spud says hi

I did not expect this

So, like, I know that I tend to buy yarn when visiting places, but I did not remotely expect to discover that I had acquired this much yarn over the past year.

There is, here, yarn from Chicago, from Russia, from Latvia, from San Diego, from Berkeley, from Madison.  There's knitpicks yarns of various kinds.  There are remnants of various bits and pieces, which includes yarn from Colorado, too.

My mind, it is boggled.  Particularly by all the blue/greens.  I didn't realize I've been on such a blue/green roll this year.

Sock and roll

So, here's the thing about me and sock knitting.  I like knitting socks.  I've got a lot of them, now.  But sock knitting doesn't always like me.

Why?  I'm such a loose knitter. 

Seriously, I poke around project notes on ravelry, and see that people have trouble getting socks over their heels when they've knit a pattern on size 2 needles... and I realize that I tried the same thing on size 0s and found them bagging around my feet.  I've had to subtract stitches from many a pattern, and in some cases have just had to abandon patterns because I can't get them to work with my tension (or lack thereof) and yarn.

Last summer I took steps to try to fix this, at least a little, and bought a size 00 needle for magic looping.  It's helped quite a bit, but sometimes... not so much.

It worked for these.

These are Cookie A's Rick socks, from Sock Innovations, knit in Koigu on size 00 HiyaHiya needles.  I really liked this stitch pattern, and found it easy to memorize.  The resulting fabric is very stretchy (or so I found).  I made two changes.  I did a short row heel, since that's my very strong preference.  And I found that I couldn't possibly complete the whole top of foot chart without having the socks far, far too long.  I cut off the last... I don't know... 10 or so rows, and even then had to do a very, very rapid set of decreases for the toes--like decreasing every row, not every other row.  Still, I'm quite happy with how they turned out.

The small needles didn't at all work for these socks.  Or, rather, this sock, because I didn't even finish one before deciding it was a no go.

I had such high hopes for these!  They're the clever Skew pattern, which is knit in such a way as to make, in particular, a cool swerving heel design.  I thought they'd be so pretty in this yarn, with the browns rendered by the curves into wood burls.  But even knit on size 00 needles, these were far, far too big if I went with the pattern as written.  Sigh.  

The heel is even looser, not to mention the bagginess around the leg.  Needless to say, this was unwearable as knit, so it's been frogged.

I was then struck by temptation in the form of the Crazy Zauberball.

I can't explain why this amused me so much.  The fact that it's got crazy in the name?  The fact that it's the Crazy Magicball?  The fact that as it unwinds it's like an everlasting gobstopper, changing color but never quite getting used up?

No, seriously!  I knit these socks out of the Crazy Zauberball (I just like typing that).  It's another Sock Innovations pattern, this time Glynis.  Except I knit them toe up, with an afterthought heel (to preserve the color changes), and made them mirrored.  The stitch pattern certainly doesn't particularly show up against the color changes, but that didn't bother me with such wide bands of color.  And it was more fun to knit than simple ribbing.

But here's the magic part.  I knit two full socks, and was left with...

...probably a whole third sock's worth of yarn.  Magic, indeed!

Embellished Squares, or Last gasp of winter

Well, that exaggerates a bit.  But after a very, very warm stretch in late winter, it suddenly got colder quite quickly, and stayed a bit on the breezy side for a while.  On the one hand, I was ready for spring to come for sure.  But on the other, it gave me reason to pull out some very, very wooly yarn and play around with it.

A couple years ago I bought 8 skeins of Sirdar Eco Wool DK, and 2 skeins of a complementary colorway of Noro Kureyon, at a going out of business sale.  I kind of thought I'd make a sweater with the yarn, something mostly brown, with a stripy waist, or something.  But when I started playing around with the yarn, I decided that actually, it wanted to be an afghan.  And as it turned out, that last gasp of cooler weather was absolutely perfect for knitting what turned out to be quite a large wooly project.

And so, Embellished Squares.

Size:  44" square unblocked, 50" square blocked (and it could probably have been blocked even bigger than that, had I wanted to)

Yarn:  Main color:  Sirdar Eco Wool DK, colorway 203, 8 skeins; Contrast color: Noro Kureyon, colorway 149, 2 skeins

(this means a total of 1092 yarns of more or less DK weight yarn; although the yarns claim to be different weights, they're very, very close; you could easily use more than two colors on this, too--or just one, for that matter)

Needles: US size 7 (4.5 mm) 40" long circular needle (or double pointed needles and circular needles, perhaps of multiple sizes, in the same size, if you're not comfortable with magic loop)

(I am a very loose knitter, so if you're not, you might want to go up a size)

Pattern notes:  In the second row, I've noted places to put 4 markers.  While you're using double pointed needles or magic loop, you won't need all of them.  Even later, because the increases are open, it's very obvious where the end of the four sections are, so you may not need anything but a marker for the start of the round.

I'm also not describing moving the markers, necessarily, but the markers should separate the four pattern repeats on all the even rows.

I'm putting in color changes as I knit them, but you can add in more or fewer color repeats.  This is what happened to work with the yarn I had, but you could experiment with all sorts of different striping designs.

Pattern:

Cast on 8 stitches of main color, using TechKnitter's circular cast on, here, or another method suitable for starting in the middle.  Join for knitting in the round by distributing stitches on double pointed needles or magic loop.  When you're able to move from either double pointed needles or magic loop onto a regular circular needle, do. (I just used the one long one, magic looping until the whole thing was big enough to fit on the circular needle I had, but you could use a shorter one for a while.)

Set up section:

R1: knit all stitches.

R2: [pm, yo, k1, yo, k1] 4 times.

R3: knit all stitches

R4: [yo, k3, yo, k1] 4 times

R5: knit all stitches

R6: [yo, k1, yo, k2tog, yo, k2tog, yo, k1] 4 times

R7: knit all stitches

R8: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

Section 1:

R1: purl all stitches

R2: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R3: knit all stitches

R4: [yo, k1, (yo, k2tog) until one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R5: knit all stitches

R6: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

Repeat Section 1 three more times, using contrast color for the first repeat (in other words, the four total repeats go main color, contrast color, main color, main color)

Section 2:

Use contrast color for first repeat of this section.

R1: purl all stitches

R2: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R3: knit all stitches

R4: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R5: knit all stitches

R6: [yo, k1, (yo, k2tog) until one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R7: knit all stitches

R8: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R9: knit all stitches

R10: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

Repeat section 2 two more times, using main color.

Section 3:

Use contrast color for first repeat of this section.

R1: purl all stitches

R2: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R3: knit all stitches

R4: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R5: knit all stitches

R6: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R7: knit all stitches

R8: [yo, k1, (yo, k2tog) until one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R9: knit all stitches

R10: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R11: knit all stitches

R12: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R13: knit all stitches

R14: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

Repeat Section 3 two more times, using main color.

Border:

Finish with garter stitch border

R1: purl all stitches

R2: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

Repeat these two rows until somewhat before you run out of yarn, ending with R1.  I ended up with 11.5 repeats of the garter border, which meant 12 garter ridges on the right side of the afghan.

Bind off: use a fairly loose bind off method of your choice.  I used a modification of Jeny's surprisingly stretchy bind off; her method has you "processing" each stitch by adding in a particular kind of yo, and I did that processing every other stitch, not every stitch.  It's not that I didn't want the resulting edge to be super stretchy, it's that I worried about running out of yarn.

Weave in ends.  Frankly, I think it looks fine unblocked...

but blocking does make it a little neater, so block as much or as little as you like.  I blocked it gently, I'd say, which certainly smoothed out the wrong side significantly.

It also made it fold more neatly.

And even the edges look nice.

This was, incidentally, a perfect, soothing, meditative knit.  All those primarily knit rows, with just a little interest... perfect for tv watching or procrastination.  And particularly at the beginning, center out blankets are so much fun because you just keep seeing them grow and grow.  At the end, the rows are mighty long, it's true... but they're worth it in the end.