Aestlight in the Evening

My Aestlight Shawl is finished and blocked :) I made it through the body of the shawl and the edging using one skein of Wollmeise (100%). The skein was a little heavier than the 150g listed on the label, 154 grams, I think. I had to break into another skein just to bind off the stitches on the top edging.

This was how much I had left after doing the border:


Here are some FO shots for you:





I knit the large size, for maximum coziness. I love how this turned out. It's casual enough to wear with jeans, but pretty enough not to be boring. I can definitely see making more of these.

I am just about two rows away from finishing my first Skandalous sock, too, so look for that in an upcoming post.

In other news, Mr. T and Sr. Jr. entered a father/son golf tournament at a local municipal 9 hole course. Despite a shaky start, they came in second! They had a lot of fun. Jr. Jr. and I played putt putt at the same course while they played.

This month is WIP Wrestlemania on Ravelry, where we try to finish up as many WIPs as possible. This means that I'm committed to working on things already in progress, which is killing me! I really want to cast on for something new, even more so because I'm not supposed to.

This upcoming week the boys are at tennis camp, which is only half a day. I won't get very far on the WIPs anyway.

Next week, Sr. Jr. goes away for a week of outdoor adventures camp, his first whole week away from home. I may go a little crazy missing him...

Down to the Last Inch, I Expect...

Yesterday I started the border on the Aestlight Shawl:


The problem is that I'm running low on yarn. According to my calculations with the pattern in hand and a scale to measure the yarn, I should have enough. But it was getting pretty close, as you can see:


I have another skein of this color, but it's a different base (80/20 rather than 100% merino), it's slightly thicker, and a slightly different shade. Ack.

I kept working, hoping that the yarn would last. By the end of the evening last night I had knit the border all the way down one side of the triangle and just around the tip at the bottom:


Here's a close up of the tip:


And here's how much yarn I have left to work my way up the second side of the triangle:


So, what do you think? Will I make it? I'll be sweating this one down to the last stitch. If I can make it through the border, I don't mind using my other skein just to do the bind off on the top stitches - the differences in the yarns won't be noticeable in the bind off. But if I don't have enough to finish the border... I may have to rely on the kindness of Rav friends :)

In general summer news, Jr. Jr. has been having a great time at football camp this week. Sr. Jr. has been home this week, mostly begging for food. He's old enough now that he can go out on the golf course by himself, so he's played a couple of rounds at a local municipal 9 hole course. I'm very proud of him. He's been playing well, too! He and Mr. T are high on the wait list to compete in a father-son golf tournament Saturday morning. I hope they make it in, because it will be a lot of fun for them to compete together. Jr. Jr. and I will entertain ourselves on the putt putt course while they play.

And now I'm off to try to power my way through this border. Have a great weekend!

Border Crossings

Kippi asked, in the comments to the last post, whether I was slipping the first stitch of each row to facilitate picking up stitches for the border. Nope. In this pattern, you increase for the triangle by doing a yarnover at the beginning of each row. This creates a line of bigger loops running up the sides of the triangle that you pick up and knit into the back of to create what looks like a row of yarnovers:


You can see it in the picture above separating the main triangle from the border pattern. I'm cruising along with this now, but I'm not sure how much I like it. I've never been a huge fan of garter stitch based lace patterns, but this will be a cozy warm shawl, rather than a work of art, that's for sure.

Garden Question

There's something yucky going on with my Roma tomatoes, and I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I'm going to seek the wisdom of the few of you who read this ;) They start out nicely, but then the bottoms start to get brown and rotten looking:


Any ideas from the crowd?

On Friday, Mr. T took the boys to the AT&T National Golf Tournament at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda. They had a great time, got themselves on TV (if you squint, they're behind Anthony Kim on one of the holes), and got a bunch of autographs:


Being a cute kid helps with the autograph seeking, apparently. They got autographs from Lee Janzen, Mike Weir, Lucas Glover (who won the US Open last week), Stuart Appleby, Hunter Mahan (who shot the course record at Congressional yesterday), Rocco Mediate, Ricky Barnes, Aaron Baddely, and Steve Flesch. Not Tiger, who doesn't do many autographs and walked right past them.

Bwahahahaha, Sarah Palin

I don't care how she or her followers try to spin her resignation from office a year and a half before her term is over -- the going got tough and she bailed. She's so full of hypocrisy, it never ceases to amaze me. She doesn't like the media attention focused on her family? Well, then, keep your family out of the media! Don't trot them out as campaign props or put them in the spotlight by picking fights with David Letterman. She complains about being in debt because of ethics complaints? Does she remember what happened to Bill Clinton? He didn't quit mid-term, although people were trying hard to force the issue. She didn't want to coast and travel around her state and across the country? What else has she been doing since the election? She's been here in Washington, in NY attending Yankees games... She claims she doesn't want to waste her state's time as a lame-duck governor. What would she do as a lame-duck President?

This doesn't even pass the most rudimentary smell test.

The funny part is that her spokesperson has said that she's going to devote her energies to getting other like-minded politicians elected to office, specifically including campaigning for the wingnut-in-moderate's clothing who's running for governor here in Virginia. However, governors in Virginia are limited by law to serving only one term... making them lame ducks almost immediately upon taking office... but they don't quit in a huff... not sure how she justifies this...

Exciting/Unexciting

Exciting: This morning's tennis match between Serena Williams and Elena Dementieva in the semi-final match at Wimbledon. I didn't get in the shower until 11:15 this morning, because I didn't want to miss a minute of the match. It was very close. A lot of excellent tennis.

Somewhat Exciting: Homemade strawberry/raspberry/banana/sour cherry smoothies for lunch. Yum.

Unexciting: Knitting garter stitch triangles:


It looks the same as before, right? But it is bigger, see --


That's where it was at my last post. I'm close to the finish line for the small size. However, I've decided to do the large size, which is another 30 rows. Even though it's garter stitch, it's going slowly, probably because it's boring.

After the center triangle is one, I pick up stitches around all three sides and knit a lace panel, then I do a knitted-on edging.

Tomorrow Mr. T is taking the kids to the AT&T National golf tournament at Congressional Country Club, so hopefully I'll have some time to crank out the rest of that triangle!

In garden news, some of our grape tomatoes are almost ready to harvest. They're nice and red, but still a little hard. Maybe tomorrow or the day after. Yum.

Freaking Out the Natives, with FO pics

A bunch of us met up in Bethesda this weekend for a Ravelry/Wollmeise swap/knit-out. About 12 of us met up and commandeered some outdoor tables, onto which we piled many, many skeins of yarn. Swaps were quickly worked out and FOs were admired. Yarn was flying across that table so quickly my head was spinning! I think everyone came away pleased.

We spent a good three hours hanging out, knitting and chatting away. People stared as they walked by, wondering what we were doing. One person asked if it was a knitting class. Others started longingly at the yarn (we did direct a few passing knitters to Knitty and Ravelry). One guy walked by, looked at us, and said, "You have got to be kidding me." (Why? Really, why? It's not as if we were smoking the stuff or rolling around naked in it...)

I got some great yarn (thanks to my yarny godmother, Tanya, and to Rena for the lace), and gave some away, too. It was really fun to hang out with other knitters and just be our nutty selves.

I brought my finished Petit Poison Ishbel with me, and now I can show you some great pics of it off the blocking board:




Once it was blocked, I decided that I'm ok with shawls made with sock yarn. It blocked out very nice and airy. Specs: Pattern - Ishbel. Yarn - Wollmeise Sockenwolle 100%, Petit Poison color. Needle size - 6. I did the small stockinette version with the large lace panel.

And so I started another shawl using sock yarn:



This is the Aestlight Shawl, using Wollmeise sock yarn in the Frosch colorway. It's similar to Ishbel in that there's an easy part and then a more interesting part. You start out with a garter stitch triangle, then you pick up stitches all the way around to knit the lacy part. I like this shawl because it's a little more rustic and casual, good to wear with jeans.

In garden news, even though it's taking longer to get the landscaping work done that I had anticipated, the veggies are growing nicely, for the most part. We have little yellow peppers growing:


They're so cute!

Our grape tomatoes are starting to redden:


Our Roma tomatoes are also getting big:


For lunch today, I had another salad using fresh lettuce and basil from the garden. Yum! Unfortunately, the cucumbers haven't survived. Nonetheless, I'm very pleased with the rest of the garden.

Next week was going to be a nice quiet week, with Sr. Jr. away for the week at his outdoor adventure camp and Jr. Jr. gone for most of the day at football camp. I got an email from Sr. Jr.'s camp today saying that they were cancelling his camp next week due to low enrollment. Luckily for him they could put him in a later week. Unfortunately for me, that means my one week of quiet time this summer is no more...

Blocking!

The "PoisonIsh" is done. (Get the clever wordplay? Get it?) Here are some blocking shots:





This time I did the small stockinette section and the large lace section. I like it better now that it's blocked, but I'll have to wait for it to be dry to determine whether I want to make more lace using sock yarn.

In the meantime, I found a little shawl/scarf pattern made specifically for sock yarn that I'm going to start next. It's not as lacy, a little more rustic looking. I haven't even wound the yarn yet, but now you'll have something to look forward to next week -- live action PoisonIsh shots and a new project, to boot :)

Summer Hours

I really wanted to have more to show you than the blob pictured above. I was really cooking along, too. But school's out now, and knitting time is scarce. I'm actually on the border chart, only about 8 rows from casting off. I'm using Wollmeise sock yarn for this, in the Petit Poison color. I love the color. Love love love it. However, I'm not so sure I like using sock yarn for lace. I'll have to wait and see what it looks and feels like when it's blocked, but in general, I like my lace very light and lacy. So I may refocus on using the lace yarn for lace and the sock yarn for socks and sweaters, maybe a warm scarf.

My zippy new computer is already broken or something. The techs are going to come soon to give it a new keyboard and touchpad to see if that helps. If it doesn't, I get a new one. I only had it for a few days, too. And I miss it already! It was nice and fast, even if the touchpad wasn't great. I didn't get booted offline every time I tried to post a picture, either.

The current dinosaur laptop is a Dell, too, and it had something similar happen. Soon after I got it, the screen died. Completely blank, even though the computer was working fine. They replaced the screen and it's been fine ever since, so hopefully that will be the case with the new one, too. It's still a major pain, and it makes me wonder about their quality control.

The same morning that the new laptop died, Sr. Jr's glasses broke. He didn't do anything to them, but the little piece of metal that goes across the bridge of his nose broke. It was kind of funny. Luckily, the glasses are still under warranty, so today we picked up the replacement pair.

The other day we wanted to go see "Up" in 3D, so we looked up what time it was playing and planned our day around it. There were thunderstorms in the morning, part of months and months of rain, but by the time we drove off to the movie, skies were clearing up. As we were driving into the mall, we saw some really pretty big white puffy clouds reaching way up into the sky.

"Cool stimulus clouds," said Jr. Jr.

With a laugh, Sr. Jr. said, "Stimulus clouds! Neat! They'd rain money."

If only.

Hopefully I'll finish off this Ishbel soon, and then I need to figure out what to do next -- more lace, more socks (other than the plain stockinette ones already OTN), or design sweater using worsted weight Wollmeise I have?

Summer Vacation Starts with a Deluge

Today is the kids' first day home for summer vacation and it's pouring. Not just a nice summer rain, but big, fat, fast drops with a lot more power than my shower, and thunder and lightning. Great.

And Sr. Jr. managed to accidentally order himself an iPod on my Amazon account. I got a new computer (yay! speed!), and had it in mind to scrub the old one of all my info and put a net nanny on it so the kids could use it. Sr. Jr. asked to use it to play games this morning and I thought "How much trouble can he get in in a few minutes?" Famous last words. I know he didn't mean to do it, and claims he didn't even realize he had done it. The one-click stuff on Amazon could easily confuse a kid looking at it for the first time. Of course, by the time I got the confirmation email from them, it was already being packed (he chose the 1 day one-click, of course) and couldn't be cancelled, but they were very nice about saying they'd take it back and eat the return shipping, too. I do love Amazon's customer service.

On the knitting front, my mojo returned just in time for the cessation of all knitting time. Isn't that annoying? I got a good way into my Skandal un Rosie socks. I turned the heel and started working my way up the leg:


I like how these are turning out. The striping is fun, and the contrast toe and heel look great with the black in the stripes.

I also cast on for another Ishbel to do the scarf KAL in the CPASG on Ravelry. I almost finished the stockinette section before school ended:


This is also Wollmeise - sock in Petit Poison medium. The color is just amazing, a gorgeous fuchsia with black overtones. As always, pictures don't show it's full depth or color. Now that knitting time is scarce, we'll see if I finish it within the KAL time.

I have, however, been loading up the Kindle with sample chapters of books I'm interested in reading. Pool time = reading time. Right now I'm reading Darling Jim, a sort of modern Gothic story set in Ireland. Not deep literature, but good summer reading.

The boys were going to go up to New York today to see the US Open, but ended up staying home for logistical reasons. Lucky them, because today's been rained out so far. (I was looking forward to a little mommy vacation, even if it was only 24 hours, but oh, well.)

Looking forward to Father's Day, but still wondering what to get Mr. T... maybe an iPod Touch! Hmm, kill two birds with one stone :)

Now We're Cooking with Charcoal

I finally finished the Kieler Sprotte socks. I can't believe it took this long. There just wasn't a lot of knitting time, I guess. But I love the way the socks turned out. They're gorgeous and comfortable:


And a closer shot:


Specs: Pattern: Kieler Sprotte, by Stephanie van der Linden, from the book Socken aus aller Welt, unfortunately still only available in German. Yarns used: Wollmeise sock, 100% superwash, in black and Sundara sock yarn in Violets. Pattern modifications: changed the top rib to a 2 x 2 rib, did short row heel on 33 stitches instead of 35.

I have several things I want to work on next. I decided I needed a plain stockinette sock to work on, so I chose a new Wollmeise color, Skandal um Rosie. It's a very contrasty variegated yarn, and I thought plain stockinette would be a good canvas for the yarn. Any stitch pattern would be lost in the wild color changes. I got out the yarn and opened it up. It looks very cool unwound:



I have another skein of this yarn, and I might try to make a pooling stole out of it - a stole where your stitch count matches 1/2 the length of the skein (i.e. half the circle), so that the color pooling symmetry that you see in the skein is maintained throughout the scarf. I've seen some really gorgeous pooling stoles using Wollmeise.

In the meantime, I cast on for the sock, using the large amounts of leftover black from the Kieler Sprotte socks for the contrasting toe:


Isn't that cool looking? I love how the yarn is striping. The heel and probably also the top ribbing will be in black, took, because I like the dark framing for these stripes. I'm further along than this picture shows, I just haven't gotten an updated photo yet.

I also want to start something lacy. I can't decide, though, whether I want another Ishbel, a Swallowtail, or whether I want to try to reverse-engineer the Shetland Triangle shawl. I don't have the pattern, but I think it would be pretty easy to recreate.

I don't know why I'm giving in to the startitis. School ends on Wednesday, which means that my knitting time will be even more curtailed. Maybe this means I ought to stick with Ishbel, which is pretty easy, until camp starts. Hmmm. Now all I need to do is pick the yarn...

Washed Away

It seems that I got washed away in all the rain we've had lately. I know I didn't put up a post last week; I was in a bad mood for most of the week, but the mood definitely improved toward the end. And it's been a good weekend, with knitting time, time with friends, and more knitting time, so here I am :)

The drenching rain has alternated with nice, warm sunny days, which has been good for my little veggie garden. The grape tomatoes are growing. I can't wait for them to ripen:


The lettuces look good, too. In fact, earlier this week, I picked some of the lettuce and made a salad using it, some of the garden's basil, fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, vidalia onion, fresh mozarella, and a balsamic vinegar so sweet it didn't require any olive oil at all. Yum. There's a lot more lettuce left, and I'm planning a nice salad for lunch tomorrow:


The Roma tomato plant is huge right now, but no actual tomatoes have started. I see little flower buds, so soon:


The other stuff is growing, but there are no veggies yet. Soon there will also be yellow peppers, cucumbers, pole beans, peas, a carrot, and hopefully some onions. Yum.

There's also new yarn, new Wollmeise colors. The first is called Skandal um Rosie, a dramatic black/white/pink knockout. I ordered this Monday, and it arrived yesterday, a new record, I believe:


I also got some Moses in a trade with Raveller Susie. I love this color:


I have more new stuff on the way from Monday's order, including Merlot in both sock and Molly, the new worsted base, and Molly in Poison No. 5.

The following is not new yarn, but Kippi wanted to see some pictures of the Sanguine Gryphon's Eidos yarn, so here it is:




And the Sappho II base:


My pictures probably don't help you much, Kippi. The colors have a lot more depth and interest in real life than in my flat looking pictures. If you browse through the Eidos section on Ravelry, I'm sure you'll find much better pictures than mine. Without kitty parts, even.

Yesterday was supposed to be the last baseball game of the season, but it was cancelled due to wet field conditions. Most of our games and almost all of our practices were rained out this year. Regardless, the guys really started playing well, gelling as a team and making some great plays. They're beginning to be able to throw and catch, but even better, they're beginning to know where to throw to during a given play. They get along well, without any big egos getting in the way. Well, they're only in second grade, so the egos and the clashes will come. In the meantime, I will savor this lovely season.

Here's Jr. Jr., getting his trophy at last night's team party at the local pool:


Right now the boys are off playing golf, so I'm going to seize this opportunity to keep knitting. I'm in the middle of turning the heel for the second Kieler Sprotte socks, so off I go to crank out some more...

Friday Frustration

For this first time this week, I had no errands to run, no appointments to keep, no laundry to do. I was looking forward to a nice day of relaxing and knitting. Yesterday I finished the first Kieler Sprotte sock and cast on for the second.

See? First sock, nice and comfy:


After a few rows of knitting this morning, I looked more closely at sock-in-progress and realized that I'd made a mistake in the pattern about 9 rows back. It was very obvious, too. So I spent my power-knitting day tinking.

This is all I've got on sock 2 so far:


All that extra yarn? That's from ripping back. Clearly, I haven't even managed to get back to where I was when I found the mistake.

And it's not like I'll have much knitting time this weekend. There's baseball tomorrow morning, a bike race for Mr. T Sunday morning, work for Mr. T tomorrow, and then Sunday Mr. T leaves town for a business trip.

On a non-knitting note: my vote for idiot of the month? Former Congressman Tom Tancredo, for comparing the group La Raza to the KKK.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

How Does Our Garden Grow?

It seems like it was a slow week. I know it wasn't, however. Knitting-wise, it was slow, but there was a lot of other stuff going on. I came home from Arizona with some kind of bug, and spent most of the week not feeling my best. I am almost to the toe of the Kieler Sprotte socks, as you can see:



Here's another view, with the heel. The pattern called for the heel to be done on 35 stitches, which seemed big for me, so I did it on 33. For this weight of yarn, I normally do the heel over 30 stitches. This is a bit deep for me, but not excessively so.

I love these socks so far. Aside from how totally cool they look, they're very smooshy and warm because of the stranding. This is a sock that could easily be done in different colors for a man's sock, too.

In other goings-on, we've been working on raising our veggies in anticipation of the nice big raised bed that will go in our backyard soon. So far, we're doing well, with some purple-leaf sage:


A nice herb pot, with cilantro, regular basil and the most delicious smelling lemon basil (in the background on the right is the thyme and the curry plant (smells heavenly):


We've got two different kinds of lettuces, and seeds for more when the bed goes in:


Tomato plants, too, of course - grape tomatoes and campari tomatoes, already flowering:


We started cucumber and pole beans from seed, and they're sprouting nicely:


We also planted some red onion seeds earlier this weekend, but it's too soon for those to sprout. Our favorite so far is the brocolli. Yummmm:


Here's our little garden, waiting for its new home:


Yesterday we went to the Nats/Os game at Nationals Stadium. The stadium is normally pretty easy to get to, but the annual Memorial Day Rolling Thunder takeover meant that many of the roads we would take were closed. Grrrr. It was hot, and I still wasn't feeling well, so unfortunately we had to leave early. But it was jersey day for the kids, so the boys got Ryan Zimmerman jerseys :)



Sr. Jr. is trying to earn up enough money to buy himself an iPod Touch. He put signs up in the neighborhood advertising "J___'s mowing service" and offering to mow lawns for $10. He got his first call this weekend! Today we walked up a few blocks with mower, trimmer, and extension cord in tow and he earned his first $10. He did a great job, and I'm really proud of him. I think they're going to have him back next week, too. Not bad for an almost-12 year old, eh?

It's a Dry Heat, My Ass

Over the weekend, we Ts went to Scottsdale, Arizona for my cousin's son's bar mitzvah. This is my mother's side of the family, most of whom moved from New Jersey to Arizona and New Mexico a while ago. I haven't seen the aunts and uncles since my father's wedding a year and a half ago, some of the cousins since my mother's shivah, and others since my own wedding, 15 years ago. When I was growing up, we saw each other a lot more frequently, so it was nice to catch up and meet kids, etc. Everyone's doing really well and looking good.

(John McCain was on our flight out.)

We only had a few hours of non-family time, so we managed to get only one hike in, up Pinnacle Peak. It was hot. 105 degrees in full son is hot, humidity or no. In the shade, it's a lot nicer, true. This is where the lack of humidity helps. But when you're in the full-on sun, with no chance of
shade, it's hot.

I'd never been to that part of the country before, and it's really pretty. I loved looking at the different kinds of cacti and plants. It's weird to see a city where there should be desert. It seems unnatural. In fact, the Santa Fe relatives and the Scottsdale relatives were talking about the fight over water out west. Sante Fe has far more water restrictions in place to try to control consumption, but Arizona does not.

A brotherly story: Sr. Jr. and Jr. Jr. sat with me on the plane out there. Jr. Jr. was by the window, Sr. Jr. in the middle, and I was on the aisle. At one point, Jr. Jr. began humming something classical. Sr. Jr. was getting annoyed, which, of course, only made Jr. Jr. do it more. Sr. Jr. kept saying "Mom, he's humming classical music! It's so annoying! Make him stop." I thought it was kind of nice and told SJ to just relax and ignore his brother. By this point, SJ was frustrated to the point of tears by his brother's humming. And just what was it that Jr. Jr. was humming? "Ode to Joy."

So here are some pics from the weekend. First, the hiking pictures:









And now one of us all dressed up:


There was no knitting. I didn't even bring it with me. Now Jr. Jr. is home sick, and there's still no knitting. I will have more knitting to show you someday.

Happy Mother's Day!

For Mother's Day, we all went for a hike up to Great Falls. It was the first beautiful day in months and months, so the park was very crowded. It didn't help that so many people decided to pay the $5 entry fee by credit card, leading to a line of cars at least a mile long waiting to get into the park. (The line to get in was even longer on our way out.) Here are some random pictures, some with notes, some without.

Here's a point where everyone goes to look at the falls, and you can look across the river to see people on the Maryland side doing the same:



The falls were raging because of all the rain we've had in the last month and a half:



Sr. Jr.:



A snake we saw:


Another snake we saw:


Jr. Jr.:



Mother's Day would have been a little nicer except that my brother spent the night last night. He called at 9 pm to say that he'd be arriving after midnight. I had things I wanted to do in the morning that didn't involve being a hostess, and he wasn't exactly taking hints that he should head home. We finally ate lunch, put on sunscreen, got our water bottles, and hustled him out the door as we were leaving to go hiking.

I hope all the mothers reading this had a great Mother's Day. I'll be back with some knitting content later this week :)

Stupid Knitter Tricks

I've been knitting for almost 20 years now. I've done just about every kind of knitting there is, from lace, to cables, to intarsia, to complex fair isle with steeks, sweaters, scarves, socks, you name it. One of the problems with having that much knitting experience is that it sometimes leads to a little hubris.

I really should learn that the thought "Oh, heck, I can do that without even thinking too much about it" often leads to "Oh, crap, why didn't I actually pay attention to what the pattern says instead of thinking I know it all?"

In this case, it's my Kieler Sprotte socks. In my defense, the pattern is written in German, a language I do not speak beyond a working knowledge of Wollmeise's color names. The sock is charted, so I thought I could basically go from the chart and figure out the rest. Cuff -- single color. Easy. I don't like K1tbl, P1 ribbing, so I'll change it to K2P2. No problem. Chart -- easy to follow. Continue chart until you're ready to do the heel, then do a short row heel. Ha! Child's play.

So that's what I did. I cast on 60 stitches, did my K2P2 cuff, started the colorwork chart, being careful to knit at a slightly looser than normal tension, because colorwork reduces elasticity and I wanted to be able to get these socks on over my ankles.


Every now and then I tried the sock on. It was a bit snug. Required a bit of tugging and maneuvering to get on, but it went on. I continued knitting. This is a fun pattern to knit, a 10 stitch repeat over 4 rows. I got to the point where I thought I wanted to stop for the heel turn and tried it on again.

Ugh. It went on, but it was a struggle. And while I like my socks snug, with negative ease, I don't want to have to fight to get them on. What was I doing wrong? I was knitting pretty loosely. I didn't want to have to go up a needle size, because I was afraid the socks would fall apart after two wearings. I wondered if I should add another repeat.

I asked on Ravelry, where people have knit this and other colorwork socks. How many stitches are you using in your sock? one person responded, Because I just knit the sock as written and didn't have a problem with it.

As I was thinking that I was knitting on the customary 60 stitches, which is what the pattern told me to cast on, I thought I ought to look at the pattern again. Even though it's in German, I could clearly see that the stitch count listed for the colorwork part was higher than the number of stitches for the cuff. By 10 stitches. One repeat. Duh.

So I ripped the whole thing out and have started again. This is what it looks like:


Only with 10 more stitches.

Sigh. I haven't really gotten far enough yet to be able to try them on and see if these modifications work.

Yarn Show and Tell

I promised I'd show you some recent yarn acquisitions, so here we go. First up is Numma Numma's the Usual, in the Pie, Please colorway, received in a Ravelry trade:


The base of this yarn is very similar to the Wollmeise base. I love the color, too.

Here's more Ravelry yarn, from vampy, who dyes gorgeous yarn and rovings and sells them in her etsy store:


Finally (for today) is some more Yarn Chef:


On top is "Goth Girl," self-striping sock yarn. In the middle is "Grape Hyacinth," also a self-striping sock yarn. On the bottom is "Artemis," in cashmere lace. Yum.

My Mother's Day present to myself was catching the latest Wollmeise update in the wee hours of the morning. Claudia had lots of new colors and some old favorites, so it was a very nice Mother's Day treat, indeed.