This isn't 12 pairs of socks

The plan was to knit 12 pairs of socks in 2009, averaging out to 1 pair of socks for each month. Did it happen? Clearly not. I didn’t even get halfway to my goal, with only 5.25 pairs of socks knit by 11:59pm on December 31. But, I’m still going to declare myself a winner because I have 5.25 more pairs of knit socks than I did last year at this time. So there.

I think the biggest problem with the sockfest for me was boredom. I love knitting socks. I think that’s pretty obvious when looking at all my FOs, the majority of them are socks. But sometimes, I like to work on other things: the occasional hat, pair of fingerless mitts, crochet bag.

So maybe the goal I picked for 2009 was a little unreasonable, if only because of its narrow focus on only socks. And that brings me to this year, 2010. I think the best possible goal I can choose for this year is to again try to produce 12 FOs, but I am not going to limit myself to a particular type of item. Anything knit or crochet goes.

And because I’m a dork, I’m calling it 2010 FO Funtiem. So, off we go.

Not knitting, not spinning, but playing Dragon Age on the Xbox. Although the spinning and knitting is slowly working its way back into my things to do. There’s only so many times I can play through Dragon Age, I suppose. I guess that number might be 5.

I did finally finish my Patchwork yarn earlier this month. I’m not sure if it’s the most awesome or the ugliest yarn I’ve ever spun. It’s a toss up, I think, and I’m either going to have some really cool socks or some really ugly ones. Either way, they’ll be warm and soft, though, and I guess that’s just fine. I’ve started knitting with the yarn a little bit already, and it doesn’t seem so bad. Of course, I haven’t gotten to any of the questionable bits yet, so there’s still time for things to get hideous.

This yarn is uglier than it looks here

Next on the wheel is Night Sky, the December 2008 fiber from the Hello Yarn Fiber Club. I couldn’t decide what to spin next, so I put it to a CPAaG vote, and they told me to go with the superwash BFL. I’ve been wanting to spin this up for a while, but I couldn’t decide between standard 3-ply or a navajo-ply, and being locked into this roving via vote forced me to finally choose. I ended up going for the 3-ply. I split the roving into thirds, and then I just split the thirds into strips of varying thickness, to get a more random, less uniformly striping yarn. We’ll see how it goes.

Aside from those things, I just got back from a trip back to Long Island. It’s been two years since I’ve gone back to visit, but I was really surprised by how normal it felt to be there. I don’t remember ever really feeling at home there when I would go back during breaks from college, but it definitely felt like going home this time. And my family didn’t get on my nerves hardly at all! Amazing. At only 5 days, the trip was entirely too short (this could explain the bit about the family), but at least it was something. We all went in to Manhattan on Christmas Eve, and it was incredibly busy and crowded, but still a fun time. It was L’s first time in Manhattan, too, so that was interesting. Saw the tree, saw a bunch of pretty lights, and we also went to dinner.

The best photo I took that night, I think

It was great to get away for a bit. I haven’t been away anywhere other than short trips down to Chicago since 2007, so even though this was definitely a family visit, it was nice to have some kind of vacation. I think the next vacation I take, though, will have to be something that doesn’t involve visiting anyone. Something where it’s just L and I going somewhere together. It’s about time we took a vacation like that. Of course, there needs to be money for that, which will probably be a long time from now.

So, there’s the more interesting bits of what I’ve been up to in the past two months since I last touched the blog. Not really much to speak of, as usual.

I’ve been busy. I have three FOs to write about today. First, I think I’ll start with the least recent.

A pair of toasty, knit back at the beginning of the month and finished during my parents’ visit in the second week of October. These were such a simple, quick knit, and a great way to use handspun. I used the Sour Fig yarn from the Hello Yarn Fiber Club that I spun during the Tour de Fleece this summer. Which I guess I didn’t blog about, whoops. I’m really happy with how they turned out, and I’ve been excited to wear them for weeks. And now that they’ve been photographed, I can.

Would you believe that I did not have needles for any of the patterns I wanted to knit after I finished the toasties? Not a damn one of them. They were all hats, all required 16″ circs, and all of them were needle sizes I didn’t have. So, I just said fuck it, and I printed off the Mini Mittens Ornaments pattern, grabbed some sock yarn scraps and my size 1 dpns, and I knit up two tiny mittens. They’ll make some nice little ornaments for my Christmas tree. Wished I had shorter dpns, though. The pattern was a bit fiddly because of the tiny size of the mittens.

This isn’t what I knit next. The Thrive hat has already been blogged. But after the Thrive hat, I used some of the 16″ circs I picked up to knit an Abby cowl out of one of the cold-weather Knitties from a year or two or maybe even three ago. A great use for handspun lacy yarns in smaller skeins. You know, the luxury fiber ones, like yak and silk blends. I used my Linda Lee yak and silk handspun for this, since my skein came in somewhere around 270 yards. So soft, so lovely.

And now I’ve decided that more colorwork fingerless mitts are in order. I’m knitting the Endpaper Mitts again, except they’re not really Endpaper Mitts. Apparently there’s a chart out there with a bird on it that matches up with the Endpaper Mitts’s structure (number of stitches, number of rows, location of thumb, etc), so I’m using that instead, using yarn from the CPaAG swap and some cheap dark blue fingering weight I picked up when I bought my needles. They seem to be coming along okay, although my right hand is so not made for knitting. Or maybe it just needs some practice, especially with regards to keeping tension.

So, considering that I keep getting distracted by other projects and kind of bored with knitting socks all the time, I am pretty sure I am not going to meet my goal of knitting 12 pairs of socks in 2009. I’ve only made it to five pairs so far, and if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to get through two more. I don’t really mind too much, since getting through even just the five, plus the other projects I’ve knit, means that this is one of my more productive years of knitting, and it’s certainly more productive than last year. And that’s really what the plan was all about.

I has a hat.

It has pretty stripes

I used the Thrive handspun from the Hello Yarn Fiber Club February 2009 roving. The pattern is Felicity [rav link]. It was a surprisingly quick knit. I went to the Sow’s Ear on Friday to get my needles because every pattern I was looking at last week needed 16 inch needles in sizes I didn’t have. Once I got the needles and my yarn was wound into balls, I cast on, and I had the entire hat knit by Saturday evening. Definitely one of the fastest knits in a long time, and I am a slow knitter.

I don’t really need another hat right now, but I like this one, so I’ll totally wear it.

Moar plain stockinette TV knitting, plz

I think this is one of the fastest sock projects I’ve ever done. I started them on the 20th, pretty much right after finishing the Buckland socks, and I wove my ends in exactly two weeks later. Not bad for socks that are pretty much halfway up my calf.

I used the yarn I spun from Pigeonroof Studios Superwash Merino to knit these, and I used pretty close to all of it. I had split the roving in half when I spun it, so that gave me two distinct balls of yarn. Each sock was knit from one ball, and it’s interesting how they are almost inverses of each other. The yarn from the left sock is all gone, aside from about 5 yards. I have quite a bit more left from the other ball, but not enough to make anything with it. So, not only the fastest socks but the most efficient use of yarn.

I think I might take a quick break from socks, since I’ve done two pairs pretty much back to back. I’ve been meaning to knit toasty [rav link] for a while, and I have the yarn I want to use wound into a ball, so I think that’s the logical choice. It’s supposed to be a quick knit, too, so that will be good. Give me some time to decide which socks are next.

I also think I need to start keeping better notes of my spinning. When sharing the Buckland socks on Ravelry, I received a few questions about how I’d spun the yarn, and it was a real stretch to remember anything more than splitting the wool into thinner pieces for each ply. I didn’t have any notes for the project, and what good is a blog if it’s not helping me keep track of my work? So, I’m going to make a better effort to keep track of these things, so that when I do get questions, I at least have some project notes to refer to.

That said, I’ll be starting, either tonight or tomorrow, spinning up “Patchwork,” the July Hello Yarn Fiber Club roving. I liked the Buckland results so much that I think I have to try the same method for this roving, which is to take the roving and split it into thirds. Then, each piece gets split into a different number of pieces. With the Buckland, I didn’t split the first piece at all. The second piece was split into two halves, and I believe I split the third piece into three pieces, although it may have been four. And each third of the roving becomes an individual ply.

While I liked how the Buckland turned out, I think with Patchwork, I’d like to see the colors stripe a little more quickly, so I’m splitting the third into a different number of pieces. The first third is split in half, the second is split into four pieces, and the last third is split into six. This should help cycle the stripes a little more quickly, spread the colors around, and make for a more interesting and vibrant yarn. Or maybe, given the colors of this roving, it’ll make mud. Who knows?

I’m such a bad blogger. I finished these socks weeks ago, and I’ve already worn them, even. And I don’t think I’ve even breathed a word about them.

Buckland Socks

I used the handspun that I made from the September 2008 Hello Yarn Fiber Club roving, which I blogged about earlier this year. I don’t think there’s much to say about the socks, really. The yarn details are in the blog post, and the socks were knit toe-up, not really following any specific pattern. At this point, I can more or less knit a standard toe-up, short-row heeled sock off the top of my head. I’ve certainly knit enough of them to remember how it goes.

So, this puts the total for my 2009 Sockfest to 4 pairs of socks. We’re three-quarters of the way through the year, and I’m only one-quarter of the way to my goal of 12 pairs. I’m nearly finished with a 5th pair, so I’ll probably get close, but I’m not expecting to actually make it.

This photo wins the day.

I wasn’t going to go. I ended up somehow overspending and getting myself down way beyond what I’d budgeted for this first half of the month. I was also worried about what I was going to have to spend on the dentist, until finding out that I’m actually cavity-free and my mouth pain is the result of nighttime stress grinding. But, I was convinced by L that I’d regret it if I didn’t go, and I convinced myself that it’s actually okay to dip into my savings to treat myself for once*. Occasionally, I deserve something.

I took a small budget out of my savings. Well, larger than I should have, but I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t prohibiting myself from buying anything I fell in love with short of a wheel. I didn’t know if I was going to find another big bag of gorgeous wool that I omghadtohave, and I didn’t want to be disappointed if I did. The whole point of going today was to make it a treat. What fun would it have been if I’d come home disappointed?

So, I went, I shopped, I saw the sheeps. I spun on the wheels.

Yes. I spun on the wheels. I tried out the Kromski Sonata, the Majacraft Rose, and a castle style Lendrum (didn’t catch the model of that one). Bad, bad idea. Well, it was a good one because I really enjoyed watching other people watch me spin, seeing the looks of, “I wish I could do that.” It was nice to realize that I’m actually a pretty accomplished spinner. However, now I’ve spun on something that is not my wheel. I’ve spun on three other wheels, all of which are a significantly better fit for me than the Prelude. I now know how full of win double treadle wheels are. I want one. No, I NEED ONE.

Out of the three wheels, I think the Majacraft Rose was my favorite. It was sturdy, solid, and spun so smoothly. It was also extremely quiet. I only have two quibbles with the wheel: first, its flyer head is slightly to the left of center, which feels just a little bit awkward; second, its $859 price tag. That’s pretty steep, and it would mean I’d be waiting a long while before I get the wheel. And when the Kromski Sonata, my second favorite, is out there for only $540, it’s not really a competition. It has most of the same qualities, although I didn’t notice whether it was quiet or not, and it felt just slightly less solid than the Rose.

There are a lot of reasons for me to pick the Sonata besides the price. I already own a Kromski wheel, which means I have all the extra bobbins I need. I also have the Kromski niddy noddy and tensioned kate, so my OCD need for things to match can be satisfied, especially since the Sonata comes in Mahogany now. Also, its flyer head is in the center, which is a plus. It’s also a folding wheel, while the Rose is not, which means it’s a bit more portable. That would be something that would be really nice for times when I travel, and it would especially be nice if I do actually decide to go to the spinning groups or retreats I was invited to.

The Lendrum didn’t interest me for a couple of reasons, but the biggest one was the tilt. I understand why some people might like it, but I don’t. I like space between me and my wheel, and the tilt makes me feel crowded and claustrophobic. Otherwise, it really had the same qualities of the other two wheels. It’s just a matter of comfort, really.

As far as the wool haul this year, it was of course smaller than last year. I had a tighter budget, so I just bought a couple of rovings: pygora, BFL, and soy silk. I was thinking about picking up hand cards, and I almost wish I had, but I don’t actually have too much fiber that needs carding right now. They will probably make the Christmas list, though. Or I can get them some other time. I also almost bought one of Jennythepotter’s mugs, but I decided I was able to go home happy without it.  Some other day, when I don’t feel so squeezed. The one I had in my hands was very cute and very large. It would have held a lot of tea.

So, it was a very good day for me. I really enjoyed it, and I’m really glad I went. And next time, I’ll have to remember my Rav Hello button.

*Okay, I do actually treat myself, but it almost ALWAYS comes out of my Paypal. Most of my real-life earned money ends up spent on bills. Whatever’s left after that ends up in savings.

A market bag, I has it.

Market bag and a messy house

This took much longer than it should have for no good reason. I’m not sure what the problem was, really. Maybe moving, doing book reviews, trying to squeeze in some reading for my own education. Oh, and the Tour de Fleece, which I actually did keep up with. I just didn’t document it very well in pictures or here on the blog. Really, how many pictures of the same bobbin of laceweight singles do I need to take?

So, this bag is made from Knitpicks Cotlin in Planetarium, and it’s the Provence Crocheted Market Bag. I decided not to go with the full 32 rounds of the mesh stitch. I think I ended up doing something like 28 to make a shorter bag. It seemed a good enough size for me.

There are a couple of things that bother me about the bag. First, it has weird joins. For some reason, the mesh squares at the beginning of each round are slightly larger than all the others. I tried a couple different ways of trying to compensate for it, but it all looked really bad. Maybe I joined it wrong in the beginning, but I’m pretty sure I was following the directions to the letter. I guess it won’t be so bad once I’m using the bag and the mesh stretches. And second, the straps aren’t the same distance from the edge of the bag. One set is slightly farther in from the edge than the other because I couldn’t be bothered to measure before sewing them on. I don’t think it’s as noticeable as the problem with the mesh, though.

Still, it’s a market bag, so it will get used, abused, and worn in. As long as it’s sturdy and it holds, that’s really all that matters.

Plant has roots, yeah yeah yeah. Plant has roooooots.

See that little tiny root?

Excited? You bet I am. For a while, I didn’t think they would ever sprout roots, and I had kind of given up on it. But now, at least one of them will be able to turn into a full plant. I love these things, and I would be so happy to have a second one. It’s also nice to have some plant propagation success, especially on my first attempt.

So, I guess I’ll leave them alone for a few more days and see how things go. The large leaf should have some pretty well-developed roots by then, and maybe the smaller one will have some roots growing, too. Now that I know there’s something going on in that bag, it should be easier to keep from fiddling with it.