May Contain Traces of Knits

In which S rants about knitting, school, and life.

Saturday, March 31, 2007

The one in which I mercilessly abuse parentheses

First up, a spring update:

Spring is coming!

The snow's nearly all gone! I've taken my motorcycle out for a ride! I don't have to dress like I'm in the Antarctic anymore! I've bought shoes! Spring!

(Speaking of shoes, I very nearly bought insanely cute mary-jane-type flats, perfect for showing off socks, but instead I got a relatively hip pair of Fakeverses. [In my world, Fakeverse are shoes that look like Converse shoes, but aren't.] I decided that if I still covet the flats on Monday I can go and buy them.)

(I love knowing that very possibly no-one reads this, so I can ramble on about anything and everything and abuse parentheses and no one's going to mind.)

Knitting!

Snakes on a Sock - heel turned

Today's exercise: find a sock-in-progress among all the crap on my desk. :D I just turned the heel of the second Snakes sock. (I love my camera. The colour of this photo is pretty much true to life, at least on my monitor, and it's not even taken in daylight.)

Tempting II - in progress

On Friday, the Tempting and I went out to soak up the sun and study geography. I'm about ten inches into the body and mildly freaking out about having enough yarn and the sweater possibly being too large. Oh well.

If the rib looks odd, that's because I subbed a twisted 1x1 rib instead of the regular one, because ribbing has a bad habit of spreading so it looks, in my opinion, a bit amateurish and rather crappy. I don't twist my stitches by knitting into the back of the loop, because that would drive me insane, but by wrapping the yarn around the needle in the opposite direction than usual. (I'm also very glad that I was taught to purl the Norwegian way, because moving the yarn back and forth between the needles = oh my god I'm going to strangle myself with a circular.)

I've made some yarn purchases, but because I have exams in physics and maths on Monday and Tuesday, respectively, I should probably study and I don't have any photos of those. Maybe tomorrow.

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Friday, March 23, 2007

FO: Jaywalker socks

Jaywalkers

They're done! Actually, they were done over a month ago, but whatever. :D

The pattern: Jaywalkers, from MagKnits (Like you didn't recognise that. Did you know that if you Google 'jaywalker' the pattern is the first thing on the list?)
The yarn: Regia 4-fädig Crazy Color or something along those lines, about 75 grams
The needles: 2,5mm bamboo DPNs, though I lost one halfway through and had to replace it with an aluminium needle

Now, the fit isn't that great, but it's entirely my own damn fault. I should have used 2mm for the socks, and something even smaller for the heel flap, because apparently my purls are ridiculously loose.

I love the socks and have worn them a lot. The soles are becoming sort of fuzzy, but the yarn doesn't show any other signs of wear.

The pattern is a delight to knit. It's got that mindless stockinette in the round quality, but also the zig-zag action going on to keep me from getting bored enough to stab out an eye with a double-point. I could knit on them on busses (I get car-sick if I don't stare out the windows) and in class, because I didn't have to pay that much attention. Simply wonderful, and worked wonders for the striping yarn, too.

Because the socks are a bit large, I usually wear them either with a pair of store-bought socks underneath them (along with a second layer of trousers, because I get really damn cold) or as-is to bed.

Jaywalkers are done!

As you can see, the legs don't quite match. The stripes don't, either, but I wasn't trying to match them. At all. And since the first sock didn't use a whole ball, I started the second one with the leftovers from the first, so even that level of matching-ness is a minor miracle.

Now, there's something fishy going on with the toes. That's because I'm an idiot and a kitchener stitch dweeb. Here, have a helpful diagram of where I screwed up:

Jaywalkers - I am an idiot.

The red lines highlight the direction of the kitchener stitch. Why yes, I did kitchener the toe of the first sock, on the right, in a right angle to the way it's supposed to be. Go me! (I hope I at least learned something from this experience, as I couldn't be arsed to rip back, because it doesn't really bother me.)

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Thursday, March 22, 2007

... Aand I'm back.

I clearly lose at updating. Oh well.

Since I last posted, I've come back from London and turned seventeen. Spring is sort of coming, but the weather is rather weird at the moment.

This was taken on our back yard last Friday:

Borderline

Half of the lawn is covered with snow, and the other isn't. (Our lawn is actually mostly covered in moss instead of grass, so it's green all year round.)

On Monday, it rained, snowed and hailed in rapid succession. Oh, and it was windy as hell. I nearly lost a hat, and it was kinda skullcap-y.

Then this happened on Tuesday:

... Crap.

Yeah. I'm glad I didn't get the motorcycle out yet. And now it's pretty much back to the way it was last week, with half the snow melted away.

Also, yarn.

yarn - Rowan Calmer

Four balls of Rowan Calmer in Coffee Bean. It's soft and squishy and springy and lovely. And oh, the colour. (Dark brown is like magic. It goes with everything, like orange and pink and greens, especially lime, and turquoise and white and oh. Yeah, a good portion of my clothes are in those colours. :D)

That's going to become Tempting II from Knitty. I've already cast on and am about three inches into the body. I'm a bit worried about running out of yarn, but we'll see. (Anecdote: this is the first time I've ever knit anything out of the specified yarn. And it's in the colour shown, too!)

Of course, it was my birthday on the 11th, so I had to buy something a little more expensive and nice. What I got after nearly and hour of browsing and trying to decide was this:

yarn - Garnstudio's Silke-Tweed

Garnstudio's Silke-Tweed in a lovely green colour. I'm a complete sucker for tweed yarns, and I've never knit with anything with any silk in it, so I got this. It took me a moment to realise that he whole label was in Swedish (I'm guessing), though:

yarn - Silke Tweed ballband

Apparently I'm better at guessing than I thought. Also, the fact I've studied Swedish for four years might have helped a bit. :D (It does have English text on the back of the ballband.)

When I was in London, I only had time to visit one yarn store. It was Loop in Islington. It was alright, I guess, but not anything yarngasmic. :D

I ended up getting a skein of Colinette Jitterbug in Jay, and am knitting some Snakes on a Sock socks, from Lime'n'Violet. (There was a mistake in the pdf, but apparently it'd fixed somewhere I failed to find. Both Miss Lime and Lexy the Admin monkey were terribly helpful, though, and it wasn't anything I couldn't have figured out myself.)

Snakes on a Sock in progress

Yes, my foot really is that short.

I also finished my Jaywalkers, but I'll post an FO report tomorrow, along with some pictures. (And a magnificent screw-up, too, but you'll have to wait. Or go to the Flickr, I guess.)

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