83 Pairs Of Socks And Counting

I get asked a lot why I knit so many socks.  Frankly, this is why:

10″ of snow on November 11th, record highs and lows this week (High today: 24F/-4C  Low tonight: 6F/-14C).

Excuse me while I go and work on pair number 84!

Subscription Boxes

Have you ever tried a subscription box?  I’ve looked at many over the last couple of years but I’ve always had this niggling doubt in the back of my mind that it’s quite a lot of money for something I might not like, so I’ve never been brave enough to buy one.  But this year at work has been very stressful with a lot of colleagues losing their job, and the few of us left are trying to keep the lights on and do the work of many.  For me it really all came to a head a few weeks ago and after working a straight eight hour day for the first time in weeks, I just grabbed my bag, said to hell with it and flounced out of the door!  I was done with it all, for that day anyway.

When I got home I was still very upset and did something I’ve never done before… I logged on to the computer, got my credit card out and did a little “stress shopping”!

I think most fibre crafters in the USA are familiar with KnitPicks, an internet based crafting company that provides a multitude of it’s own yarn, needles, patterns, books and notions to the fibre community.  They also brought out their own subscription boxes last year, but I never really looked into them either, however, very recently they put them on sale for a very reasonable price as they obviously had “leftovers” that they wanted to clear off their warehouse shelves.  Add to that the fact that I’d also received a 15% off coupon via an email promotion, the only decision left to make was “what to get”!

As a sock knitter I immediately gravitated towards the Sock Yarn Box but despite the extremely good value on offer I was still hesitant, mostly due to that niggling “what if I don’t like it” little monkey that was sitting on my shoulder whispering in my ear!  So I looked at all the other boxes, thinking about best use and possible choices and, monkey be damned, ended up ordering one Sock Yarn Box and one Fan Favorite Box.  Better the devil you know apparently.

They shipped pretty quickly and I told my husband to randomly pick one boxes and put it away for Christmas when they arrived, as he works from home and was going to get to them before I did!  So I arrived home from work one day to find a largish KP box sitting on the kitchen counter.  There were no markings on it at all, so I had no way of telling which of the two boxes I was about to open, which added to the fun.  It turned out I had the Sock Yarn Box and all my fears of not liking the contents of not finding the items useful were completely unfounded.  I was so incredibly happy with everything.

Let’s start with the yarn, it’s Capretta, their Merino/Cashmere/Nylon blend and it’s something that I haven’t tried before.  There are two balls in Eclipse Heather and one each of Pucker and Highlighter Yellow.  Most boxes seem to have two patterns, I got an entire book!  Splendid Soles contains 16 sock patterns, a good number of them I’d like to knit too, so that’s a huge score.  There are two smaller items, no doubt to make up the value and add a little extra to the box; the first is a little tin of stitch markers, a simple thing to chuck in the box but perennially useful.  The second item is a Radiant 24″ US1 circular needle, which is a little strange as to magic loop it’s recommended to use a 36″ circular  needle, there is a way to knit socks with two circs, but they included only one!  It makes no difference to me as I’m a die-hard DPN sock knitter, but I do knit shawls and things where a24″ circ is useful, so it should get some use eventually.  Overall I’m very impressed and pleased with my first ever subscription box

It was great value for money too, I worked out the costs based on non-sale prices of the items.  KnitPicks have great sales going on pretty frequently, but finding everything in this box at sale prices would be difficult to say the least.  This is how it all worked out:

4 x Capretta @ $8.99 each
1 x 24” US1 Radiant Wood Circular Needle @ $6.99
1 x Stitch Markers tin @ $6.99
1 x Splendid Soles Book @ $29.99

Overall cost if bought at none sale prices = $79.94

Sale price of box = $36 -15% off plus sales tax, came to $32.44 so yeah, I’m pretty happy about that, and I’ll have the second box to look forward to in December, although it has a lot to live up to!!

Finish All The Things

I’m trying hard to finish up as many of my WIPS as possible before starting new stuff.   I’m still allowing myself the odd new cast on here and there, let’s face it, what knitter wouldn’t?   Compared to many knitters I don’t have that many WIPS if I’m honest, but I really dislike clutter, and a knitting queue full of unfinished things clutters up my mind and my knitting mojo.

So in the last few weeks I’ve finished two pairs of socks and a large, double loop cowl.

First up, the socks:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pattern: Miss Lemon
Ravelry Project:  Socks First Miss Lemon
Cast On/Bind Off: 1 April 2018/12 August 2019
Reason For putting Down:  Hmm, what can I say and still maintain my politeness?  The pattern is badly written, the chart is incorrect (it’s upside down), there are missing instructions depending on which size you’re knitting and the heel as written is incredibly too small… among other errors.  I’m glad they’re finished!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pattern: Ralph and Alice
Ravelry Project: Ralph and Alice Test Knit
Cast On/Bind Off: 29 May 2019/27 August 2019
Reason For Putting Down: Because this was a test knit I only had to make one sock… always a bad idea! Most of my test knits sit longer than this one did, but I really like everything from this particular designer so the excitement to have a new pair of socks from her outweighed the procrastination gene!

And here’s the cowl:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pattern: Nest Cowl
Ravelry Project: Nesting
Cast On/Bind Off: 5th January 2019/8th September 2019
Reason For putting It Down: It’s knitted as a long scarf and seemed together with a three needles bind off, and Summer arrived. In other words, too hot to have it sitting in my lap! As the weather cooled towards the beginning of August I picked it up again.

Next up on the “to be finished list” is a lovely pair of lace socks, shouldn’t be too long as I’m at the heel of the second one (top down).

Hello World

It’s been a while, I know.  I could come up with numerous reasons but at the end of the day they would just feel like exactly what they are… excuses.

So c’est la vie and all that, let’s move on.

A previous set of two posts, here and here, showed my adventures with hand dyeing my own yarns with food based dye products like Kool Aid, Easter Egg Dye Tablets and Food Colouring.  After these posts I dyed up a few more skeins… a flamingo pink, a muted purple a really bright yellow and a bright tonal blue.  For some reason, almost everything I dye tends to come out on the  eye-searing spectrum!  Outside of one pair of socks, I never really knitted with the hand dyed yarns, so last year I set out to change that and ended up knitting with all of them with the exception of a yellow skein.

So without any preamble this is how everything turned out:

The red was the only yarn that I’d already knitted up and shown on the blog, but it’s included here for completeness.

The red became By The Seine River socks.

From the same dye weekend this beautiful mottled peachy/pink/orange became…

…Oktoberfest Socken, a beautiful pretzel cable pattern that’s mirrored on each sock, with simple ribbing making up the majority of it.

The next batch of hand dyed looked like this in the skein..

The flamingo pink……became test knit lace socks with a plain back, Heritage Socks

The muted purpley/plum….became more test knit socks, Flaming June.

This parrot green, that didn’t appear in either batch of photos for some reason…

…ended up as MORE test knit socks!!  These are called Peak Foliage.

And finally, that lovely tonal blue turned into the most gorgeous shawl ever! Umstead Shawlette. Quite possibly my favourite knitted thing up to this point, and the fact that I hand-dyed the yarn for it just makes it all the more special to me.

Over the course of this year, I’ve picked up a few more skeins of un-dyed yarn so I’m looking forward to continuing the fun again at some later date.  Just have to use up that pesky yellow skein first!!

It’s All Relative

I thought for a bit of fun I might expand a bit on my previous post where I said I’d been distracted by my family history research of late.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to regale you with a dull list of names and dates, but I do like to look at the “fun” side of this hobby once in a while.

Have you heard about the Six Degrees of Separation?  The notion that everyone is connected within six steps of each other, not biologically, but the friend of a friend’s brothers wife kind of thing.  There was even some college level research done a while ago that resulted in a kind of game about The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which was about linking as many Hollywood types with the actor.  You can read about the whole Six Degrees thing and how it came about here.    And just to stay true to my knitting roots, Rachel Coopey even has a pattern set called The Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon!  Why seven, I don’t know, but there are also 12 patterns too.

I have my family tree online at WikiTree.  I like the idea of OpenSource, I like the idea of collaboration rather than everyone adding a personal tree, after all, we’re all related and looking for our cousins, and I love the idea of using proper sources instead of something your Gt Auntie Dot might or might not have remembered.  Anyway, WikiTree has this thing called 100 Degrees of Separation, whereby they think that it could be possible that every person in the entire world, alive or dead, can be connected within 100 steps of each other.

So using myself as an example, and the wonderful WikiTree as the source for the information from all of our worldwide trees, here’s a little list of well known people that I can connect too, not biologically, but I can connect to them nonetheless.

For this example I’m going to use Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain.  Apparently I’m 26 Degrees from her.  It goes like this:

Queen Elizabeth, her father, his father, his father, his sister, her husband, his brother, his wife, her mother, her father, his brother, his son, his son, his daughter, her husband, his mother, her father, his brother+, his wife*, her 1st husband*, his father, his sister, her son, his son, his son, his son -> his daughter which is ME!

*right here is the intersection.  Mary Caile married my ancestor Thomas Cummins, after he died she married John Storey, marked thus +.  Clear as mud right?  But fun!

Here are some more for you with the level of separation from them to me listed.

Legendary actor James Stewart (How The West Was Won, It’s A Wonderful Life) ~ 23 Degrees

Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde ~ 38 Degrees

Canadian singer, songwriter, novelist and poet Leonard Cohen ~ 29 Degrees

Aviator Amelia Earhart ~ 24 Degrees through my husband

As much as I find these worldly connections very interesting I’m MUCH more interested in having an accurate, well sourced family tree of ancestors where I have biological connections.  And to that end if anyone can tell me if my Gt Gt Grandmother Elizabeth Park, born in Glasgow in 1832, is Scottish through and through, or if her Father came from Northern Ireland I’d be incredibly grateful…. cause it’s a brick wall I’ve been banging my poor head on for far too long!

Three Things On My Needles

Gosh the days are flying past at the moment.  Every day I think “today will be the day I’ll write that blog post” but it never seems to materialize!  I also got a bit knee deep in my genealogy research recently as I found a 3rd cousin via a DNA match.  It was fun filling in some blanks in our shared history.

I may not always find the time to blog about it, but my knitting is a constant companion.  I usually have a couple of projects on the go at home and at least one at work.

This is the current work project.  It’s Punica by Rachel Coopey and the yarn is Hansen’s Hand Dyes Bounce Sock in Lavender Wisp.  As of today, the first sock is now complete and the second sock has about 15 rows of ribbing complete.

The first home project is a stranded tam, it’s new to the needles, and so far it took me longer to pick out my yarn than it did to knit the rib!  It’s an Occitania Tam and the yarn is Happy Fuzzy Yarn Corrie Sock in the very pretty Azores colour, along with the charcoal black of Patons Kroy Sock.

This pattern has a couple of plain knit rows separating the two main motif sections, and I’m seriously thinking of adding in some purple for that!  Yes, no, too much?

And finally, there are socks at work so there have to be socks at home too.  A quick pattern by a favourite designer.  This is the start of The Lily Petal in the Fishbowl by Heidi Nick, and my yarn this time is Holiday Yarns Flock Sock in Gold Olive.

And as it was a balmy 39F/4C on Sunday afternoon with the sun positively beating down out of a cloudless blue sky…… this happened. Mad dogs and Englishmen anyone?

February And Ravellenics Round Up

There was a knitting and an unknitting frenzy going on here in the last week.  No time for anything else, there were medals on the line!  For the first time I got really inspired by The Ravellenics, previous Olympics I was a bit Meh about it for some reason, but I really got behind it this time and cranked out a good number of items, along with some frogging, so the wool gets a second chance of being turned into something that fits, looks nice, isn’t full of learner knitter mistakes or all three!

So my February round up is really a Ravellenics round up, plus one more project, so I’ll make most of these brief as you’ve seen them before.

Ravellenics Projects:

Deflect Socks ~ WIP Dancing Medal

Team Colours Hat ~ Hat Halfpipe Medal

Brambles Beret ~ Hat Halfpipe Medal

Honeycomb Mitts ~ Mitten Moguls Medal.  I’ve yet to get a proper photo of theses, they’re made with the same lovely green yarn that the Brambles Beret is made with, and I almost put moss stitch in the cable centres… I really wish I had now!

I earned 4 medals in the Aerial Unwind category for Autumn Garden Mitts which were too big, I’d like to make them again at some point.  Serenity Plain Jane Socks, also too big (whatever possessed me to knit socks on 3.25mm needles with fingering weight yarn?) but they won’t get made again because I no longer knit plain socks.  Amble Socks because I didn’t know any different at the time and knit the first one EXACTLY as stated and could hardly get it on, so I added more stitches to the second one and it fits!  But the first one never will so I still couldn’t wear them! 🙂   And the final frogged project was Snozzberries.  The pattern said the cables pulled in a LOT, so I used the largest size with my 2.25mm needles and predictably they were huge, but these will definitely be remade as I’m in love with the pattern.  I’ve already repurposed the yarn though.

Overall I was incredibly happy to get 8 medals.  I also won a project bag donated by a fellow  Ravelete on the team I was part of (Team Michigan ~ 83 total medals), and I donated a nice skein of Michigan yarn as a prize to be awarded to another competitor on my team.

So, my only non Ravellenics project to make it off the needles went right down to the wire last night (28th Feb).  They were a pair of White Walkers socks.  Obviously only one is blocked in the photo, I had to submit them to a couple of sock challenges that were closing at midnight so I didn’t have time to block the second one.  I did find a cute prop thought, but what that has to do with a Game of Thrones inspired sock is anyone’s guess!

Yarn is Artesano Definition Sock in the very British colour of Mushy Peas!  It knit up very nicely so it’s a shame that the company went in to liquidation the other year.

So today is March and it’s pouring down once more, only today it’s going to change to snow by early afternoon and drop 6″ – 9″ of very wet, heavy snow by midnight…. so that’s something to look forward to for the commute to work tomorrow. Not!

I’ll share my March plans in another post, they include mittens, socks and a stranded tam.  More later.

 

Randomness

Random. Every once in a while I look at my phone, or the camera, and see what I’ve taken pictures of in the past week. Last week seemed to have been dictated entirely by the weather, which is OK by me as it was the “good” kind of weather… snow.

We walked in the snow…

 

We ate the snow (not really!)…

 

We watched the snow plows plowing the snow in tandem, and got horn honks for taking their pictures…

We cross country skied in the snow…

We walked some more in the rapidly diminishing snow…

And in the now pouring rain and ridiculously warm temperatures, I finished my Brambles Beret for The Ravellenics and mourned the loss of the snow…

 

The Ravellenics ~ A Week In

I have to admit to being pretty pleased with my knitting progress for The Ravellenics in the past week.  Today marks exactly one week since The Opening Ceremonies for the 2018 Winter Olympic Games, and in that week I’ve managed to:~

Finish my Deflect Socks for a WIPS Dancing medal.

Cast on and then finish a stranded Winter Games Hat for a Hat Halfpipe Medal.  It needs blocking still and I’m pretty sure I’ll put a pom-pom on it at some stage, but I’ll calling it done for now.

And I’ve cast on and got pretty far along with my Brambles Beret too, not many more rows before the decreases start.

Colour me happy, why don’t you!?

 

 

Hand Dyed Yarn Pt2

You can read Pt1 here.

So to continue with my meagre yarn dyeing adventures!  I dyed three skeins in total on that first weekend.  After the red one I talked about in the original post I moved right along to an orangey one.  Still on a wing and a prayer and basically just having fun, and still only using KoolAid drinks powder I came up with this one.  I say “came up with this one” like I know what I’m doing but it sounds so much better than “messing about and seeing if I like what I get!” which, frankly, is much closer to the mark.

It turned out more peachy than orange though.  It looked great in the water, but it was made to look darker due to the indoor setting, but as it dried I saw that it was just as splotchy as the first one drying next to it.  Thankfully I didn’t have any white yarn showing, I had learned the lesson of not tying the ties so tightly at least, so that was an improvement.

So back into the warm water it went, and when it was fully soaked through I mixed up a packet of bright pink with not much in the way of warm water and just dribbled it about a bit.   Finished and in the spinning basket it still didn’t look like much of anything to be honest.

But fully dried I fell in love with it.  It wasn’t what I set out to do but boy was it pretty!

Skeined up:

Once again the yarn is Kraemer Yarns Jeannie, I’d bought two skeins from Ebay in order to begin my dabbling.  The KoolAid recipe this time was 3 packs of Lemonade and 1 pack of Orange pre-mixed with the warm water already in the crock pot before adding the yarn.  After that it got 1 pack of Pink Lemonade, mixed with a little warm water and drizzled about.

The next day I thought I’d go for a bluey/green.  So into the pot went 3 packs of Lemon-Lime, 1 pack of Green Apple and 1 pack of Blue Raspberry Lemonade, followed by the pre-soaked yarn, which this time was Wool2Dye4 Platinum Sock.

I have to admit to being surprised that the blue didn’t come through more, so I took the yarn out of the pot and added another packet of Blue Raspberry Lemonade and another one of the Lemon-Lime.  And it  still didn’t make a jot of difference.

Pretty though….

It was an interesting weekend though, I definitely had a lot of fun and decided I’d like to do a bit more dyeing.  Nothing intensive or anything like that, just a couple of times a year perhaps, have a bit of fun but not take it too seriously kind of thing.  Neither of these two yarns have made it into a project yet.  But looking at the pictures makes me want to go digging them out of the stash once The Ravellenics is over and done with.