Home Sweet Home

I am so glad to be home. I enjoy going on vacation but it is always nice to get home to my full stash, um, I mean, my own bed.

We had 10 days of pure work work work. We got up on a Friday and the work didn't stop until Monday after the reunion, my mother-in-laws family reunion. I doubt there will ever be a reunion on my FIL side or even on my own parents side....which I think is really sad, but that's the fact of life.

I will try to write more personal stuff over on my yahoo blog because I have some major gossiping to do and this isn't the place to do it, the private blog is.

I did get some stitching accomplished:

I finally finished the first sock for my daughter, now the second sock will have to wait for me to finish my HSS partners socks...I am kind of disappointed with the way they turned out actually. I messed up the pick up stitches on my gusset and now I have some pretty big ventilation holes there...oh well...it is also the first time I've done a tailored sock so I was having some problems with double increases/decreases...I also got interupted so often that I had made one section too long and the other section too short.

So after I take a break from them and work on my partners socks (using a pattern type I'm used to) I will be comtemplating whether I will let the sock stand as it is now or make a new sock ripping out the stitches from the old sock as I go.

But I will wait....I may even wait until after I finish my daughters brownie socks, even though I was planning on them using the same pattern. I did find however that each sock takes one ball of Bernat Sox yarn...or about 1.75 ounces...50 grams....203 yards....186 meters.

so I was right in buying two skeins of yarn in each color. I found some hair binders at walmart while on vacation that will match them wonderfully!

I even had time to knit up something special for my partner using pearle cotton and size 0 needles...I will probably make another for her using even smaller needles but not until the kids start school so I will be nearly uninterupted, and I can put on three pairs of magnifying glasses w/o worry of being picked on.

I feel kind of bad because I came back from vacation and found that there have been some trivia questions going on the HSS2 blog that I've missed and let my house down on...time to pull out those books and keep them close to the computer I see.

Actually it reminds me alot of the trivia contests we used to have on the WB HPbbs...one person would ask a question and then whoever answered it would ask the next one, the moderator would decide the difficulty of each question and award points...only this time only McGonagall will ask the questions. Either way I've found it is helpful to keep the books handy...along with the URL for the HP lexicon!

Well football is coming on in about...ewww, NOW! Got to go.

Go Vikes!! I bleed purple.

Sock update

It has been a while since I posted about the socks I'm making for my daughter so I thought I would post an update. Well I was able to redo all the stitches that my son let loose, and except for one single stitch all went well...I think what happened was that I may have accidentally pulled a stitch up from the previous row and put it on the needles too, but unless you are looking for it you would never know.

I am a tad disappointed with the way the double-decreases look...the instructions called it the back-seam so I assumed that they were supposed to be noticable, but I don't really like them. But being that I am at the heel there is NO WAY I am ripping it all out and starting new...the tough part will be resisting the urge to fix the problem on the second sock, after all they should match.

I was digging thru my stash and found several possibilities for my HSS partners socks and started playing with them, here is a shot of one possible pair:

But I think I may have found the perfect yarn on line (not telling where) I just have to get over the fact that I can't get it on sale....I hate paying full price for ANYTHING....but it would be perfect and would open an entire realm of possiblities....I could even get lacy with it if I wanted too....we will see. I have to look at some more patterns...to my advantage my partner likes the shorter crew socks so one skein should do the trick.

Kids and Knitting do NOT mix

I love my kids, I really do.

I was in the bedroom (where the HD tv is) and I was working on my current sock...see previous photos...when the phone rang and I put down my work. I had just gotten to the heel flap so had switched from my size 2 dpn's to my size 1 circs, figured I would make life easy on myself and if I put the work down for a long period of time I could slip the stitches down onto the cable. Good Idea, right?

I'm not used to working with circs....I only got them because I was going to try making socks using the Magic Loop system but couldn't figure it out...so there they were laying on the bed.....next to my 11 yr old son....who was watching television with me....apparently he is not the fan of the news because as soon as I got into the quick conversation on the phone he decided to get off the bed....the call lasted all of 50 seconds....literally, if even that long.

Son and I passed each other thru the door...when there on the floor lay...you guessed it---the circs....no sock....just the circs!

I had cataract surgery about 4 years ago, at age 38, so my eyesight is not the best but even I could see I had a BIG problem on my hands.

So I popped on my magnifying glasses over my regular glasses (it makes my entire lens the same prescrib as my bi-focals) and proceded to slip as many of the loops back onto the circ without loosing them....this is not easy for anyone, but try to do it while fighting the urge to find the kid that did it (I know it was my fault for not sliding down those stitches)

{sighs} so I get all the stitches on, give it a gentle tug just to make sure...a run is easy to fix at this point, but {wiping sweat from brow} luckily I didn't have any runs--all the stitches were saved. Right??

WRONG! I started to do the next knit row. It was great the first half of the heel flap==not a problem EVERY single stitch was twisted correctly and right where it belonged, but once I passed the marker that's when the problems began.

1. most of the stitches are actually the ones from the previous row, or a mix of the previous row stitch and the present row stitch.
2.still hadn't dropped any rows, no runs...well that's good news at least...but I have stitches where I caught PART of them...which means I have split the yarn...which weakens it. On the heel this is not a good thing, in fact its a very, very bad thing.
3. hubby came home and now I haven't had time to straighten out the mess....only reason I'm writing this blog now is because I'm waiting for my stroganoff to meld together (keyboards are easier to clean than knitting while its on the needles).

So now I am sitting here dreading having to get out the crochet hook and redoing 15 stitches so that I am catching all the yarn fibers that should be there----and seperate the previous row from the current one.

You know the devil on my shoulder is saying "just stitch it the way it is, no one will notice the heel"....but I just can't do that....{sigh}

On the bright side I told my daughter, they are her socks, what had happened and that I would have to fix her heel and she said "on my leg or on the sock?" Maybe she knew I could have used that good chuckle about then.

Still Waiting....

Okay so I am really trying to keep myself busy waiting for a "yea" or "nay" from the sock swap....I've given hair cuts to son and hubby....I've fed the gargoyles....I even worked on my sock yesterday (some concerns here)...but this is really testing my will power not to send off yet ANOTHER plea to be let in.....how UNslytherin of me, if I give in I would suspect the others will really trounse me!

About my sock...

Well I noticed after I put up the photos of it that I was getting some pretty funky pooling of color suddenly. I rechecked my gauge, nope it was still the same....8sts/inch, 9rows/inch....so the color should have been the same. Then it dawned on me that what it could be is the dying sequence had changed....hmmm, why would they do that?

Because that was were/when they expected me to be at the HEEL...instead of the decrease of the calf! So now I had this really nice wide striping going on with a big muck of muddiness...but really that's not my issue with it...it doesn't look the best but I can live with it (so can my daughter for that matter)....by issue is:
what if there isn't enough to finish the foot!!!

I mean think of it....I could be most of the way done with the foot and suddenly run out! That would be disastrous because I only have 2 skeins of this yarn....the last two herrschner's had...and buying a new skein risks mismatching dye lots (even though bernat is usually really good about it, I ain't pushing it). I even thought of using a second yarn for the heel and toe decrease, but then I thought....well if there IS enough yarn I would have a bit left over from each ball and then I have to worry about matching the striping and working in ends on the other sock. yada, yada, yada.

That is the one thing I do NOT like about the Arachne sock calculator....it doesn't give you approximate yardage needed. I don't know why it couldn't....I mean its a simple mathematical equation...

(#of sts needed to complete) X (# of yds needed to make gauge swatch of specific portions)=yds needed

OR

(#of rows) X (yardage in 10 rows)=approximate yardage needed

since the calculator asks you to enter in your gauge anyways, all it would need to know is the international size of the yarn to give the best estimate of yardage (1-5, based on thickness).

I suppose I could figure it out on my own too, but it would be easier if I had one of those cool tools that you just pull the yarn thru and it tell you the yardage you have....that would really be SWEET for something like this.

Just think all I would have to do is make swatches for every size of yarn with all my different needles and then measure it out...viola! Instant yardage chart! But that seems like just too much work for this time of the morning.

Besides, it won't help with the problem I have now....although the number of yardage/sts. would be the best way to handle the decreases and increases....AHHHHGGG! Now that will be stuck in my head and rattling around all day.

But then.....it might be better than obsessing over the Sock Swap!

On My Needles

Not too shabby for two days worth of work and doing all the other stuff that has to be done at the cabin as well, huh? This is the test for the "Arachne Sock Calculator" that takes your measurements and makes a simple sock pattern for you. It can be found at:
http://www.panix.com/~ilaine/socks.html
This pattern is great for self striping yarns like the Bernat Sox that I'm using in Hot Tamale! I also thought I would challenge myself and broke out the size 0's for the ribbing, a single row in size 1 to step up to the size 2 dpns....normally I hate working with anything smaller than a 3 but I like the fabric made with the smaller sizes much better (I even make my washclothes with size 4s instead of the 7 or8 that's recommended).

I purchased the yarn last year when I was planning on making tons of socks for my niece who we dubbed "Dobby" because whenever you asked her what she wanted for Christmas or her Birthday the answer was always the same---SOCKS!!

The Sox yarn is made of 60% acrylic and 40% nylon which gives it a wonderful memory, it doesn't hurt my hands like wool tends to, but I know many sock enthusiasts are just dieing now yelling "NO USE WOOL"...I'm sorry my hands just can't take it, but then I've only used LB Wool-Ease yarn so who knows what other brands will be like.

Actually this is the second attempt at these socks....I was almost finished with the leg last week when I realized that I had been marking my rows wrong and I hadn't put enough rows before the decrease began and then had too many rows between the decreases. So I frogged it all and restarted it last Friday night and churned this much work out on Saturday (sunday was a travel day so nothing got done....I can't knit in the car).