Ruthless Knitting Archive

I finished one Red Herring sock. Here it is in all its (unblocked) glory:

Wow, do I ever love this sock. The Monkey socks are fine and all, but this sock thrills me right down to the tips of my toes.

Despite the great love for Cookie A’s patterns in the world of knitting blogs, I haven’t seen many signs that other people are knitting this pattern. Is it because a lot of people dislike stranded knitting? Or herringbone? I’m not sure. I am very fond of herringbone, and I like stranded knitting, so I was attracted to the pattern when I first saw it on Knitty. Now that I’ve knit one sock, I like it even more.

These socks were supposed to be a birthday present for my mom, but this one came out too small for her. I checked with her and determined that she’d rather have some different socks anyway, so now these will be all mine. Just as soon as I knit the other one.

I finished these on Sunday, but I decided to save them for Monkey Thursday, which also happens to be my friend Rebecca’s birthday. Happy birthday, Becca!

Pattern: Monkey by Cookie A., Winter 2006 Knitty
Size: One size (women’s medium). Foot measures about 8 inches long and 8 inches around unstretched.
Yarn: Interlacements Tiny Toes in Mountain Jewel (100 percent superwash merino wool, 185 yds. per 50 g. skein)
Yardage: 2 skeins, with substantial leftovers. Perhaps 300 yds. used?
Yarn Source: Interlacements
Needles: US 2 bamboo double-pointed needles
Gauge: 32 stitches over 4 inches in stockinette
Notes: There’s not much to say about this pattern that hasn’t already been said, so I’ll keep my comments short.

1. Modifications. The only thing I changed from Cookie’s pattern is the ribbing, which I didn’t twist. I cast on the first sock at a meeting, and I was distracted and forgot to do the twisting. I like untwisted ribbing better anyway, so that was fine by me.

2. Yarn. The Interlacements yarn that I used is just lovely. It’s soft, and the colors are really rich and satisfying. The yarn for the second sock was dyed in different intervals than the yarn for the first sock, so I ended up with socks that don’t particularly match. This is not the sort of thing that I care about. I’m not a very matchy gal — more of a deliberately non-matchy gal, truth be told. It is interesting, though, to observe how different two socks can be as a consequence of very slight differences in the length of the color repeats.

3. Combination of yarn and pattern. Cookie designed this pattern to have a plain stockinette heel, and I knit it to spec in soft merino wool that contains no nylon and is not otherwise reinforced. I suspect that if I’m not careful, I could wear a hole in these things so fast it would make my head spin. As a result, I’ve decided to wear them only on special occasions with my cute Mary Jane shoes, rather than to make them part of my regular sock rotation.

4. Artistic relationships. I think of these as my “Spinal Blue” socks because they remind me of this painting by my brother, James Merle, which he has kindly allowed us to hang at our house until such time as he wants it back.

More of James’s art is here. He also wrote and illustrated an awesome children’s book called Milo’s Amazing Rocketship, which has its own blog here and can be purchased here. It’s proving very popular with the under-five set. Oh, and he and my other brother, Austin, have a T-shirt shop here.

Pattern: Chicchai by Jane Field, a Shibuiknits pattern sold by Knit/Purl (currently called “Baby Hat & Bootie Set” on their website). “Chicchai” means “tiny,” “little,” or “wee” in Japanese — at least according to Google.
Size: One size. Hat measures about 12.5 inches around but is stretchy; socks have a 3-inch-long foot with a 4-inch circumference.
Yarn: Koigu KPPPM (100 percent merino wool, 175 yds. per 50 g.), P201
Yardage: Nearly the whole 175 yards
Yarn and Pattern Source: Knit/Purl in Portland, Oregon
Needles: Addi Turbo 16-inch circular in US size 3; Knit Picks double-pointed needles in US size 3
Gauge: 7 stitches = 1 inch in seed stitch on size 3 needles
Notes: When my mom purchased this pattern and yarn for me as a gift (Thanks, Mom!), I was a little worried that knitting the hat in seed stitch on tiny needles would prove to be tedious. I am not the world’s biggest fan of seed stitch, since it is so very slow compared to stockinette. Creating the hat turned out to be rather enthralling, however, largely because Koigu looks wonderful in seed stitch. And I am a real sucker for knitting baby socks, since they are quick, involve numerous stages of completion, and are ridiculously cute. So the whole process of creating this set was great fun.

I did modify the pattern for the socks slightly. It gives a gauge of 7 stitches to the inch but does not list a row gauge or specify which needles or stitch pattern are supposed to give this gauge, which is something of a problem given that the pattern calls for you to use size 1, 2, and 3 needles, as well as stockinette, 1 x 1 ribbing, heel stitch, and seed stitch. And there are no finished measurements included. And it includes a stern warning that you have to get gauge lest you risk running out of yarn. !?!

In any event, I knit the first sock on the called-for size 1 and 2 needles, but it seemed impossibly small, so I went ahead and knit the hat and then decided that I had enough yarn left to do larger socks. I ended up ripping out the first sock and then knitting both on the size 3 needles, and I had a comfortable amount of yarn to spare — though not enough to make another sock.

I think the set will fit a newborn for a month or more, and the socks may continue to fit for a bit longer. I didn’t have any specific baby in mind while I was putting this set together, but I do have a friend who is due to have a baby any day now. I figure that there’s a 49 percent chance that I’ve already got a gift for her.

Since I complained about the rain in April, and since it is a glorious day, I feel that a shot of my Angelique tulips is in order as a sort of mea culpa.

And here is a picture of my current project, a baby hat in Koigu, being upstaged by the new GoKnit Pouch that I just purchased from Scout’s Swag.

I don’t do a lot of walking and knitting at the same time. (Okay, I don’t do any walking and knitting at the same time.) But I did want one of these pouches for traveling, because every time I have to pack my knitting for a flight, I end up deciding that I can’t take both my knitting bag and a carry-on, and I can’t jettison the carry-on, so my knitting ends up all crammed together in a Ziploc bag, resulting in more chaos than I am comfortable with. It is my fervent hope that next time I fly somewhere, this little pouch will save the day.

I will assume that the fact that I got a mere two comments on the completion of the bathmat, one of them from my mother, is an indication that y’all are on vacation, not that you’re completely lacking in enthusiasm about my stupendous accomplishment. I continue to revel in having finished the project, especially when — and this has happened twice — I am knitting and I think, “I should really put ten minutes in on the bathmat,” only to realize that the bathmat is DONE!

It’s okay. I am good at celebrating quietly.

Pattern: Loosely based on Absorba from Mason-Dixon Knitting
Size: 23 x 35 inches
Yarn: Ironstone Warehouse Flake Cotton, colors 7167, 1552, 680, 1203, and 5659
Yardage: 10 balls of 328 yds each = 3,280 yards
Yarn Source: Mass Ave. Knit Shop
Needles: US size 10.5 circular, bamboo and Denise
Gauge: 14 stitches and 22 rows over 4 inches in garter stitch
Notes: My more astute readers may have figured out by now that this bathmat was not a labor of love. It was my oldest unfinished object. I bought the yarn for it nearly a year ago while visiting Indiana, knit the center block and first two rounds or so, and then fizzled out. For a while, it lived in a tub under the bed in the guest room, and it made me feel guilty whenever I glimpsed it — which was fairly often, since I keep all of my yarn under that bed.

I am not the sort of person who doesn’t finish things. Sometimes, I decide that they won’t work out and I frog them, but this was not one of those cases. There was nothing wrong with how the bathmat was coming out. I just didn’t like knitting it. This was not the pattern’s fault, as I really only used the pattern for inspiration. I’m not sure what yarn it called for, what size needles it recommended, or how large the finished bathmat was supposed to be. What I decided to do was to hold five strands of 100 percent cotton together and knit them on size 10.5 bamboo needles with shoddy joins, and this was a poor idea. The stitches caught on the joins constantly, it hurt my wrists to do the binding off and picking up, and the knitting was just generally no party. No wonder I abandoned it.

Once I finally rescued the bathmat from its long sojourn under the bed, I forced myself to work on it for ten minutes a day. Then I ran out of yarn, which was supposed to be my signal that I was finished, except that the bathmat was not nearly big enough. So I ordered three more balls of yarn from Mass Ave. Knit Shop (which they sent speedily) and then trudged through those, too.

The last fifteen rows or so went a great deal faster than the earlier rows because I switched to some recently acquired Denise needles, and the better joins and longer cords made the knitting go more smoothly. This proves that the main reason the project sucked was that I was too lazy/cheap to buy another set of needles for it.

I persisted in knitting this because I wanted the bathmat, and I am certainly pleased with the final product, which is doing an excellent job of making the bathroom look slightly less blah while simultaneously absorbing water. Still, I don’t plan to make another bathmat any time soon — though a small curtain for the bathroom window is a distinct possibility.