my eyes almost bugged out of my head, and I said I don’t think I want physical therapy.  He then informed me that if I didn’t I would lose a lot of mobility in my fingers, and to be honest at that point I would have been fine with that :P.   Can you tell I am not looking forward to these?  I’m accepting volunteers to take my place for those :P.

I was hoping I would be knitting again, however I did not anticipate having a splint/brace on for at least another month, sigh.  Maybe time to see if I can figure out the throwing knitting style or a variation there of (I normally knit the combined continental knitting style, also referred to as picking, so I use my left hand for my knitting tension like a crocheter does and my right hand does the actual knitting.)  Time to get serious to see if I can spin with my left hand in this contraption.  At least, I can take it off to wash my hair :), and for those dang physical therapy sessions and whatever home exercises they make me do.  Otherwise it is to be in this thing, tho honestly, my hand is grateful for the support the splint/brace gives.  Aspirin at this point is my friend :).

 

Just one more set, honest :P   I couldn’t resist this one more stitch marker set from Adore Knits , it was on sale and so darn cute! These are tiny for sock knitting, which works well for me because I have to use size 0 to get gauge for my socks.