quiet, but busy

I have been super busy lately, but it's been raining nearly every day that I'm home and able to take photos, so no photos of the finished items I've got.

First, I finished my Jaywalkers! They look great. Not that stretchy, as many people have noted, but I can get them on and off my feet without too much trouble. I got some really lovely sock blockers from Seven Yaks on Etsy. They were seconds because the plexiglass is cloudy, but honestly, the sock covers up pretty much all of the cloudiness so they're perfect for photos. It also doubles as a needle gauge, which is just too handy for words.

Since finally breaking through the Jaywalkers block, I have gone crazy for socks. I queued a bunch of patterns on Ravelry, and cast on almost immediately for a pair of Duckies, in a Spunky Eclectic sportweight yarn that's been sitting in my stash for just over two years. The Duckies are simple but still interesting, and it's amazing how fast sportweight works up. It's been very slow going because I have a pretty severe flare up of tendonitis in my arms, plus shoulder pain. Raising my hands even to type for more than a few minutes hurts, and I wake up in the morning with stiffness in my shoulders and neck. Not good. Time off from knitting (with a side of ibuprofen) is definitely the best cure, so once I've fulfilled a couple of small commitments, I'm going to put all business knitting on hold till the pain is gone. I had intended to reopen for customs at the beginning of this month, but I just can't do it.

On the dyeing front, I'm wrapping up my latest wholesale order for Apple Yarns tonight and printing out labels. I have a ton of yarn to list in the store, but the horrible weather has made photos pretty much impossible. We are supposed to have a few clear days, so I'm going to try to get as much of this stockpile photographed and listed. I had really wanted to go to a regular schedule of stocking on the 2nd and 4th Thursdays, now that Venus Vanguard has moved to a 1st Thursday schedule, but the winter weather has put a damper (ha, ha) on those plans. Maybe next month will be better.

I also shipped off some fleeces for blending and processing. I'm looking for that perfect combination of softness and resilience, so I'll have two different yarns coming to me in a few months. Both the processing and spinning will be done by Washington family farms, and one of the blends will be all-Northwest as well. I'm really hoping that at least one of these yarns will work out--I think it would be so cool to have my very own local yarn.

Jaywalker, part 2

I am never, ever going to finish this pair of Jaywalkers that I started in September 2007. Yes, it's been 15 months. Good thing I have plenty of Smartwool socks to keep my feet warm.

After a reasonably good start, I put the project on hold for a few months. Came back to it when I had some downtime from business knitting and finished up the first sock in April or so. Got busy again and didn't pick up the second sock till I went on vacation in October. I couldn't find my instructions for knitting it toe-up, so I thought blithely that I would just knit the second one cuff down. I knew my chevrons would be pointing in the wrong direction, but I thought I'd just rotate it 1/8 or 1/4 or whatever, and then everything would match the other sock.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Got to the heel, turned it, and realized that my increases and decreases wouldn't cancel each other out. I'd end up with too many stitches, or not enough, or something. No problem--I'd just knit the bottom half of the sock toe-up, and then graft the halves together.

Alas, another solution that I didn't think through! I got to the grafting part. I was a mere 76 kitchener stitches away from a completed pair of Jaywalkers. But then I realized instead of forming nice tidy rows of triangles all pointing in the same direction, grafting would give me little diamonds with bulges of extra sock in their centers.

That's what you get for not doing a project straight through--you forget how the pattern works, make foolish assumptions, and end up with no socks. I'm putting this away for a while till the frustration fades a bit.

one down, five million to go.

I was pleasantly surprised when I received my 13-lb box of undyed yarn on Saturday instead of Monday. But then I realized that I needed to work on my new colorways on cheap yarn, so I didn't actually dye any of the new yarn till this week.

So far, the week's been a mixed bag. When I was kettle-dyeing my Dusk colorway, I didn't get the dye intensity quite right. Plus I sloshed the yarn around when I took it off the stove, and now it's not Dusk anymore. Very pretty, but not what I was wanting.

I did manage to knock one item off my list--I've dyed up the Eat Your Veggies yarn for my collaboration with Erika. She's going to do an appliqued T-shirt to go with the yarn as part of our Farmers' Market stocking.

As far as knitting goes, I'm taking a break from custom orders because I know I'm going to be crazy busy with the two early-April stockings, and I don't want the stress of a custom right now. So I've picked up my personal Jaywalker sock project again, because my hands feel funny in the evenings if they're not holding knitting needles. I've shortened the gusset by almost an inch from the pattern, because it seemed like it was past time to turn the heel, but the last time I deviated from the pattern I was sorry. I hope I'm not sorry again.

I am torn between dyeing some more yarn tomorrow afternoon, and going with my husband to a sports bar to watch the opening day of March Madness. I'm not sure which option would make me geekier.

Jaywalker, Part 1

I dyed my Moonlight colorway on my lovely new BFL sock yarn:




I was finding Full Belly Farm yarn a little annoying to work with (more on that in another post), so I put it aside for an evening to start the Jaywalker socks. I was really curious to see how the color repeats would work up.

So I also decided to do the socks toe-up, because I've never done that before, and to do short rows with wraps, also a new thing. Tore it out halfway through the toe because I found the wraps really difficult to see with sock yarn, and changed to the YO short row method instead.

All was well and good, until I realized that I'd measured my foot too loosely and the sock was going to be too big. I went ahead and did an inch of the pattern, just to see what it looked like. A much more basic stitch pattern than I'd realized, so once I redo the toe, it should be a relatively quick knit. But oh, how I miss working with size 8 needles! This size 1 thing is a little painful to someone who mostly works with heavy worsted yarn.