Piano mitts

My 80+ year old friend plays the piano, but not for long periods of time, because her hands get cold... So I made her these mitts, using the Skyp Socks pattern for the ribbing.


That is a picture of her hands, posing at the piano. I should have made more pictures of the mitts. Oh well.

Snakes and Ladders

Another September project. I did not know if I wanted lace or cables in my socks, so I went with both. Someone from India told me years ago that she knew knitted cables as "snakes", and so I thought of the game "snakes and ladders" as I knitted the socks. Later I learned that in the US the game is know as "chutes and ladders".



Thanks to wikipedia, I now know that the game originated in India, and that over there it is still known as "snakes and ladders". So I'm sticking to that name.

I used a yarn called Summer Sox, which was a pleasure to knit with, though the ends tend to get splitty and weaving them in was not easy. In keeping with my obsession of using up all my yarn, I used the leftovers to make fingerless mitts for a friend, in the same pattern.



No leftovers! Yay!

Finished Mitts

I did run out of green yarn, as expected. Luckily I was able to finish the thumbs and then use gray yarn to finish the cuffs. I originally chose a lighter shade of gray but the spouse disapproved. So I ripped the light gray cuffs and let him choose another yarn. I think I am spoiling him.

I spent Friday teaching a friend to knit two socks at the same time from the toe up. I was very surprised to find out that she knits the same way I do: with the yarn in the left hand, knitting from the back and purling from the front with the yarn below the needle. What she did not know was that when knitting in the round you purl from the back and knit from the front. Up to now she had been making socks with twisted stitches and had not noticed.

Although she is American, she spent her childhood in Mexico, and apparently that is where she learned the basics. Why is it that many of us in Mexico knit this way? I know that at least Andrea knits this way too. It was the Spanish who brought knitting to Mexico, but in Spain they knit using the British method.

I used to think that what best defined my style was the combination method, but in Anne Modesitt's book she never mentions purling from the back. In fact, she says that when knitting in the round you have no choice but to purl the "traditional way", which means wrapping the yarn above the needle when purling. This I find clumsy and unnecessary. The important thing is to pick the stitch from the leading edge. How you wrap of pick your yarn does not really matter until the next row, when again, you just have to make sure you pick the leading edge.

It is the Russians that use this method. How this came to be used in Mexico remains a mystery. Anyway, this is the video I shared with my friend to use as reference:

Sock hanger and a few things

Not all pretty things are useful, but this one is.



It is also cheap and thus fragile. From the moment I bought it I promised not to cry when it finally breaks, but it has lasted a few months now.

My scarlet fever socks have heels.



The fingerless mitts have thumbs.



And I am struggling to make another hat on the addi turbo. So far so good.



Is there a way to correct a dropped stitch? I literally had to put a marker on the stitch, keep going and then use a crochet hook to pick up all the missing rows. I am lucky this happened towards the end.

Well, this toy is useful for making something else...



It's a sock blank!



I have been ignoring the castoff instructions, which require you to thread the stitches. I've been pulling the stitches off the machine and casting them off by hand. This will be particularly usefull when knitting from the sock blank.

Scarlet fever

That's the look of the new socks I'm knitting. It's just plain socks, no pattern. I felt the urge to knit and knit until I run out of yarn, using Opal Crazy Color #1903. This is the way it was supposed to look, with the red spots spiraling around the socks.

Instead, I got ret spots all over the socks.



Which is still very pleasant to the eye. What bothers me, though not much, is finding a knot.



Now I've had the tortuous experience of having a knot in a self striping yarn (Schoeller Fortissima Socka Colori), with the new strand knotted backwards and, of course, completely out of sequence. Brrrr. This knot, in comparison, was easy to deal with. The yarn was knotted respecting the color sequence. I still cut the yarn on the other sock and took out 10 cm in order to make the socks match. That's another advantage of knitting both socks at the same time.

Speaking of which, I am now knitting a pair of fingerless mittens from the Ultra Alpaca Fine yarn that was left over from the previous pair of socks.



When I was making those socks, I used a single center pull ball. That meant that, as the yarn was unwound from the outside of the skein, it got twisted with the central strand. So every few rows I had to let the socks hang free, needles and all, and allow them to untwist themselves.

I am doing the same thing with the fingerless mitts. I only have 21 grams of yarn and I have no clue if it will be enough. So knitting both mitts at the same time will allow me to use up the yarn evenly on both mitts. I am also knitting them from the top and not from the cuff. I expect to at least complete the hands. If I end up with a short cuff, or using a different yarn for the cuff, it will not matter, as long as they match.