Consumpta nocte.

It may not appear that there has been progress, Reader. It may even appear that this blog, like Enron, promised big things, but, due to a quasi-legal accounting system and amoral trading practices, has actually delivered nothing but rolling blackouts to the state of California. I assure you that this is not the case. Pay no attention to that bank account in the Cayman Islands. That's my retirement fund, and I like to fill the hot tub with Cristal.

No, I measure progress these days by Buffy episodes watched; and we, dear Reader, are almost done with the third season. That's a lot of episodes. We have slogged through some not very good ones for the sake of the knitting time they bring us. All for you. All for you. Except for when it was for me.

First up: finally, god help me, I finished the mates of the two socks I've been blogging about for ages, and they're blocked and ready for wear just in time for a hot, humid Jersey summer. If you have a yen to visit Jersey in the summer, ever, put your head inside of a plastic bag and breathe in your own warm, damp carbon dioxide for awhile (not for too long; don't hurt yourself. Also, never use plastic bags to line your baby's crib. That's a free tip from you to me). That's what it feels like, and now I've saved you money on gas.

In any case, I've been living with those socks for a long time, and I'm tremendously glad they're over. I am quite excited about them, however, and very much look forward to wearing them. I'm up to I think four pairs of handknit socks for the winter. I have made socks before, but I've never really had ones that were up to being worn, like, out of doors.

Secondly: I made the Odessa hat for our friend Rosey, who sent us each a felt pillow she had sewn herself. I made the hat out of Lavish Fibres alpaca in charcoal grey. The Odessa is a very popular Magknits pattern by Grumperina, and calls for a DK-weight yarn and about a hundred beads, so I used a worsted weight and no beads, and felt like such a badass. Or I made a boring hat; it's hard to tell. The pattern is a really excellent one--a combination of ssk and yo spaced several stitches apart creates the spiral of the hat, which is most visible from the top. I hope Rosey has some very tall friends who are really into hats. I also hope Rosey isn't allergic to cat hair, because the kitten likes alpaca almost as much as I do. I washed it, Rosey! I swear!

Oh, a final note: I used a circular needle for this hat, the first time I've ever used one. This will become important in just a few moments.

Third: this is a sweater knit by Lilyriver to clothe one small, naked mouse, of whom I have blogged about extensively. Like Graham himself, the sweater was sort of an experiment. Lilyriver has been working through a book called The Sweater Workshop. Graham's sweater was a final exam of sorts, and she did a bang-up job of it--it's really amazing; it has all the details of a big sweater, only very, very tiny (it is unfortunate that Graham is not really the ideal sweater model, as he lacks both a neck and shoulders). L. would blog about this herself, but she's been lying on a chaise drinking mint juleps since she finished it.


Finally--finally--we have reached the part of the post where I show you a picture of a work-in-progress that is not the thing I said I was going to work on the last time I posted. I, too, have succumbed to the lure of Koigu. I'm doing the Monkey pattern from Knitty, by Cookie A, mostly because I was reminded of it on the Yarn Harlot's blog about when I decided to work with this yarn next and partly because I love Cookie A's aesthetic and most of her patterns are way harder than this one. Inspired by my foray into the world of circular needles with the Odessa hat, I've decided to do these socks on two circs. I'll keep you posted. Probably.

Assorted FOs, if one is liberal with the definition of "FO," as one, one hopes, will choose to be.

First, the promised Corazon mittens from the Knitty pattern. I used, as I noted below, an alpaca/silk blend from Knit Picks, and its shininess made it largely camera-proof. Mittens, it turns out, are rather awkward to photograph. In any case, my experience doing the colorwork vastly improved once I got it into my head how to knit without tangling the yarn: always keep one color under and the other over. It's slower at first, but you don't have to untangle the yarn every row or whatever. I did not come up with a good picture of the palm. I was frankly a bit relieved about that because the back is noticeably uneven. The colors, as you can see if you follow the pattern link, switch every stitch and I found it very difficult for about the first mitten and a quarter of the second to keep it looking as nice as I wanted to. That improved somewhat once I was able to keep my yarn straight.

Here's a close-up of the stitchwork on a mystery hat. As you can see (I hope), I did my first cables. I looooove cables, you guys. They're total genius. It was a hell of a breakthrough for me once I was able to comprehend that you don't have to knit stitches in the same order. That's all a basic cable is: stitches knitted out of order. I think for my next fancy sock, I'll use Nancy Bush's Conwy pattern, which features tiny braided cables. I did the hat in a worsted weight alpaca I purchased from the Inter-America Group on eBay. I think that the next time I do a hat, though, I will use bamboo needles, which are of course much lighter than metal ones. The metal ones were heavy enough to cramp my wrists a little bit.

Finally, I offer you two lonely socks. One is the Eclipse sock I've been blogging about forever; I've just finished the gusset decreases on its mate, so "all" I've got left is the long, slow march to the toe. My progress on this sock has been hampered by its tedium. I desperately want the pair to be done so that I can start another plain stockinette pair in Meilenweit Colortweed, of which I, um, have three different shades. The other sock is my Vintage Sock project, the Child's French sock. It is nigh impossible to photograph it adequately, so I hope you will take it on faith that it is as it ought to be. I am extremely worried about blocking this sock; since it's not a superwash wool, I can't count on the drier to shrink it back to size if it grows. I suspect that it's going to grow quite badly because the pattern called for 72 stitches across 2.5mm needles, which equals a lot of extra yarn for a sock. I am waiting to block it until I finish the pair (I am working on the heel flap of the second right now) because if it blows, I'll never finish and I'll just have this loose thread hanging over my life forever and on my death bed I'll say, I should've finished those goddamn socks, and I'll find out that hell is really just me tediously working on the other sock forever knowing that there were no elephants in hell to wear this huge never-to-be-finished goddamn sock [redacted for length and increasing hysteria].

One kind of gross thing is that this yarn proved to be a frigging beacon for cat hair. My cats are awesome, but I really don't feel the need to knit anything from their fur. As a side note, I'm using Knit Picks DPNs and they are really excellent. (As for the color of the sock, the picture of the full sock represents the color much better than in the close-up.)

Mirabile dictu!

So I've spent the last week or so--countless hours of television!--attempting to reproduce the Knitty Corazon pattern (more or less), and I've finished the mittens, finally. They're blocking now and I'll post pictures when they're done drying. In the meantime, I'll show you the nifty new trick I learned. I've put the picture at left because, um, it makes the post look better, but think of it as a preview of the amazing, incredible, unbelievable (POW! KAZAAM!) afterthought thumb. It's genius, you guys.

First, I made a few modifications to the pattern. Quite obviously, I used different yarns. I decided to go with Knit Picks Elegance, a 70% alpaca and 30% silk blend, in coal and barn red (I'm not normally a red person, but I'm matching two scarves I already own and a hat I made a long time ago. This red is lovely as reds go, however). I love alpaca, even though actual alpacas are kind of weird looking and certainly not as cute as sheep. Alpaca is so soft and lightweight--and still warm, apparently, although it's already pretty damn warm in New Jersey right now. It's sort of like sticking your hands in flour. The Elegance developed a fuzzy halo, especially on the palm, where the colors alternate so frequently. It makes the colorwork less precise. I think the effect is neat, but may be a drawback to alpaca yarn if you don't like that.

The modifications to the pattern itself: those of you who know Spanish would, I imagine, recognize immediately that the word "corazon" means heart (I think?), but I spent my college years (and now, alas, part of this summer) on Latin and I didn't realize until right before I was going to start knitting that the design is actually made up of hearts. That's a little too cutesy for me. I made a minor change to the design and substituted a contrast color stitch to a main color stitch on the joins between each heart and made the effect more sort of abstractly floral. I also made the cuffs about 3" instead of the 2" called for by the pattern, and used size 2 needles for the cuff & top (I wanted to make sure I had a snug fit) instead of size 3s. Finally, and most noticeably, after knitting the top shaping decreases, kitchenering the top, and blocking the first mitten, I realized that I still hated the point at the top, and also that the mitten was way too long, so I ripped it back about an inch.

But! The amazing trick I learned by working this pattern was the afterthought thumb. It's so cool. I am really inching to start a new pair of socks so I can try out the afterthought heel, which works along the same principle. You knit in a piece of waste yarn in the spot where you want your thumb (or heel) and then slip the stitches with the waste yarn back to the left needle and continue working in pattern. Then when everything's all done, you come back and "unzip" the stitches on the waste yarn and pick them up. It's total genius. I did have to reinforce the base of the thumb, as the picked up stitches can make a bit of a mess at the joins, or, at least, they did for me. I imagine that none of that really made sense, and I can't say it really did for me until about the fifth time I read the Corazon pattern and meditated on what it means to "unzip" for awhile. It will suffice to say that it's awesome.

I never thought it could happen to me, but....

Remember how I was all like, Pooling? Who cares about pooling? Pooling's great, you damn yarn whiners.

Famous last words.

All I did was drop down a size and a half in needles and the yarn made that crazy giant purple and blue stripe on the foot! It was, I admit, really fun to knit; I could hardly believe my eyes while it was happening. But what happened to the green? How will I ever replicate that effect on the second sock? The answer to the second question is, of course, that there's no way I can. I'm more likely to knit the face of Jesus in the second sock than I am to get that stripe back. And it's cool, but suddenly what I thought might be a tasteful (HA) autumn sock might instead hop in a van and spend its summer following the Grateful Dead.

In other news, I cast on a new sock (not that one's mate, much to the dismay of the long-suffering Lilyriver) with my Regia Canadian Classic Colors Eclipse, and it's knitting up so quickly and easily that I feel kind of bad about it. I have done another couple inches since I took that picture. Another wild colorway, that's for sure. The Regia yarn, it turns out, is really excellent for socks--it's spun quite tightly and doesn't split. It really seems like it'll last forever even if I machine wash and dry. It isn't as soft as the 100% merino wool sock I just made, but I'm sure I'll get more wear out of it.

What fresh hell is this?

My only friend: the end.

That's right, ladies and germs: a finished pair of socks! That I am keeping for myself! Forever and ever and ever or until they get holes and probably even after that!

Get ahold of yourself, Bolty darling; you might scare the children.

In any case, the beige tweed socks are done, and they are delightfully warm, and I have only found one mistake (a purl in the ribbing where I should have knit). The yarn--Phildar Preface, as I've mentioned before--is really lovely, both in terms of the colorway (it's hard to to tell from the photo, but the yarn is actually variegated) and feel. I think the brand is Canadian (?) and moderately difficult to get ahold of--mine came from Double Diamond Knits. In any case, I also have a couple skeins in a flat brown; I might use the leftovers from these socks to do heels and toes on those and make some cute socks for next winter. I see yarn in my sleep, you guys.

In sadder news, I'm going to have to frog the green almost-argyles yet again due to purl laddering. My new plan is to put the argyle pattern on only the front of the sock (32 stitches) and do the back 32 in plain stockinette, which seems to come together much better at needle joins. I think I'll probably have to wait until I have better technical skills to do the pattern as it's written.

Your epidermis is showing.

The mouse body is finished and, as I was told I had to name him, christened Graham, and now I'm going to put him in a drawer and never look at him again. No, that probably isn't true, but I have to say that finishing him off gave me a world of trouble. I've always been a bad finisher (cf. backlogue of sock projects) and even when I do come to the end of a project, I tend to rush with the details (cf. failure to proofread papers). I got the head on the body all right, if not smoothly, and the ears turned out okay, but the limbs; oh, god, the limbs.

The pattern directions were simple and straightforward: thread yarn through one arm, pass it through the body, thread through other arm, repeat until secure. I, um, had to improvise with stuffing, and used deconstructed cotton balls instead, and the yarn needle just did not pass through the cotton. I threaded it between the knitting and the cotton instead, which made the arms hang a little funny, and, at any rate, they weren't secure enough for my taste, so I secured them to the body at the shoulder sockets with a few more stitches. The mouse looks like he's about to be crucified, but at that point, I figured I could fix it with the sweater. The mouse legs had the same basic instructions, but I, having learned nothing from the arms, managed to attach the right leg crookedly. I tried to snip it off so I could reattach, but it was impossible to figure out what could safely be snipped without damaging the mouse body, so I did some triage and gave it up for lost. Maybe I'll make him the crutch I linked to the other day and he can hobble around like Tiny Tim.

The sweater, which, as I have noted previously, was my favorite part of the pattern pre-knitting, but, as you may have gathered by now, that didn't go very smoothly either. I used some leftover self-striping sock yarn (DGB Confetti from doublediamondknits.com in gray, light blue, and navy) and made each sweater half. I wasn't happy with the way the colors knit up--since the garment is so small, the stripes really just look like huge blocks of color, and the light blue and gray are very similar--and I was even less happy with the size. The pattern indicated, somewhat vaguely, that the sweater could be made up and then put on the mouse, but looking at the mouse's giant head and childbearing hips, I realized there was no way that was going to happen. Then it turned out that the sweater was too small around the neck to even be sewn on. I tried again with larger needles in cotton Knitpicks Shine and modified the pattern a bit...and, after panicking and making the neck too small, that doesn't work either. I need to think it through again...but not any time soon. Sorry, Graham.

So, in the end, I have a crippled, naked mouse with a Messiah complex.

Never (again) the twain shall meet:

lilyriver on demand

Because this whole Etsy venture is still new enough to me that every sale is a narratable event, I'd like to share the pleasure I took in completing my first custom order, a shortened version of my "Swinging Squares" earrings (also the blog's namesake). I was in fact so pleased that I was moved to include an emoticon in the item description of the listing, and now I am moved to repeat it here :) Yay! There -- now I've got that out of my system, hopefully.

In other crafty news, last night I made some serious headway on the plastic bag bag while watching Brokeback Mountain for my Queer Narratives class. I figure it will only take about four more feature-length films to finish it, and then maybe only about four years or so before I figure out what use I can put it to without feeling self-conscious about it...Unfortunately, none of my remaining homework is compatible with my knitting, but this doesn't mean I'm not more interested in deciding which project to start next (I'm thinking either some cute little shorts or a shrug to go with my new H&M sundress) than I am in deciding which feminist reading of pastoral poetry to commit to. I am SO ready for the Great Crafting Spree of 2007, set to begin, let's see...May 23. If I start to associate summer and crafting any more closely, I will probably ending up making this.

Made to order at Lilyriver Labs (TM).

Dye Hard with a Vengeance.

Another yarn story, Reader: I turned my Black Cherry samples into a a felted Tiny Tote, almost as awesome as it is alliterative. I had begun thinking I would just knit a swatch and leave it at that, but the swatch grew in direct proportion to my knitted dreams*. My second thought was to make a little soap saver bag for Ellen's package, and that's what my goal was until I reached the final stage of the project. I'm an unrepentant spoiler junkie, but I'll make you wait until the end of the post to reveal the twist**.

The unevenness of the dye on the yarn actually turned out to be a great effect--I'm not a great lover of variegated yarn, but the swatch came out pleasantly homey. The bottom half of the swatch is the khaki and the top, the cream, but I don't think you can much tell the difference.

Having started life as four separate bits of yarn and reached middle age as a flat swatch, the tote is crudely put together. I'd certainly recommend doing it in the round. I used size 4 straight needles and then just a tapestry needle to sew up the bottom and the sides. I didn't try anything fancy with the binding--just whip stitch--and that's probably the least aesthetically pleasing part of the whole thing, because I had to use the khaki yarn to do it, having run out of the Black Cherry.

The Black Cherry was sacrificed to a good end: I gave I-cords a try, and damned if they aren't just the best thing ever. I'm supposed to use I-cord to make the straps on the Tote of Doom (you can see it behind the swatch-in-progress) and was anxious to give it a go beforehand. During the OJ Simpson trial, I made a tube of finger-weaving probably long enough to wrap around the whole house. I believe I had the vague idea that I could use it to escape my bedroom during a fire. I should note that our house only had one floor. In any case, I-cords are certainly an advance in tubular yarn crafts.

Voila, Reader: a Tiny Tote casting tiny tshadows on the wall. I'm going to keep you in suspense until tomorrow for the actual felting. You'll love it, I promise--hey, where are you going? Come back! For god's sake--

*My dreams are not, of course, actually knitted, but I suspect that's only a matter of time. There's a scene in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie where the improbability drive turns the Heart of Gold into yarn dolls. It's not impossible, is all I'm saying.
**Lies, all lies.

Sitten here knitten my mitten, kitten.

I finished these mittens awhile ago, but I am moved to post evidence of completed projects instead of evidence that I buy a lot of yarn. I have made many, many socks (I cannot, however, say that I have made many pairs of socks), and mittens are, of course, in the same vein, but not something I had tried before. I made them out of stash yarn, which made the project doubly satisfying. Technically, I think, aside from a few bits around the thumb gusset, I did fine, but I miscounted the stripe rows, and one gray stripe turned out slightly larger than the other. For my next pair, I think I'll either reduce the stitch count or use smaller needles, because these are slightly too large. I used this pattern in the adult female size and supplemented a few unclear parts (i.e., the direction of the increase stitches on the thumb gusset) with the pattern in Knitting for Peace (a fine book, whatever you think of charity knitting). Oh, one last adjustment: I used size 3 dpns instead of 4s because I didn't have 4s.

Wearing the finished mittens makes me feel like high-fiving people. Alas: almost as soon as I finished them, it became too warm for them.