It’s confession time. Over the weekend I got a bit sidetracked from the blankie. Really, it was only for one evening – or so – as far as the knitting went, but my brain has been all over a little obsession with a new sock. Still is, really. Don’t worry! I’ve been hard at work so far this week making up lost time, and blankie progress for the week will hopefully fall into the acceptable category of accomplishment.
I’ll talk about the sock in question momentarily, but first I have to show you a couple of other pictures that are clogging up the queue…
Sophie has been working hard on sprouting new molars in the back of her mouth. So she’s been walking around looking like this quite a bit lately.
It really is amazing how far she can stick pretty much her whole hand in there. Totally random, I know. But cute, so you have to look at it to get to the knitting.
And by the way, those pictures were taken over the weekend. Today’s Sophie update is that she woke up with a high fever and remained a limp little noodle for the entire day, despite multiple doses of Motrin and Tylenol (delivered at appropriate intervals, of course). Gah! Why can’t we as a family seem to recover from the neverending sickness this winter? The answer is all in one word: pre-school.
Next, I need to brag on my recent sock class that just ended. I feel so lucky to have gotten to teach this awesome group of women for the second time – a bunch of ladies took my hat class a few months back, and they had fun, so they set up a socks class to do together. They were all really fun, and seemed to catch on to the short-row heels and toes pretty well. Here are some of the results:
And here are update pictures of my current socks-in-progress, although I’ve gotten further up the cuff on this Fleece Artist one
And the poor little Vesper toes are languishing in a project bag somewhere till the Seawool ones are done. Notice, though, that I *do* sometimes use magic loop now. I kinda like it, and I love my Addi Turbos.
And here’s where we really get down to business…It all started when I got carried away with the credit card and the computer a couple weeks ago. Part of my spending spree involved some more Addi Turbos. Because my beloved Yarnery doesn’t carry them in this particular size, or maybe they were just out of stock the last time I checked.
Let’s have a closeup.
That’s right. Crazy-tiny Addi Turbos in a length justright for Magic Loop. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ll mention it again. I knit loosely. I usually knit all my socks on size 0s, partly because I really strongly believe in firm fabric for socks so that they will wear longer, and partly because I knit like someone who is much, much more relaxed than anyone who meets me could possibly believe. So when I heard about crazy-tiny ATs, I thought “I need me some of those.”
And they came in the mail, and it was kind of like a present because I had by that time forgotten that I’d ordered them. So I was really excited and I felt the immediate need to try them out. Of course. Unlike the other needles that we don’t even need to name again, I couldn’t just switch one of my projects-in-progress and give them a whirl because I was expecting, even hoping for, a dramatic change in gauge. I needed something new.
And what I found was the perfect yarn for the testing job – a skein of what I’m pretty sure is Schaeffer Anne that one of my awesome readers sent me during the deluge of sock-yarn scraps. She had tried knitting with it and didn’t like it, so convinced me that I was doing her a favor by taking it off her hands. And I had at some point in the last year and a half cast on a toe with my beloved Pony Pearl 0’s, but never got any further because I was less than thrilled with the fabric I was getting. Anne is really thin fingering weight. I think one could even argue that it borders on laceweight. And that combined with my loose tension meant a fabric that was floppier than I wanted for socks.
It’s hard to see in this picture, but the top toe has a nice, tighter gauge because it was knit with the 000 Turbos, while the one at the bottom has a looser gauge because it was knit with the 0s.
They look like they’re about the same size, and they pretty much are, but that’s because I knit more rows and added more stitches to the new toe when I realized that it was going to be too small for my foot on the standard 64 stitches around that I normally use. So I went up to 72, which was about right. Only, I had knit my standard short-row toe and switching to increases at either side looked pretty clunky. See?
And at this point, I realized that if I am going to knit socks with this yarn at this gauge, I’d like them to be State Fair-worthy – a high bar to set when you’re talking about the Minnesota State Fair and its highly competitive sock knitting categories.
See, by this time, I had another motive in mind. I’ve had entrelac on the brain for quite some time – years really – and over the holidays out came Interweave Knits with their Holiday issue and in it was a design called “Annetrelac Socks” that had renewed my interest in making a pair of entrelac socks, considering how beautiful the sample was and the fact that I had this single toe sitting on my shelf staring at me all the time anyway.
And the obsession was in full swing by now, and I was suddenly pulling entrelac sock patterns off the shelves and poring over them to decide just how I wanted to knit my version.
I’ve really considered three main patterns – I started with Eunny Jang’s pattern that appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of IK, and actually knit a couple of tiers on it (after, of course, ripping out the second bad toe and casting on again with the appropriate number of stitches this time) before I realized that I was terribly unhappy with it. I forgot to take a picture before I ripped, but I had a line of holes along where the base triangles joined the toe. In talking to one of the managers (Theresa Gaffey, who totally rocks!) at the store when I was there on Sunday, I found out that she’d had the same problem with that pattern, and then looking at the picture in Ravelry, it appears that lots of other knitters had the problem too. You can see it pretty well in this one.
To the frog pond I went, and I took Theresa’s suggestion of the pattern by Vickie Starbuck in Socks Socks Socks, which she said worked much better for her, and which I found to be true for me as well. See?
Oh, and before I forget – I chose not to use the Annetrelac pattern in IK Holiday 2007 because it was written top-down and without patterning on the foot. Which doesn’t make it a bad pattern – just not the one I wanted.
Anyway, even after knitting all these annoying little squares, and much improving my knitting-back-backward technique, I’m still a little obsessed with the idea of entrelac socks. I’m going to knit a pair, I think. But I’ve set this toe aside for a few days, partly because I knew I needed to make up time on the blankie, and partly because I want to sit with my thoughts for a bit before I embark on a project that will take some time, and not just idle mindless multitasking time, but actual pay-attention knitting time.
I poked around a bit more on Ravelry. What the heck did we ever do before Ravelry? There are a few different patterns for entrelac socks out there, and hundreds of project pictures amongst them to stare at and analyze. Lots of those were made with Schaeffer Anne, and I realized that I didn’t like them as much as some of the others – the handpaint yarn actually seemed to muddy the pattern up quite a bit. The ones I really love are the ones made out of the new Noro sock yarn. It’s like the gradually shifting colors and entrelac were meant to go together.
And I feel like I’ve come full circle, because I’m not sure if I mentioned it here, but I saw my friend Connie knitting entrelac socks out of the new Noro sock yarn a few weeks ago at my Wednesday morning group, and could. not. take my eyes off of them, they were so beautiful. They were so beautiful that the same afternoon I dragged the girls to Coldwater Collaborative and bought two skeins of the stuff. I bought colors 164 and 185 – don’t have a photo handy at the moment, and it’s getting too late tonight to drag the camera back out.
In any case, I’m strongly considering knitting some copycat socks, and I was really sad about missing knitting with her this morning because I wasn’t about to drag my limp Sophie-noodle to the bagel shop where she could infect all my friends with her fever-inducing germs.
And speaking of Sohpie once more, I will leave you with two more incredibly cute kid pictures. Julie, for some reason, hasn’t been in the photos much this week – maybe because she’s been in school and Sophie and I have been tooling around together. This one is from Monday when we were heading out to do our grocery shopping, before the Busted incident. It looks like she’s grimacing, but really she’s smiling because she’s letting the snowflakes land on her face and tickle her. You kind of had to be there, but it was SO cute, watching her experience the sensation as only someone to whom it is new can do. She did this every time we got in and out of the car that morning.
And from yesterday, she let me put her hair in pigtails, which were so cute till she pulled the rubber bands out later that afternoon. And she’s excited about eating a banana, which she loves but which I haven’t allowed her to have very much in the last year because of the constipation issues that are well on their way to resolved now.
And hey – if you have any great resources on knitting entrelac that you’d like to point me to, I’d be grateful.
