A Bluestocking Knits

Place-mats and Fuzzyfeet

I finished the last random-stripe place-mat yesterday!  I've been working on these for at least two years -- put them aside when it was pretty clear that I would run out of some of the colors much sooner than others, and I got a little discouraged.  It seemed silly, though, not to carry on and finish, especially when I had only four mats, and I wanted at least five, and six would be better, when I certainly had enough wool by weight.

These are Araucania Nature Wool, in blue, lilac, red, and green, worked in garter stitch on US7 needles, then fulled in the washing machine.  They shrank rather more than I had anticipated, so they look a bit stingy even under the smaller plates that we use for regular meals, but they are wonderfully thick, and the colors are so beautiful that I must accept that -- and I do have six, there is that!

These were about 21 x 16 inches (136g) before fulling, and about 14 x 9 inches afterwards -- a whopping 35% loss in height!

I ran out of blue wool first, long before any of the other colors looked dangerously low, so I ripped out the mittens I made for Julia many moons ago, which she wore once or twice then left in the corner of her closet floor until they were ratty and moth-eaten.  (Long-ago-grown-out-of, anyway -- I'm using Laura's as pockets for my reading glasses.)  But the extra wool got me quite a few more blue stripes -- you can see how wretched the wool looks in the "before" photos of the mats, but after fulling they're quite indistinguishable from the others.

It's really a shame that the Nature Wool is discontinued -- it's really gorgeous stuff, a pleasure to knit with, and the colors are just sumptuous, the red and green especially.

As it turned out, I ended up with at least two skeins of green left after the last mat, so I thought I'd whip up a pair of Fuzzyfeet for what I hope will be winter this year.  I made a pair years ago that ended up too small, so I thought I'd err on the side of generosity, and estimated a stitch count based on the shrinkage of the place-mats.

Another reason to make them über-gigantic is that my Easy House Slippers, which I wore for a couple of years, kept shrinking with every wash, and eventually my big toe poked a hole at the end of each sock.

These are worked on US7 needles with one US8 because the set was only four needles, so the gauge is rather smaller than you usually do for fulling, but I already had a reference point from the mats, which after a couple of washes are tight and thick.  David and Julia both mocked me for making them so big, but I erred on the side of caution, in fact.  They are just comfy now, so I will have to wash them by hand, I guess.

(I'm using "Henry V" for scale as I am doing the FutureLearn "Shakespeare and His World" online course again, and it's this week's play ...)

Jaywalking Through Summer

This is of course the famous Jaywalker socks pattern from Grumperina, the next on my WIPapalooza 2015 list.  Some time ago, I offered a pair of knitted socks as a Christmas present for my cousin -- who, though not a knitter herself, is in fact the one who started me reading knitting blogs, way back when -- and her only requests were for knee socks and that they be pink (her emphasis).

I did get the pink part, in Shepherd Socks' "Pink Blossom", wh. is vivid indeed.  The knee socks part rather defeated me, I'm afraid, as I have found, even in my one or two adventures in knitting knee socks, that unless you're willing to wear garters, knee socks really have to be custom-made-snug.  M. has very shapely calves, and lives far enough away that we don't see each other regularly, both of which made it difficult to get the sock shaping right, and I felt so bad about the years intervening between promise and product that I eventually capitulated on the knee sock part.

I'm afraid, too, that this isn't quite my finest hour, sock-wise, as it's been so hot this whole summer that my heart just hasn't been in knitting at all, and it seems to me to show a bit in these -- that funny little valley you get along the bottom of the foot if you don't tug the yarn a bit between needles in the round, a slackness at the heel flap/gusset join which I managed to disguise by winkling the extra wool a stitch at a time into the instep, a general air of ennui.

But they are Jaywalkers after all, and I am not the only one by any means to be charmed by their zigzaggy joie de vivre.  I've not made any before in a solid color, so this was quite fun.

So now I still have the unfinished felted random-stripe place mats, the red and white Selbu mittens, and the Setesdal scarf.  Shall I ignore the pretty-but-workhorse mittens I found in a drawer last month?

This is Brown Sheep's Lamb's Pride in fuchsia and Handpaint in English Garden, which play quite nicely together.  Well, the wool is kind of scratchy, and the thumbs really are too tight -- so, out they go!

David took this photo of the eclipse Sunday night --

a triple event combining a full moon, a supermoon, when the moon's elliptical orbit makes it seem bigger in the sky than usual, and a lunar eclipse, which because the sun's rays have to pass through the Earth's atmosphere, makes the moon look reddish-orange.  Apparently this combination has happened only five times since 1900.  We could add some more rarities, actually -- that it was at a civilized hour (just past supper), and that the night was unusually clear for us here in smog-land!

Hot Pink

It's hot again today, in the 90s (30s C) with far more humidity than we really like -- we want our California summers nice and dry, you know.  Not a good day for knitting, anyway.  I tried a few rounds of this Jaywalker, and not just the yarn but the needles were sticking to my hands.  It's a nasty irony that there is so much moisture in the air and yet we're in a drought with no end in sight.  ("The only way in which we know that summer is coming is by the more chilling winds, the increased dust, the tawny color of the hills, and the general dying look of things," wrote Caroline C. Leighton in June 1876. Heck yeah.)

Strangely enough, it isn't too hot to do needlepoint.  I'm not sure why this is, but I suppose it's that the needle and wool don't need to slide through one's fingers.

This is another miniature carpet from the McNaughtons' book -- the Khotan No. 25.  I've changed the background color from the lightest gold shade in the medallions to the putty-ish white left over from the Holbein carpet.  The pale gold was quite all right, but this really speaks to me.

Am also reading The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks.  I'm torn, actually -- sometimes he writes whole paragraphs in sentence fragments, which are generally like fingernails on a chalkboard to me, but sometimes he's quite lyrical, and sometimes I feel, with his viewpoint, that the world would be a better place if more people were able to simply do what they love, regardless of whether others think they are "wasting their lives," and that tourists are a nuisance (or worse), and from my own viewpoint that those who are blessed enough to live in the Lake District, to have lived there for centuries, regard people like me as a nuisance (or worse).  A conundrum, to be sure.

Thoughts on the Muriwai Bathmat, and a Mini-Muriwai

A few episodes -- well, quite a few -- of "Poirot" and I have a Muriwai Bath Mat, a pattern by Mel Clark, in her book (with Tracey Ullmann) Knit 2 Together.  I started this around the middle of 2008, I'm sorry to say -- my advice to anyone who wants to knit it is to have lots of circular needles on hand!

This is my usual Sugar 'n Cream dishcloth cotton from Michael's, here in Icing Sugar (white) and Strawberry (pinks and white), knitted together.  I had one of the mega-balls (400g/14 oz) in white, of which I had a good deal left, and numerous regular (2 oz) balls of the pinks, so I calculate this as most of 6 balls of the latter -- the whole thing weighs 630g.

It's an easy pattern, but a bit tedious, and obviously I had a bit of a problem with this, as one of the corners is quite wonky -- an attention error, I suspect.  Since I didn't have the same gauge as in the pattern, I worked the center section roughly as indicated, then just kept knitting until I thought it was about the right size (with a little extra to allow for shrinkage, wh. I'm sure it will do), so the center section on mine is a little "smaller" scale-wise than the original -- oh well.

It seemed more and more obvious as I went that this pattern would scale down to dolls-house size very easily, and indeed it did! --

The Mini-Muriwai is in crochet thread from Michael's -- Aunt Lydia's, I suppose, but I don't know which blue, though it is very pretty.  I worked this mat on US000 needles (1.5mm) in a couple of hours, just dividing the full-sized dimensions by 12, and estimating the gauge.  The increases are, curiously, a little awkward on the miniature version as well -- I thought I was doing the increases the same on either side of the corner sts, but I guess that one being enclosed, as it were, by the corner st on the right needle, and the other exposed at the beginning of the left needle, made a difference somehow, either in how I laid them on the needle or how I worked them on the next round.  Oh well!

I was aiming for about 2 1/3 x 3 in., and got 2 3/4 x 3 1/4, so a little off, but not too bad.

The picot edging is worked here by binding off 5 sts in every repeat, instead of 6 as on the full-sized mat, which reduction I thought would be better for scale, though I suppose looking at the final mat, it wouldn't really matter one way or the other.

Kitchen Cotton Monday

Quite a lot of our dishcloths are looking a bit ratty, so I got out a bunch of the little odds and ends of kitchen cotton left over from other cloths, and whipped up some new ones.  The two on the right are just Grandmother's Favorite, while the one on the left is a Quaker Ridging cloth.

I also got out the Muriwai Bath Mat to have a go at that, for my next WIPapalooza project -- the receipt is dated "4/30/08" so that tells you how long it's been.  I couldn't tell at all how big it actually is, since it's been scrunched up on a single circular needle for five+ years, so I ran a piece of plastic trimmer string -- straight off the spool -- through the live stitches, so that I could actually spread it out and see how much more I need to do.  (It was much easier getting it back on the needle from the trimmer string than it would have been from a strand of yarn!)  I figure the mat will shrink more than a bit with washing, so say ten more rounds, and it will be done.  Of course, ten rounds is a lot by now ....

Thoughts on the Blueberry Waffle Socks

Another one done!  These are the Blueberry Waffle socks by Sandy Turner, for my mother-in-law, who chose this yummy color of Shepherd Sock, which is "Purple Club".  I decided on this pattern for a number of reasons -- that it was said to be nice and stretchy, and that it is a good pattern for avoiding the dreaded pooling-and-flashing, and because, well, how could I not when the colors actually look like smooshed blueberries and cream?!

I used the eye-of-partridge heel flap instead of the usual Sl1, K1 -- it seemed more in keeping with the waffle pattern somehow.

As I was knitting blithely along on the second sock, I looked down at the finished heel turning and realized that because I was actually reading the instructions, I'd done a sort of band heel.  Since I'd turned the first heel months ago, I'd forgotten that I'd done a round heel on the first one.  I will offer as an excuse that I was not following the pattern especially closely since Turner had written it for 4 dpns, including specific instructions as to how many sts per needle, etc. and I was knitting with 5.  It's too bad that I wasn't paying attention the first time around, as I appreciate the use of different heels, and of course it's good to have various types in one's bag of knitting tricks.

That said, this particular sock can be adapted to any kind of heel and toe the knitter likes, using the basic "waffle" pattern, which is simply,

Rounds 1 and 2: K to end.
Rounds 3 and 4: K2, P2 to end,

over a total number of stitches divisible by 4.

The stitch pattern doesn't really avoid pooling and flashing so much as disguise it, as you can still see the effects, but they are certainly muted a bit.

In addition to the inherent stretchiness, I added a little calf shaping, which wasn't especially difficult to do with this pattern, thank goodness, as I foolishly didn't keep track of what I did on the first sock, and had to re-create it for the second -- which on the second attempt proved to be much less complicated than I was making it!

The moral of the project is, of course, it's just not a good idea to leave things half-finished for years!

We Interrupt These Waffles for a Dishcloth --

Since finishing the yoga socks, I've been plugging away at the Blueberry Waffles and am now a ways into the foot on the first sock, but paused a few hours to whip out a house-warming gift, a set of bright dishcloths.

The pattern is the Reversible Pips Dishcloth by Hannah Maier, available free from KnitPicks, part of their "52 Weeks of Dishcloth Patterns" series. I found this new (to me?) color of Sugar 'n Cream at Michael's the other day -- "Psychedelic"!  You can always use a bit of cheerfulness when washing dishes.  Two balls of the yarn made three full-sized cloths quite easily, with a small ball left over.

The pattern works up very quickly -- the only quibble I have is that the finished cloth doesn't lie quite flat.  I actually had to block it for the photos.  I liked the designer's note that the pips give the cloth "plenty of scrubbing power" -- the psychedelic part was a bonus.

I washed them thoroughly before sending them off, since the yarn did this to my needles and fingers! -- the first time I've ever experienced this with Sugar 'n Cream.

Thoughts on Some Yoga Socks

I finished these yoga socks at the beginning of the month, but to tell you the truth, I'm so tired of them that I couldn't be bothered posting about them until now.  I played around with the "toy camera" setting when I was taking the picture, just to make it a little less boring.

One skein of Berocco Comfort Sock, in color 1810 "Invercargill", on I think 2.5 mm needles.  I can't remember which pattern I used -- probably this one, just with a continuous 3x1 rib.

On the bright side, the yarn in 3x1 rib is very stretchy, so I could make knee socks without any shaping at all.

I actually meant these as more of a sock dickey than for yoga -- because I'd heard that acrylic yarns make your feet sweatier than cotton or wool does, I thought, "oh, yoga socks over cotton ones!".  This is I think a good idea, but these have rather large heel openings, which means that the white sock underneath shows above the top of my shoes -- if I do this again, I'll make the opening a little smaller.

Sorry for the crummy lighting, indoors and out -- it's actually raining at the moment!  "Ten percent chance," the weather man said!  In the middle of a drought!  It looks like it won't do much more than get the pavement damp, but gosh, you take what you can get!

And just because I'm pleased with these, here are some gratuitous roses shots, an oldish one and a new one --

These are "Duchesse de Brabant" -- in January! -- and the one below is "Sharifa Asma".

Two Down, Seven To Go ...

Well, the friend I was knitting the Klaralund for has decided, with much regret, that she would no longer be able to wear it, due to some physical issues, so -- I feel bad that I didn't get it done when she wanted it, years ago but -- that's that.  I've pulled it all out and wound it back up, and it's back in the drawer for a future project.  I took the photo beforehand, to remember how the colors look knitted up.

I don't much like this Berrocco Comfort Sock, but I love the way it looks against these rosewood beauties.  The color is a bit richer in real life.

Thoughts on the Garter Heel Socks

Ta-da!  I've finished the first of my projets anciens -- gosh, it sounds so much better in French! -- the Garter Heel Socks by Susan Lawrence, from the Vogue Ultimate Sock Book, which I started in May 2009.  The yarn is Chameleon Colorworks Bambino superwash merino/bamboo/nylon blend, in Viridian, a lovely yarn in a lovely color, soft and pleasant to knit with.

When I slipped the growing first sock on my foot, I remembered why I'd left off some five years ago -- I'd had to add in 8 more stitches to make it big enough, and it was still a little snug.  The stitches looked visibly pulled, but I wasn't sure if that was the effect of the bias stitches themselves, or this yarn on the bias, as it has a rather lovely shimmer to it and so the light catches it differently, or if it really was too snug.  I suspected now, though, that adding still more stitches would make it too big, so I carried on after all.  It feels perfect, so I guess I'll go for that!

Besides adding in those 8 stitches -- one in each K section of the lace repeat -- I made a few other modifications, most obviously in the welt at the top, which I did in 3x1 rib instead of garter stitch, as I like that better.  I also did my usual pick-up-extra-stitches on the heel flap, which for me solves that problem of a little hole just there -- so my gusset is a bit longer than the original, but not by much, as it happens.

The garter-stitch short-row heel is quite comfortable, but I have the feeling that other than not having to fuss with the wrapped stitches when knitting the heel together, there isn't much point to having it be in garter stitch except the visual element -- though that is certainly interesting!