number one hundred

This post brought to you by sock pair #15 and the letter H for horrifyingly awful odor that is beyond smelly.
It numbers the 100th posting made by yours truly here where I’ve rambled, babbled, and mostly taken pictures of knitted objects to share with the fellow knit obsessed peoples that troll the internet for this kind of thing.

The second Conwy is complete. This pattern is found in Nancy Bush’s Knitting On The Road. I finished these up last night, making the total for Socktober 3 pairs of socks. Not bad, considering the ennui I have been suffering regarding socks since first becoming pregnant.

And these will probably be the last pair that I work on consistently for myself until after the baby is born. I have thoughts of knitting a pair for Mr. rachface’s very large size 11 feet and between those and the deluge of small baby patterns that are cute (and may or may not involve the color pink) stacking up around here to knit, I’ll be busy.

Hope your Halloween was exciting. Mine involved ice cream, knitting and trying to determine what the god-awful smell currently seeping into the house from under the kitchen sink could possibly be. It’s such a mystery, I don’t even know what kind of expert to call on the subject. Good times.

 

widdershins!

I don’t know what I thought the widdershins pattern was all about, but I was incorrect in my assumptions. Firstly, Widdershins is a toe up pattern, complete with slip stitch heel flap.

Secondly, I was compelled to knit it.
Is this not what the spirit of Socktober entails? That we try new things? These electric, lemon green super socks were knit in Socks that Rock medium weight, colorway Lemongrass. And they were something new, indeed.

Do you see the striping? I heart the striping.

I had planned to post and discuss these guys among other things last week. However, plans change. I think this will be the best thing to remember and take into parenthood. So, I plan to add photos of my sock yarn stash to Ravelry. I wasn’t going to participate with that previously, but I stood in a yarn store for 45 minutes yesterday trying to find a skein of sock yarn I didn’t think I already had at home, and found it most difficult. Because sock yarn is pretty much the only thing I stash, it will be mildly time consuming but should prevent me from coming home with the same colorway I lurve twice.

Now, to finish that other conwy.

 

It’s socktober!

While wandering around the internets I was reminded by this fellow sock knitter that September is gone and Socktober is in. How crazy do I have to be to forget about this? Apparently, craziness is not a factor, but pregnancy brain is. Today, I have come to the following conclusions:
1. I knit my first sock a year ago
2. I could knit nothing but socks from now until the black hole at the center of the universe seeks its vengeance upon us, dooms us all to an unknown fate, and be perfectly content.

To celebrate Socktober fest, I am doing the following:
1. Knitting socks
2. Stashing sock yarns.

Good plans, yes? In further celebration, Monday at the knit group I finished up the second Cracked Canyon Monkey sock.

The pattern is the ubiquitous Monkey from Knitty! If you’ve been here at all in the past couple of months, you know all about it.
The yarn used is Socks That Rock, medium weight, Cracked Canyon colorway. The medium weight is quite more weighty than what I’m used to (think Lorna’s) and makes a super heavy (read: warm!) sock. I knit these on size 1 needles being as the yarn was thicker.

As for the pooling, I can’t really explain it. Before I wound up the yarn (some time back in.. may?) I recall all the stripes matching up and the dye job looking the same throughout. However, while knitting the first sock the pooling changed completely, giving me fraternal twins of inconsistency. Tension change? Alien interference? The world may never know.

You may recall from the previous post I was rambling on about knitting a new pattern. Fact: I have chosen a Nancy Bush pattern. The struggle is choosing the colorway. I hope to debut them shortly here and on ravelry.

Other things I plan start this Friday. There will be a month long celebration of socks and sock related things on the fifth work day of the week ’round here. So if you like socks, you might be interested! Stay tuned! And enjoy your day, for serious.

 

blah-dee-blah-dee-blah

Have you been enjoying the Robin Hood series on BBC America? I have!

Submitted for review, one (1) pair of finished socks.

They’ve been done and hanging around for a couple of days now but I have not had the energy to drag myself to the computer and talk about how wonderful I think they are yet. So I’m half assing it here today.

So, more Monkeys! My scheme to avoid admitting to those concerned peoples surrounding me that I’ve fallen off the no-repeat-sock-knitting wagon is to just not tell them. Then they don’t know until I’m already done! Many of these naysayers have not yet knit monkeys of their own yet, so how can they really understand this tawdry love affair with a 12 row repeat?

For this pair, the only change in the original pattern was to knit all the stitches. No purls! I used STR mediumweight for the first time. I love this yarn! It’s very cool and super wash, which is a big plus in my book. I had to go down to size 1 needles for proper sock size. Anyone else have this issue? It made the fabric very dense and I think that size 1 would be best with STR lightweight, but I can’t attest to that as I’ve never seen any lightweight. Me thinks this may lead to some yarn ordering. Yet another wagon I’m destined to fall off!

(Note: The fabric was dense but I really liked that. I think I will knit another pair. They will make rockin winter socks).

Overall I’ve been feeling very blah lately, but I’m told this is totally normal when one is in the first trimester of pregnancy.

As it turns out, I am much further along than I should reasonably be without having been clued in before, but still haven’t hit the second trimester. At least now I understand why I’ve been falling asleep at work and feeling like I’ve run two marathons by the time I get to bed! So apologies if you were expecting massive updates from here, we still have a couple of weeks left before the energy is supposed to return! I can’t promise it will be worth the wait, but I can promise many, many mini-human sized objects in the near future.

 

The After Party!

Wow.

I don’t know what to say, except HI EVERYBODY!

According to wordpress, lots of you are coming this way via Cara. She’s obsessing herself with the Monkey sock pattern and as you may or may not know, I also knit that pattern. A couple of times. I might have mentioned it. Sometimes I still load the Knitty page with the pattern and stare at the green, green socks and dream about finding size 2 needles and casting on with some of the new Lorna’s I got but recently I was stopped by this.

These are called Yukon Leaves, free pattern through the link. I used Lorna’s Laces in Manzanita on size 1 Addi’s, two circ-style.

You may think that SSS stands for Second Sock Syndrome but in this case it stands for Socks that Sucked out my Soul. I’m not sure what it was exactly that turned me off halfway through the second sock. I started these about two months ago, or whenever it was I finished the last pair of socks but never blogged about them. Maybe subconsiously I just didn’t want to admit to them so I could throw them in the corner and move on to something else?

At any rate, don’t let my experience scare you away from these socks. If you google the pattern you will find lots of successful (and happy!) owners of these socks. I myself like how they turned out.

Moving on, because we have more fun things to talk about.

Friday the nutmeg and I left Va Beach and made like bandits (Code named Loretta and Margie) for Colombia, MD and the Sheep and Wool Festival you might have heard about. We sat through horrendous traffic (oh DC residents, how do you carry on knowing you have to face that every day? I thought bridge and tunnel traffic was bad around here…), experienced amazing varieties of people at a Cracker Barrel, saw the largest P.F. Chang’s restaurant in the history of P.F. Chang’s restaurants, had some 5 star accommodations and rocked the festival before heading home in terrible, rainy traffic (we did stop at Ikea. We HAD to stop at Ikea. You understand, right?).

As for the loot:

From left to right, we have 1) A caramel colored merino/tencel blend. It’s quite soft and shiny! 2) Two skeins of Socks that Rock, in colorways Lemongrass and Cracked Canyon. No, I did not wait in that line. I haven’t seen a line like that since Beanie Babies were all the rage. 3) Some Australian S51 in a crazy awesome colorway of blues and greens (very me). 4) A colonial wool that is soft as clouds and dyed in a Sagey colorway (also very Margie). 5) A big ball of wool, for the life of me… is it Merino? I have to find the receipt. It was about $8 for that pound and is the most beautiful, murky green blue, much like the Chesapeake Bay. In the clean parts. 6) A shawl pin from Moving Mud. I was drawn to this color instantly. Surprised?

Didn’t think you would be!

Now that things are settling back to normal and I am decompressing I can return to the current obsession !!! of Lizardy Ridges.

As always, more fun things in the Flickr page.