Stick a fork in them! The pair looks much like the single sock photos, so let’s mix it up a bit with some shoes:

My normally nicely purple shoes look downright dull compared to the BLUE!

Pattern: My own, based off of a stitch pattern from a Japanese craft book
Yarn: Tess Super Sock and Baby

So this is my contribution to Sockpalooza 4. These socks were a bit of a collaborative effort - Stacey suggested the name, and the yarn was from Jess’s blog contest. Yay for the internets!

The sock pattern morphed a bit from the original swatch and I’m very pleased with the results. The pattern is forthcoming, I’m in the midst of font-editing to create the charts. I’m a novice chart creator, and I’ve realized that it’s quite a bit of work. I found a few knitting fonts online - a couple on the knittingsoftware yahoo group (which require conversion to macify them), and one from Knitter’s magazine which is very good.

I do need to add a couple of symbols that aren’t in the fonts, and I’ve downloaded Font Forge to help me out. The program is, um, hideous, but works on the mac. The general plan is to use Excel (well, Openoffice) to create the charts, following the instructions on Fleegle’s blog. Fingers crossed that this jumble of free resources will work!

Update: The pattern is finally available!

Since my camera wants desperately to wash out the blue, here’s a better photo of the texture:

The Tess yarn was really nice to work with, reasonably soft and smells delicious. It definitely has good springy sproing to it, just like my other fave socks yarns (Koigu!). There was some bleeding in the brief soak these socks got (the real blocking is to come once I replenish my wool wash), but nothing like the great Red Laceweight Bleed of ‘07. I would use this stuff again and I’m looking forward to digging into other Tess yarn I’ve got in my stash.

I still love the heels!

This is my second year participating in Sockpalooza, and I wasn’t as into it this year. I like reading about people’s progress on their blogs but I never really followed the digg-like pligg. I partially blame the interface (I’m not much of a digg follower, either), and partially on Ravelry, which surfaced around the same time and has all the pretty photos that the pligg lacks. Regardless, hopefully my sockpal digs these, and I can’t wait to see what I receive in the mail!

Are you sick of the blue yet? Because I sure am. I sort of finished the sockpalooza socks!

I wasn’t even going to blog about this, because Alert The Presses, Kelly Has Frogged Something For Some Anal Retentive Reason. The heel flap on sock one differed from both my notes and sock number two. Also, the foot edge patterning could best be described as assy. So, we ripped everything and all is well.

But! I was working on this at the doctor’s office this morning, and I lost! a! chart! I have three pieces of graph paper that I tote around, one for each chart, and the heel chart is probably still sitting in exam room 6. The heel chart is a bit of a pain to recreate and the sheet also contained all of my heel turning numbers. The socks are now officially fraternal twins. Sorry, sockpal.

I lost a bit of the sock love today. Silver still likes them, though.

Don’t let that cute exterior fool you - all she wants to do is eat that sock.

i feel like I was the only person around not holed up reading a certain book this weekend. Instead, I went to the Menil Collection and visited another Broken Obelisk.

Now I need to schedule a trip to Seattle to see the third obelisk.

Yesterday, I braved the 94-and-freaking-humid weather and some incredibly persistent mosquitoes to do a sock photoshoot.

Sockpalooza sock #1 is complete! I need to figure out a better name for it. I’m a terrible namer of things, when I’m allowed to pick names we end up with color coded cats and a plant named Droopy.

I’m knitting the second with an eye to writing up the pattern, but I do need to replicate my first sock mistakes (like one or two too many gusset decreases). I’m still a bit torn about handling different sizes - the easy way would be to call for different yarn weights and needle sizes, the harder would be to rechart everything. Recharting isn’t difficult per se, as I already have a larger leg chart completed, but it is pretty error prone. There are three charts for the sock - one each for the leg, heel, and foot pattern. They’re all basically displaying the same thing, with some minor changes for edge stitch treatments.

The heel is my favorite part:

There’s a pair of stockings in Handknit Holidays that has a similar pointy heel, and I love it so!

Hi! It’s been a week, and I’ve got nothing to show except for some photos of squished up knitting.

Will you trust me that this sock looks 100% better when blocked and stretched out on one’s foot? Thanks. I’m almost done with sock #1, which will give me about two weeks to knit the other sock and do some serious blocking. I think we’re in good shape here, especially since a certain Petal is in Time Out.

Petal is thisclose to becoming a sweater. I don’t seem to own a size 1 circular needle, so I had to chain a number of straight needles to knit the edging ribbing, which is extremely annoying. I finished the ribbing and seamed the sides and one sleeve yesterday, and the result was not so good. The body fit great, the neckline not so much. I dropped the neckline about an inch, because I thought it hit in a bad location on the modeled photo, but that causes my bra straps to show in the corners where the upper triangles hit the lower neckline. So now I’m going to frog back the lower neckline and reknit to pattern and really, really hope that I don’t have to frog the upper ribbing to reknit the triangles. Fingers crossed!

Then there’s the question of crocheting some buttonholes for the glass buttons that came with the kit. I’m considering reusing the buttons for a different, handwash-only, project after reading this:

Oh, come on.

I have declared this the Summer of Finishing. I have a number of teeny little projects that have been sitting around, taunting me at the top of my Ravelry project list, and they need to go! First on the list:

Pattern: Jacket in Alpaca, from Drops Design
Yarn: Rowan Cashsoft 4 ply in Forest and Fennel

This sweater has been ABB (all but buttons) for a couple of months now. I had dreams of finding the perfect kicky light-light turquoise buttons for it, but my dreams were crushed by my local button sources. I definitely should have searched for buttons while in NYC, but alas. I purchased a number of contenders (including these adorable flounders, but they weren’t high-contrast enough) and wound up going with some traditional shell buttons. So much for kicky.

The pattern had all the potential to be boring garter stitch, but I quite enjoyed it. The short rows added some interest, and the sweater really flew by.

I made two modifications to the pattern:

1. Wrapped my turns. The pattern says to just turn and tug the yarn tightly, but that still left me with holes. The wraps aren’t noticeable.

2. I didn’t bind off the arm stitches as called for - I instead placed them on waste yarn, and later cast on provisionally. At the end, I flipped the sleeves inside out and kitchenered the live stitches together, which created a line of bumps that does not disrupt the patterning. I am planning on redoing the grafting before I send this off, because my sloppy finishing is pretty obvious (so much for blocking out the wonkiness).

This is the first time I’ve used Rowan Cashsoft yarns, and they are extremely soft. Better yet, they’re machine washable, so they’re perfect (albeit a bit pricey) for baby wear. Unfortunately, the yarn is a bit splitty - I can see a couple of blips in the pattern where I only knit with one ply and the contrast color shows through. The sweater calls for two balls of each color - I used almost all of the dark green and about 1.5 balls of the light green.

I love the shape and construction of this sweater - such a simple idea, and the result is so cute. I was pondering making an adult-sized version of it, and ran into this version at Anthropologie. It’s the same exact construction in stockinette stitch with some garter eyelet rows in the blue yarn.

I had some leftovers from the sweater, so I decided to make some Saartje’s Booties:

These are teeny tiny. So, so wee! Baby-in-law won’t be wearing these with the 6-month sized sweater, since I made the newborn size. Do babies wear booties in August? Regardless, this is a cute-as-pie pattern.

I’d like to send a couple of other things to baby-in-law - my sister-in-law’s due date has indeed spurred my Summer of Finishing. I finally started sewing the Big Footed Bunny, after cutting out the pattern pieces months ago.

I am endlessly amused by bunny pants. These pants were hard, people, definitely out of my newbie sewing skills league. Easing in the ass of these pants is easily the hardest sewing I’ve ever done, followed closely by hemming the teeniest leg holes around.

Good thing that Blackie’s on hand to help.

We are back! We were awake at 3am central time to catch our flight back to the big TX on Wednesday, and hoo boy I’m still recovering. The trip was good, the weather was awesome (almost chilly at times), and the shawl well received on Rob’s grandma’s 90.5th birthday celebration. We also got to go to NY while we were in town and Rob let me drag him to a number of places that make him antsy:

Purl. Purl is very pretty with their lovely window display and so-soft yarns. Everything is smooshed into filled cubbies, so you need to pull out the yarns to see what they are. Which isn’t such a bad thing, since they have the softest selection ever. Soft. Squishy. Yum.

However, you definitely pay the Purl tax for shopping there - Koigu is $13.50 a skein. Damn. I just couldn’t justify paying that much for more sock yarn (although I was quite tempted), but I did break the yarn diet for one lone green skein at 40% off. I also picked up some Nature’s Palette, which isn’t available locally - the green skeins are for me, and the blue for Rob’s mom. She loved the socks I knit her for xmas so much that she wants to relearn to knit (she knit in college) and make her own socks. Yeah, I can help with that.

I probably wouldn’t go to Purl again if I was visiting NY, as their entire inventory (at least the yarns) are available on their website. Which is great for those of us living far away, but not so interesting if you stop by in person. It was nice to see their fabrics up close and personal, though.

I didn’t buy any fabric - Rob was getting impatient, and I don’t really have any sewing projects or yardage requirements in mind for fancy pretty fabric. I figure I’ll order some from them at some point when my sewing skills improve. We ended up having lunch at the cafe between the two Purl shops, and the creepy cats in the window stared at us the whole time we ate.

Kinokuniya. I was on the lookout for some more Japanese stitch dictionaries, but I didn’t see anything worth buying. There was one reasonably priced book but it looked questionable, with some swatches knit in mohair (bad, bad idea). I ended up buying this amigurumi book with cute animals and a crocheted milk carton instead. Does a body good, pass it on.

MOMA. Just kidding about the antsy part, Rob really did want to go here. We used to visit NYC occasionally when we lived in MA, but I’ve only been to the Queens annexy MOMA when they were doing construction on the Manhattan building. It was really nice and only saw about half of it in the 2 hours we were there. MOMA makes me appreciate Houston a teeny bit more, as we’ve seen a few MOMA exhibits in local museums in the last year. Houston definitely has some great contemporary art going on between the Menil, Fine Arts, and Contemporary Art museums.

I ended up bringing Petal to Jersey, so I only really worked on Petal. I finished the front up to the arm shaping and a good chunk of the back. Then I ripped a good chunk of the back because my gauge loosened up while I knit sleepily on planes, buses and automobiles, gah! I also reworked the chart for the Sockpalooza socks to make it sock-workable, more on that when I start the actual socks (T-minus 26 days).