Ruthless Knitting

Thanks for all the nice comments about the final Florence post! I’m happy to have been able to provide a little closure for all of us.

Over the weekend, David and I went to Iowa for my cousin’s wedding reception and to help install a floor at my aunt’s house. The traveling gave me the time I needed to finish up the second Oriel sock for my mother. It feels good to get the first item on my list of Duty Knitting finished up.

Now all I have to do is make these a paper sleeve, and I can mail them off tomorrow. I’ve been using cardstock to print little sleeves for my gift socks. I put a picture on there, along with the name of the sock, the yarn I used, washing information, and anything else I want the recipient to know. I’ve only done this twice so far, but I’m getting good feedback. The first time I sent a pair of socks to my dad with a sleeve on it, my mom called me up to tell me how great the sleeve was. (Oh, and the intarsia socks in six colors of yarn that I dyed myself were okay, too.) When I saw my dad this weekend, I asked if he’d received the Grandma socks I sent him. He said he had, but he hadn’t taken them out of the sleeve yet, because he was still enjoying it. Lesson learned: the sleeve that takes five minutes to make may just attract more admiration than the socks that take two weeks.

Anyway, it’s nice to be finished with the Oriel socks, not least because they were meant to be a birthday present, and my mom’s birthday was more than a month ago.

Pattern: Oriel Lace Socks from Sensational Knitted Socks by Charlene Schurch
Size: 72 stitches cast on. Should be a women’s medium-large (size 9-10.5ish).
Yarn: Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock (80% superwash wool, 20% nylon) in 16ns Charcoal
Yardage: 2 skeins at 215 yds. per skein with lots of leftovers
Source: Iris Fine Yarns in Appleton, WI
Needles: 2 Knit Picks Classic Circulars in size 1 (2.5 mm.)
Gauge: 8.5 stitches per inch in stockinette
Modifications: I made the leg shorter and added 2 inches of 2×2 ribbing at the top, as per my mom’s wishes.
Notes: These socks were pleasant enough to knit. The pattern was easy to follow, and the yarn (picked out by my mother) was a good choice. I’ve seen several pairs of Oriel socks on the Internet that came out too big, but these are just right, probably because Lorna’s is a thin yarn, and also because I knit tightly.

The Oriel socks are designed to be knit from the toe up, beginning with what Schurch calls an “easy toe,” which was a new one for me. Basically, you begin by knitting a tiny rectangle and then pick up stitches along the two short sides of the rectangle to get going in a circle. Then you increase at the four corners of the rectangle until you have made a nice, round toe. I found the method to be easy enough, and I like how it looks. The heel construction is also neat: many toe-up socks have short-row heels, but Schurch has designed this sock so that you knit the bottom of the heel tightly (I used size 0 needles), turn the heel, and then begin knitting a slipped-stitch flap and the gusset at the same time. Though the flap looks rather narrow, it seems to fit okay.

I’ve had Schurch’s book for a while (and I have her new book, too), but this is the first time I’ve actually made a sock from it. I enjoyed the process and will probably turn to the book again in the future, particularly if I’m looking for a pattern to use with a nice solid or semi-solid yarn.

This was my first experience knitting with Lorna’s Laces, and I enjoyed it. The Charcoal color that my mom picked out is a variegated brown and black, but both are so dark that the sock looks almost uniformly brown once it’s knit up — more like a shaded solid than a variegated yarn. It has a bit of a sheen to it that I think is the nylon showing up; Grumperina mentioned noticing a similar sheen on some navy blue Lorna’s. The lace pattern might have shown up better in a lighter shade, but it’s also obscured because the socks are a bit big for my feet. These should look prettier on my mother’s slightly larger feet.

My baby set pattern went on sale today in Sanguine Gryphon’s Etsy shop! Here are a few of my informal shots of the cardigan and hat set, with Leona as model:

In my initial design of the pattern, I knit a prototype version of the sweater in white, pink, and brown. I called it my “neapolitan baby sweater,” and I gave it to a darling baby named Gwendolyn.

Pattern: My own. Available from Sanguine Gryphon Fiber Arts (along with Gryphon’s lovely hand-dyed yarn!).
Size: Shown in the six-month size, I believe. The chest measures 20.5 inches, and it is 9.25 inches long. The sleeves are intentionally a bit short — about 6 inches long from the shoulder.
Yarn: Prototype is knit in Brown Sheep Nature Spun worsted in N91 (Aran), with dots in Knit Picks Palette in Bark and Petal. The pattern is in Sanguine Gryphon Undertow in Tangle, Seaweed, and an unnamed color.
Yardage: Prototype: one skein (245 yards) of Nature Spun. Pattern version: 2 skeins of Undertow for sweater and hat in the six-month size. The newborn and 3-6 month sizes can be knit with a single skein.
Needles: US size 8 and 6 straights and circular, as well as US size 3 double-pointed needles
Gauge: Prototype has 5 stitches per inch. Pattern has 4.5 stitches per inch.
Notes: This was a fun pattern to create, and it worked out as I had hoped it would the first time, which was awesome. I wanted to come up with a pattern that could be knit using a single skein of Gryphon’s beautiful Undertow, so a baby sweater seemed a good choice. I also wanted to come up with a way to embellish the sweater, and I found this method of knitting circles in one of Nicky Epstein’s books. I can’t remember anything else about the design process at this point — guess I should have written this up sooner!

I wanted the cardigan to snap closed behind the circles. An earlier experience with sewing snaps directly onto my knitting taught me that knitting is too stretchy for this to work well, and thus I had to find a way to stabilize the snaps so they wouldn’t stretch out the knitting and be difficult to open. I went looking for snap tape at the local craft store, but they didn’t have any. I bought plain old ribbon instead. I cut two pieces of ribbon to approximately the right length, sewed one end under on each piece (just tacking it down), sewed on each half-snap in the right place so it would fall behind a circle (just eyeballing all of this, not actually measuring, and sewing no less than four of the pieces on upside down so that I had to do them over), basted the ribbons onto the cardigan with contrasting thread (cutting and basting down the other end of the ribbon in the process), and then sewed the ribbons down as I had basted them. All of this took an age, but I’m absurdly delighted with the result and feel very strongly that it was worth it.