Heels and flowers.

The squeaky socks have heels. If I'm watching a movie while I knit the squeaking is bearable.



Oh yes, and the spouse sent me flowers. He's totally earning these socks.

Squeaky socks

It's time to start a new pair of socks for the spouse. I did promise I'd use that gloomy gray yarn soon. But alas, not only is it gloomy, it also squeaks! It's all synthetic: nylon and acrylic. It's driving me nuts. Stitch after stitch, it squeaks loud enough that I can hear it and even feel the vibrations on my fingers.



The pattern is Gentleman's Fancy Socks (ravlery link). The spouse chose the pattern, which by coincidence I had also chosen for myself (from the same library book) three years ago.

Tomorrow will be my first day at the new job... I'm so nervous... maybe that's why I can't stand the squeaking.

Happy New Year!

This year starts well enough for me, with a recently finished pair of socks. I said I was going to knit until I ran out of yarn, and I did!



I tried that once before when knitting the sunset socks, also with Opal yarn. In that occassion I was using the Coriolis pattern and I ran out of yarn earlier. Coriolis looks simple enough but it does use up more yarn than a plain sock. These socks are definitely longer.




They stay up if I am not moving around much, but I plan on adding elastic thread later on.

I used this bindoff, which is a variation of what I always do (learned from Vaxgirl), except I do purls instead of knits. The results are very similar.

Another great thing about this New Year is that I will be starting a new job soon. I will not be making as much money as before, but it beats being unemployed, right?

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:

Another hat

Pardon the bad picture. You all know how hard it is to make pictures of yourself. This is the hat I started recently on the addi express. Basically, I knitted 25 rows, picked all stitches up and continued knitting in the round using two 6 1/2 mm circulars, decreasing in a five point star pattern. The hat is a bit pointy. I usually decrease in a six point star pattern for hats but, what can you do with 46 stitches? I made one decrease in the first row and after that based my decreases on 45 stitches, which is divisible by five.

As for the edge, I picked up the stitches and, as I was binding off, I was also dropping every other stitch for five rows and picking it up with a crochet hook from the inside. The dropped stitches become purl stitches on the outside, creating the ribbing. I think this dropping/picking up stitches took me much longer than the 25 rows I knitted on the machine.

I also made another pot of black beans and took the opportunity to test the use of Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate) as mordant.




Because even if alum is not toxic, and they use lots of it in treating drinking water, aluminum has been linked to Alzheimer's disease. And yes, I know correlation does not imply causation, and that alum is used in preserves and no one has had a problem with that, and that some of the studies liking aluminum to Alzheimer's disease were controversial. Anyway, magnesium is actually one of the essential minerals one must consume everyday and there is no controversy around its use. Not that I would recommend eating Epsom salts. I just want to try other alternatives.

It is interesting that the pretty blue I got using alum did not really come out with Epsom salts. You can tell the difference in the dye water itself, wich turns blue when you use alum as a mordant, but not when you use epsom salts. I thought the blue was a result of the pH change, but I believe now that aluminum somehow interacts with the dye, like many metals do. That is why they tell you not to use metal pots for dyeing.

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.

Final Version

So here they are, bound off, washed, blocked and modeled by the proud owner.



I tried a new way to bind off:



It is, indeed, surprisingly stretchy.

Ripped and re-knitted

I had finished the cuffs and was about to cast off when I asked the spouse to try the socks. And good thing I did! When I said that the socks were not too tight I should have really said that the socks were not tight at all. So I ripped back to the heel and got rid of the increase. I am finally catching up, and in a couple of rounds I will start the ribbing.



I feel like a little girl who cannot play with her new toy because she has to finish her homework first. I want to fool around with my knitting machine, and I have tons of ideas that I cannot try out yet because I want to finish these socks.

Hat break

I halted all sock progress to make a hat. Not because I was tired of socks, or because I wanted to knit something with larger needles... It's just that I bought a new toy: The Addi Express. I got the King Size version, with 46 stitches.




I knit up the hat really fast, then took it off the machine and finished the crown by hand.  This was tricky and I messed up a bit. Then I picked up  the bottom stitches and made the  ribbed edge. I used the yarn that came with the machine, a wool acrylic blend called Zermatt. Today, with some difficulties, I managed to knit the rest of the yarn into a flat piece, proving that the machine can be used also for flat knitting. The equivalent needle size is about 6 mm.

It's fun, but it's an expensive toy.

Other than the price, my main objection is against the number of stitches.Why did they choose 46 needles? If you  plan on adding any decoration like duplicate stitches or buttons, or even for making crown decreases when knitting a hat, 46 is a really bad number. It is divisible only by 23 and 2. The perfect number would have been 48: divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 and 16.