Suffragette socks in progress

These are the four faces of my first suffragette cuff. Naturally, I prefer the purple side :-)

There are some mistakes in the white side, although I've checked and they're mistakes in the knitting, not in the chart, so at some point soon I'll publish the both-sides-right-way chart to go with the simple one. (It's very exciting publishing a pattern on Ravelry and then watching people adding it to favourites and queue!)

I'm also planning some adjustments to the chart to suit a wider range of stitch counts - it should be fairly easy to narrow the pattern in several places. And I'm thinking about serifs...

Not enough to knit!

I currently only have one thing on the needles! And unfortunately, it requires too much looking-at to be practical to knit while watching TV or reading, but it's moving along slowly:



What had brought about this strange state of affairs is finishing off two things in the last week: the dragon's breath scarf, and the swimming coriolis. This is the scarf in its unblocked state:


And this is it held taut-ish to show the pattern off:

(That's the edge of my Wisteria sleeve visible on the left, and the edge of Making Money by Terry Pratchett (which I haven't yet read) on the right.)

I'm planning to only lightly block this - I like how it looks like very complex cables as it is now, and I think blocking it completely flat would lose some of its charm.

These are the swimming coriolis:


They look rather more leftovery (which they are) than I hoped, because the roll of the cast-off edge obscures most of the second band of the variegated yarn, so I'm rethinking my original intention of giving these as a gift - I don't think they're nice enough :-/

I've got various other projects (all gifts) wandering around in my head, but I haven't got round to doing anything concrete like swatching or sketching or even winding the yarn into balls. Unusually, I want to be already knitting rather than starting to knit, which is a bit of a problem when most of my knitting time isn't well suited to my sole current project. I'm hoping that writing this post will serve as a kind of catalyst, and prompt me to go and do one of those things, but I'm sufficiently distrustful of today's energy levels (I'm coming down with a cold) to avoid saying that I'm going to go and start something as soon as I click "publish post" ;-)

Catching up

This is Ella blocking, all flat! I've worn her a couple of times, and she's nice and warm, and I'm pleased I paid attention to alternating the more- and less-variegated skeins in knitting her.



This is the Zauberball I mentioned in my last post, in the process of becoming the dragon's breath scarf (so named because this is an adaptation of the flickering flames pattern, and red). I'm a lot further on now than in this picture - I just haven't taken any photos for ages.

I've finally finished both Lucas's Tomten and the red cardigan, both of which were waiting for fastenings, and I'd failed to find the green toggles and reddish-purple ribbon, respectively, I wanted, so in the end I plied some yarn (orange for tomten and the silk mix edging yarn for the red cardigan) against itself twice to make cord ties. The double plying means the cord is stable, and it's four times thicker than the working yarn, which is a good thickness.

I've now got three knitting projects on the go, and they're all actually in progress: yesterday I worked on all three of them, depending on how much my eyes were free to look at them:

• Coriolis socks (almost no looking-at required) while working through some of the reading for the first week of my course


• Dragon's breath scarf (some looking-at required) while watching TV


• Selbu modern hat (lots of looking-at required) while listening to music

Project promiscuity (swimming Coriolis)

While knitting Wisteria, I've also done some other knitting...


After I'd finished the heel (eye of partridge, which looks gorgeous with this yarn) of the first sock, I weighed the remaining yarn, and discovered that it's not going to be enough for two full socks, so I immediately put the live stitches on waste yarn and cast on for the second sock with the other end of the ball. These will have contrast legs, but I haven't decided on yarn for them yet. The available one that goes best is the dark red Dream in Colour Smooshy that went with this yarn for the push-me-pull-you socks, but there's more of that leftover - probably actually enough for a whole pair - so I'm reluctant to use it. None of my other sock yarn goes as well, so these might end up being very short socks. On the other hand, the DiC is a suspect in a hat-in-planning I'm thinking about, which would probably leave enough to finish off these socks...

Knitting while camping

Just back from a weekend of camping, swimming and knitting (report on the camping and swimming on my personal blog, and photos on Flickr), during which J and I both cast on for coriolis - she wanted to try a toe-up sock and had beautiful but very dark and rather subtle yarn, and I wanted some simple, portable camping knitting, so coriolis suited both of us. We spent a lot of time sitting at the tent or on the riverbank knitting, and both got to about halfway through the spiral increases. We're planning to cast on the second ones together at the Reading Festival in a couple of weeks (even if we haven't finished the first by then), so these should probably be called my "camping socks", but the swimming trip was so much fun it's taking precedence, and I'm calling them "swimming coriolis".



(This is the variegated yarn I used in my push-me-pull-you socks, but it's so much more beautiful on its own.)

Getting back on the horse

I'm just back from a lovely week with some roleplayers, during which Frax and I compared notes on our lost mojo. She recovered hers during the week, and mine is now slowly resurfacing, I think. I don't want to scare it.

In the couple of months since I last wrote here, I have done some knitting, including most of a cardigan, but it's not gone well, and I'm not sure if the yarn (soft handspun singles) will stand up to frogging and re-knitting (not least because there has been quite a lot of frogging already), so at the moment I'm not thinking too much about that.



While on holiday, I picked up the sixth and final baby jungle stripe coriolis, and forced myself to knit a few rows. Now, at home again, I've found that finishing it required less force than picking it up again did. And I've now wound my first skein of spinning oddments into a ball, and am starting to think about the shawl I'm going to knit it into...

Finished heel!

I haven't done much knitting since I got back from holiday, so it's taken until today to finish the heel:


All is not going smoothly, however - I twisted some stitches when starting the leg, and now have to do some complicated untangling. Writing this blog post is useful procrastination ;-)

I've also been doing some weaving on the red leaf wrap (no photos, cos they wouldn't look any different from the last time I photographed it), after showing the loom off to my parents yesterday re-enthused me about the project :-)

Holiday knitting

I've just come back from a week roleplaying in Lincolnshire, during which I did quite a lot of knitting - my second pair of push-me-pull-you socks, for R this time (on the equivalent roleplaying holiday last year, I also made socks for him). I took this photo as I was just about to turn the heel:



The heel is progressing slowly so far, because I got my yarns mixed up and had to tink about three rows, but I think I've got it fixed now.

Finished grey cable socks

Neither of these photos is very good, sadly, but the socks themselves are lovely :-)





The cable panel is much more visible in the flesh than in photos, the yarn is soft and fuzzy, and the colour is a bit more muted than it looks above.

And having finished knitting these, and now having nothing actively OTN, I need to quickly decide what I'm doing next, because I'm going on holiday tomorrow. Yay!

One finished sock!

First sock completed less than a week after beginning, which is probably a record for an adult sock :-) Second sock to be begun tomorrow, and I might make an attempt at writing up the pattern (although with adjustments, since I used Cat Bordhi's ridgeline master pattern.

This was my first attempt at EZ's sewn bind off, on Frax's recommendation, and it is just as stretchy as the underlying knitting. I'm a convert! And I really like the cable as an inset panel, rather than continuing onto the cuff, and the plain rolled edge instead of ribbing, which seems to suit the soft, slightly fuzzy yarn. Impatient now to start the second, but that will wait until tomorrow.

Cables!

I think the Cardigan of Doooom, for which I designed this pattern, put me off cables for a while. OK, I made Clessidra, but the bit that I stopped to admire wasn't the cables, but the seed stitch. But at my knitting weekend with Frax and Kauket, I admired Frax's Absinthe socks, but said that I preferred the cable section of the pattern to the lace. Frax laughed at me for being predictable, but it actually reminded me of my love of cables; I came home and immediately cast on this sock. Of course, all that talk of self-sufficiency and knitting from stash probably had something to do with it as well :-)

Socks!

I've finally finished the knitting of the red cardigan, and will blog it as soon as I've sorted out the fastenings. In the meantime, I've started my next pair of socks!



This is a whirlpool toe using the fibre I blended specially for socks: 40% natural grey shetland, 25% dyed grey merino, 25% variegated-mauve mohair and 10% bright pink silk. If I've succeeded in combining the best of all of these, the socks will be warm, soft, tough, and a bit shimmery. The yarn's a bit hard in the ball, but is knitting up to be beautifully soft, with a slight halo from the mohair.

The socks are going to be the ridgeline sockitecture from New Pathways, with the cable pattern from the doomed purple cardigan along the ridge. I seem to be developing a habit of designing complex cables for doomed large projects, and then repurposing them for socks ;-)

A weekend of socks

In between watching the Watchmen, eating sushi, shopping, hanging out with frineds and watching a lot of console gaming, I spent this weekend knitting these:

I need to weigh a finished sock to see if there's enough yarn left to make three complete pairs - it looks promising :-)