World Champion Socks! Also, an impasse.

So if you are the type of person who cares about such things, you will know that the Boston Red Sox just won the Worlds Series and so can officially be called the Best Team in Baseball! This was a really fun playoff season for me because I've probably paid more attention to baseball this season than ever before, and especially because I got to attend the first game of the world series through being lucky enough to have an awesome dad who is also lucky.

But I also feel like I deserved to be at that World Series game, because the Red Sox would never have gotten there without my lucky socks:



I bought the yarn for these socks just before the Red Sox won their first World Series in 86 years, back in 2004. Then the yarn kind of languished, half-knitted into a boring plain sock during the 2005 and 2006 seasons. I frogged that sock and started knitting these ones a day or two before the Red Sox home opening game, and posted about them on the day of said home opener. I finished them back in August while watching (on TV) a game in which the Red Sox pummelled the White Sox 11-1.

So clearly, they were lucky socks. I crammed them into my clogs (they're pretty bulky socks -- I'm thinking I need to get some bigger shoes for wearing with handknit socks) and wore them to the World Series game last Wednesday. The Red Sox dominated the game! I couldn't wear them during the second and third games on the series, but I had them with me anyway. And I proudly wore them on Sunday night, when the Red Sox finished off the Rockies. They're powerful socks! I'll be knitting another pair of fancy red socks next baseball season, if anyone wants to join me. White Sox fans and fans of any other potentially knitting-related teams are also welcome to join in.

I've started a Henry scarf. I've just about finished the second pattern repeat of seven, so that makes me more than a quarter of the way finished. I'm hoping to finish it in time to give it to my dad for his birthday at the beginning of December. Here's what it looks like now:


Nothing to set the world on fire, and very time consuming, but very nice too. The yarn is Gloss from Knitpicks, which is also very nice. I like it a lot. It's an easy pattern to memorize so long as you don't get bogged down with line numbers and things. I knit a lot of it this past week while watching baseball games.

I'm also trying to start the Dale of Norway sweater I've been wanting to do. I've got the yarn, but the trouble is I can't seem to knit small enough. I could buy new, smaller needles (we're talking size 00 and 000 circs, which are only made by one company anyhow), or I could try and train myself to knit tighter. I'm afraid if I tried to knit tighter, I would get less even gauge. I don't know. I may just suck it up and buy the tiny needles, though it hurts me to do it! And the yarn will split like a bastard. Alas!

Almost anticlimactic, but not quite.

Guess what I finished while I was watching the Red Sox game this afternoon? I'll give you a hint: it was a curiously appropriate project. OK, I give, it was the second Bayerische Sock!

I believe the appropriate response is WOO HOO! They are lovely lovely socks. This is what they looked like yesterday:


Note the little gummi-bear thingy -- I got sick of the little 00 needles poking through the side of my purse, so I bought a set of sock needle protectors. Yesterday I was working on them on the train on the way to the museum where I work on Saturdays. You have to change trains at one point, because not all the trains go all the way to the end of the line. This can be confusing for some people, especially because many of the train drivers do not make very useful announcements.

As a result of this, I often end up advising families of tourists on how to get to the museum, and I did so yesterday, with a rather confused French family. After I told them I was going the same place and they could follow me, one of the girls in the family said something to her father about a chaussette, and I held it up and showed it to her, and this led to a whole long conversation in bad English (theirs) and worse French (mine). Sadly, I didn't remember the word for knitting (tricoter, of course! Je suis tricoteuse!) until about three hours later.

This is not the first time knitting on public transportation has led me into conversation with people who do not speak my language -- I remember one time (at this same station, actually, although I was going in the opposite direction, from a different home to a different job) I was knitting an afghan and these two Asian women were very interested in it. I got the names for knit and purl from them -- it was something like jo and lai, I think, but I've forgotten which was knit and which was purl.

OK, in closing, one more picture of the socks. Check out that toe!

Pic pic pics

So, since I last posted, I have been on vacation!

(Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains, taken in Burlington, VT, which was not my final vacation destination but which was nonetheless a lovely place to stop for dinner.)

We all know what vacation means, right? Time for knitting! (And reading, and, you know, vacation fun.) I brought along all my current knitting projects -- this is actually just the Hanami stole and the Bayerische sock, and they're both very compact (the stole should be 19" by 70" complete and blocked, but the yarn is fine enough that it doesn't actually take up all that much room in the purse).

Unfortunately, I drove to my vacation destinations (Montreal and Mont Tremblant), which meant no plane/train/bus knitting, but I got in lots of hotel and pool knitting, which is also good stuff. I also did some car knitting, even though I was ostensibly driving -- there were serious delays at the border on the way home and I spent close to two hours going the last 1/2 mile to the customs plaza. Since I was in Park most of the time, I had no qualms about whipping out the knitting. A woman in a minivan I kept passing asked what I was making, and I held it up to show and said it was a shawl, and her husband/whatever said, "By the time you get to the states you'll be able to wear it!"

It wasn't quite stole weather by the time I got to Vermont, nor had I finished the shawl before my exciting interview with the customs guy (I nearly forgot to declare my Wheat Thins), but I got a pattern repeat or two done, and here's what it looks like now:


Not too bad-looking for unblocked lace! I'm on the fifth of seven repeats of the basketweave pattern; after that it turns to an every-row faux-random pattern of swirling petals. I love this baby alpaca yarn; it is super-soft and silky and I just want to rub my face on it. But I don't.

I also got some good vacation knitting done on the second sock (I'm determined to cure myself of second sock syndrome, and I've instituted a rule for myself where every time I finish a pattern repeat on the shawl, I have to work on the sock for a bit). Here's what that's looking like now:
Note that these photos were taken in natural light! It's an exciting breakthrough. This still doesn't look quite like the color looks to me -- it should be a bit darker maybe. More importantly, you can see the twiny stitches much better in natural light than with the flash or the assy camerphone.

Also, I should mention that I never turned comment notification on the Seven Year Sock, so I wasn't noticing when people were commenting. But now it's on! So I will notice and may even respond.

Sort of FO! Pictures to follow! Also new project! Also, why do I knit so loose?

So, I finished the first Bayerische Sock! I took some pictures a couple of days ago, but 1) it was dark and they didn't turn out so great and 2) my incredibly messy apartment was hiding my camera cable from me. But finally I found the cable, and given the excessively crappy weather we've been having I'm not going to be able to take any pretty well-lit pictures of it any time soon, so I shall post: And it only took me 3 months! Well, 3 1/2. Sigh. It actually looks even better in person. I'm delighted. I've cast on for the second sock but haven't even finished the ribbing yet.

I've cast on for the next sock, but I've also decided on my next/additional project (also in a fiddly smallish gauge -- what is wrong with me?): this Hanami Stole. I just happen to have some laceweight alpaca, and I just happened to see this stole mentioned in this post. (I feel some trepidation for the original poster, who wants to knit a wedding shawl for a friend, and wants it to be a cobweb-weight kind that you can pull through the wedding ring, but doesn't want it to be too difficult/complicated. Best of luck to her, I say!) I've got maybe 15 rows knitted on that so far; I left off the beads, because I just wasn't crazy about them as a design element and I feared that if I went into the bead store I might come out with more than I had bargained for. But it's shaping up really nicely.

The Hanami Stole is supposed to recall falling cherry blossoms, which I like. I have a fond memory of a lovely spring day out with friends strolling around the cherry blossom trees in Washington, DC. For those who are unfamiliar with this part of DC, the trees are in a park on a sort of peninsula out into the Potomac, and you can get quite a long way from the nearest Metro stop while you're walking. Just as we were getting about as far as you could from the Metro, a storm whipped up out of nowhere. It got dark, and the wind was blowing cherry blossoms everywhere (I kept getting them in the mouth), and everyone started running back off the peninsula -- thousands of people, all trying to beat the storm to shelter in the Metro and the museums and things. Long before we made it, it started pouring rain. People were huddling under bridges (just right out in the street), under/up against little monuments and in statue niches and things... it was pretty hilarious (it was a nice warm day, so hypothermia risk was fairly low). I ended up buying a new t-shirt at the Air and Space Museum because I was so soaked. I considered buying new pants, too, but couldn't find any I liked. Anyway, that was a fun day, I thought (and yes, I do also like piña coladas).

Further evidence of my excessively loose knitting: the pattern calls for size 3 American needles. I started the shawl on size 2s, but it was way big, and I went back and re-started on 0s, which seem to be just about small enough. "Making socks?" the woman at A Good Yarn asked. Yes and no, I said.

But take the socks, for example. I have gone down three needle sizes for those socks, from the recommended 2 to 00. And I feel like I'm knitting incredibly tightly! The twisted stitches and frequent cabling on the sock mean that it feels tighter than plain knitting, to the point where sometimes I can hardly squeeze my needle into the stitch! I don't understand how it would be possible to knit to gauge on the size needles recommended, and yet plenty of people seem to have done so. I am clearly freakish.

You know, I am still working on that same damn sock. The first sock, even! Last weekend, I went to the Big Apple to audition for Jeopardy (as you do), and it kept me company on the bus and the train (bus out, train back; I am more tolerant of annoying bus travel at the beginning of a trip than I am at the end of one). Except I lost my copy of the pattern and my train ticket! Now, I don't know about you, but when I have just lost a train ticket, I need something to calm me down. Something like knitting, or a good stiff drink. Having just spent an unexpected $100 on a train ticket, I did not care to shell out money for an overpriced Amtrak drink, so knitting it was.

I had turned the heel and picked up the gussets on the bus, so I didn't have anything too complicated to do, but I still managed to screw up pretty royally, and I ended up having to rip all that out last night. But it was easily resumed (I probably only knit for the first hour or so of the train, so there wasn't too much to redo) and I am well into the decreases now. I still love the pattern, and I still haven't memorized it, sadly (now that I'm into the foot one of the patterns is sort of split up and altered, so it's a new chart to learn, not that I ever quite got the full pattern memorized).

Oh, and also I got my train ticket back, and it's still good! So that's nice. Who says New Yorkers don't care.

A new beginning

This blog isn't going to be just about socks, I swear -- I'm really not that into them. Mostly. But I am starting a new pair of socks -- Eunny Jang's Bayerische Sock. So pretty! And I had the exact right yarn on hand (from the last pair of socks I started, two and a half freaking years ago). It seemed fated. As usual, I need to go down a size or two in the needles; this was a problem because size 0 needles were the smallest I had on hand. I called A Good Yarn (motto: we're the LYS on Kyle's way home from work), who had nothing between a size 0 and a 0000. But Windsor Button (motto: we're the most dangerous of all yarn stores because we also sell notions and embroidery stuff and lots of shiny buttons!) was able to hook me up with a Susan Bates sock set with four sets of needles, size 000 to 1. My inner knitting snob is all, "OMG, Susan Bates needles? Why don't you just knit up an afghan in your school colors from Red Heart acrylic while you're at it?"

But actually, they're not bad at all -- much quieter than the larger sizes, for one thing. I hate noisy needles! And they were $10 for four pairs of needles (and that's at Windsor Button, which isn't exorbitant or anything but isn't a big box bargain store either). Win win! My roommate has a needle sizer that goes down to 000, so it was extra easy to figure out which size was which (as a wise poster on the advanced knitting livejournal community pointed out, they can't exactly print the size on the shaft of a 1.5mm needle).

So I've started the Bayerisches Sock, and it is a... a challenge, let's say. The increase row between the ribbing and the beginning of the pattern is scarier than most sweaters. Seriously:

*(K1tbl, p1) 7 times. M1 purlwise. (K1tbl, m1 knitwise, p1, m1 purlwise) 2 times. (k1tbl, p1) 7 times. K1tbl, m1 knitwise. Purl into front and back of next stitch. M1 knitwise. K1tbl, m1 purlwise, p1, m1 knitwise, k1tbl, p1. Repeat from * for other half of sock. 20 stitches increased, 96 stitches total.

Tell me that's not disturbing and frightening. It took me three tries. Then it took me two more tries to establish the pattern, but finally! There it was, ending at the end of the fourth needle and everything. I had to take a break after two pattern rows because I had a death grip on my poor little aluminum needles (in my set, the 00s are hot pink, which is clashy but kind of awesome with the red yarn).

The sock pattern involves four cable charts, three of which are eight rows long and one of which is 16 rows long; after eight rows, the pattern is really starting to come together and I'm getting much more relaxed about cabling without a cable needle, and just more relaxed about the pattern in general. My knitting has really loosened up a lot, which makes me worry that I'm going to have to go down another needle size, but anyway this is good practice, right?

Here is a terrible, hideous, fluorescently-lit camera-phone photo of the Sock So Far:


We had a rough patch during that increase row, but I think I love Eunny Jang.