Sox and Pox!
(And about time too)
First in our line up: the long awaited Mint Julep socks! A pair! Yippee!!
I’m pleased with the way that they turned out – and I’m even more pleased that they are finally finished. I used the round toe from Sensational Knitted Socks and they didn’t look quite the same as the photograph in the book. That is entirely my fault as my M1 seems to be different to Charlene Schurch’s – if I could have been bothered I would have experimented with different increase stitches to find one that matched hers. But I didn’t and mine have the appearance almost of a purl bump which go with the Mint Julep theme – they look like fizzy bubbles spiralling up from the point of the toes.
The lace pattern turned out slightly ribby so they grip well and don’t fall down and the pattern flowed beautifully into the k1,p1 ribbing at the cuff.
The yarn was Posh Yarn’s Lucia, from the sock club. I frogged each sock a couple of times but this yarn didn’t mind at all. It looked beautiful after being rewound, repeated kidnapped by and then rescued from the cats and, despite living in my handbag and glove compartment for months, it refused to split, pill or fuzz. I’m so glad I have a box of this stuff in my stash, otherwise I’d have to panic-buy more as there is a good chance I’ll never knit socks with anything else ever again.
Another ground breaking event (apart from this post!) is the completion of these socks – in State Fair from Sophie’s Toes. Why? You might well ask. They look like pretty ordinary vanilla (to quote the YH) socks, don’t they? What is truly amazing about these socks is that they were knit on dpns, 5 of them, bamboo, 2.25mm and pretty damn speedily too!
The colours are actually brighter than the photo shows, here they are being dunked in their first handwash. I wore them straight off the needles and love them to distraction. I love the way there are so many colours that my kids can’t decide what colour these socks actually are.
I was a great fan of Magic Loop, still am for sleeves and such, but from now on I think I might be a mostly-dpn sock knitter. I was amazed at how much quicker I am on dpns than ML! It was also much quicker handbag-knitting, which I drag out when waiting for kids to come out of school, between appointments and while waiting for the cappuccino to turn up. A quick needle-full or two is much more manageable than a row of Magic Loop somehow. If anyone else is considering the jump to lots of pointy sticks instead of one then I’d recommend taking a quiet hour or two, watching lots of online video of other people doing it well and jumping on in. Strong liquor helps too but only in small doses. Ask me how I know.
And just to prove what a convert I am, here is my WIP:
This is the last of my Sophie’s Toes sock yarn, in Water Lily, I think. These are a present for a dear friend and the pattern is more-or-less taken from SKS again (well, the cuff pattern is!) I cast on for these in the airport while waiting for my flight to Hong Kong. I knit the toes and half the foot on the flight and managed the heel over a few girly evenings in when we indulged ourselves with room-service, DVDs and gelato. The yarn holder is a funny little thing I bought in a shop in Hong Kong, it is round and I think it might actually be a toilet roll holder, but it is so cute and fit the yarn cake so perfectly that I have decided that it had to come home with me.
I must admit that these are progressing a little more slowly though as I have distractions in the form of two skeins of Eva 8ply (silk and cashmere, you’d be distracted too!) In a moment of intermittent insanity I asked my MIL if she’d like to visit for Christmas and then somehow got fixated on the idea of knitting her a gift. Now, you should understand that normally I’d rather fry my head than do Christmas knitting. I can think of nothing worse than knitting to a deadline when the gift might not be appreciated with the rapture I feel it deserves. This might be why this project is cursed. So far I have knit half a hat, one Sunday Market Shawl and a bit of a scarf (I think it is a knitty pattern, I’ve lost the printout, which I like but it defies my attention-span-of-a-gnat style of knitting) so it is about to be frogged for the fourth time.
Thank goodness for Posh Yarn yarn! This stuff doesn’t look distressed at all, does it?
It is so marshmallowy, luxuriously, decadently divine that I don’t mind knitting it four times either. The Sunday Market Shawl (I took a picture but have lost it somewhere in the computer) knit up quickly enough. In stocking stitch this yarn looked beautiful and I loved it. I dropped the stitches as directed and began to ladder the fabric but… I didn’t like it. This yarn is quite slippery and, as I worked the ladders down the length, some of the gaps began to close up and the laddered appeareance became a bit haphazard. The slackening of the tension as the stitches dropped also meant that the remaining stitches became much bigger (that is how the Shawl grows after you cast off) and at that point I realized that I don’t like the look of big floppy stitches and it wasn’t making me happy.
Normally I would have put it away and slept on it for a few nights. Then I would have stuffed the scarf into the Closet of Shame and pretended this never happened. But, proof that Dee creates the most addictive yarn on the planet, I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even finish laddering it. Truth be told, I was rather pleased to have the opportunity to knit it all up all over again. There is a strong chance that this gift might never be finished at all and I’ll just spend the next year or two (until lured away by something else, obviously, I am nothing if not easily distracted) re-knitting this yarn over and over again.
In the meantime this is turning out to be quite the sanity saver. Daughter number 1 has chicken pox. Daughter number 2 does not. Short of rubbing them together as if I’m trying to start a fire, I can’t seem to get her spottified. You just know she’s going to save it until the worst possible moment, don’t you? Like next week where three days have been mysteriously blacked out in my diary, coincidentally (or so I’m told) those days cover my birthday and our 10th anniversary. I have no idea what is planned. I don’t want to know. It might be nothing more than lunch at the cafe and a stroll around the supermarket but quite frankly, if I haven’t had to pack, organize daycare and babysitting and iron anything for it, then I’m happy and will spend the next week joyfully imagining all the possible delights ahead.
On the other hand, if what is planned involves my mother minding the children then I’m going to have to spend every minute between now and then cleaning my house and catching up with the ironing or she’ll be giving me That Look.
