Try Not; Do or Do Not; There Is No Try

If you're a Star Wars fan, you'll recognize the title as Yoda's words to Luke during the latter's training as a Jedi. Yes, the Baby Yoda sweater is nearing completion. I've knitted all the large pieces (still one I-cord tie to go) and have done about half the seams. I don't particularly love doing seams, but they are so satisfying that I don't keep around unseamed items long-term. Thus the Yoda quote. After seaming, I'll just have the neck border to knit, and it's on held stitches, so there's no picking up of stitches to procrastinate about.



(Who, me? Block before seaming? Oops...)

I'm still not in love with this colorway as knitted, though I loved it as skeined. :( But I've had great comments from people who've seen it in progress. Since it's a baby sweater in very non-femme colors and I'm obviously pregnant, it prompts a lot of questions about whether I'm having a boy or a girl. It's a boy, since you asked; but my tendency has been to knit in unisex colors for DD, too, partly to amortize my knitting effort over more children and partly to encourage her to enjoy a variety of colors and ways of being in the world.

The spinning continues. I now have dates to spin in all three of the kindergarten classes at DD's Waldorf school -- more guilt-free spinning time, hooray! I'm doing a lot of hand-carding this weekend so I'll have enough fiber to spin while I'm there -- the carding is a bit tedious, but should be worth it for all that good wheel time.

This week my loaner wheel from spinning class is a Lendrum double-treadle folding wheel, and I love it SOO much more than the Schacht Matchless single-treadle I was using last week. Mostly I love that it starts and treadles so easily and doesn't walk away from me while I spin. This may be mostly a single- vs. double-treadle thing; I don't want to write off Schacht without trying one of their double-treadle wheels, so I'm hoping to try the Ladybug before we're done. Schacht is my oh-so-local spinning wheel producer, so I like to buy what I can from them. But I don't know if I can buy a wheel that doesn't have a large bobbin available for plying, so the Lendrum is a stronger contender at this point. I'd rather have a starter wheel whose limitations aren't immediately apparent to me -- there's not much room in my house for multiple wheels!

I also want to try out the Kromski Sonata, which poses a problem, because no store within hours of me stocks them as far as I can tell. But the other day at my LYS, while I was waiting to ask my spinning teacher a question, she was talking to someone who owns a Sonata (she bought it on the Internet) and was helping a friend shop for a wheel. I brazenly asked this total stranger if I could come try out her Sonata at her home, and she said yes! We have a date in a couple of weeks.

Oh, and I'm ordering a big ol' fleece to work on. I'm hoping this is not serious folly for someone who doesn't yet own a wheel! But I think that if spinning doesn't work out as a hobby for me long-term, both the fleece and the wheel should have good resale value. The fleece is a 9-pound monster from Cormo Sheep and Wool in Orland, California. I'm psyched about having something to spin that will yield yarn soft enough for next-to-the-skin wear by my picky family, me included -- Cormo is the same micron count (fineness) as merino wool, but with longer typical staple lengths for nicer spinning. If only it were superwash. (Sigh.) Ah, well. Still fine for hats, scarves, and probably enough wool for two or more adult sweaters, though I'll have to see how much of the weight washes out as lanolin. And of course all that's in the future, once I actually process and spin the stuff up! I'll probably swatch some of it and try washing it as I do my socks, in a lingerie bag, cold water front-loader machine wash, air dry. If that works, I'm golden. Baby wear, here we come! I'll be sure to post photos of the fleece when it arrives.

The Handspun Monster Emerges, and Knitting Meditation

Last night I plied, washed, snapped, and dried (with light blocking) my first skein of handspun. I spun this on a spindle (here's the entry with a picture of the singles on the spindle) and plied it on a wheel. We haven't had our plying lesson in the spinning class yet, so my teacher gets none of the blame for this. Here you go:




This is about 1.25 ounces of Lincoln fleece (an award-winning fleece!), hand-carded and spun in the grease, and apparently severely overplied (2-ply). The light blocking? Yeah, without that, even after the hot water wash and snapping, the yarn twisted completely up on itself. I'm not sure if blocking buys me any balance long-term. Something to find out, I suppose!

I'm spinning some dark-brown Corriedale under the same conditions, though probably by the time I ply it, I will have learned a bit more about plying. I hope to make something out of both these "first yarns" that will be some kind of fun. Maybe a striped purse for my daughter. The Lincoln, at least, is too scratchy to want to wear near the skin.

In the meantime, I spun another hour and a half or so today on the wheel, and I'm starting to get the hang of long-draw spinning, sort of. At the end of every rolag, I end up with a ring of fiber and assorted lumps that weren't there to begin with. Hmph. That will be a good question for class.

In current knitting, Thursday I cast on a Baby Yoda Sweater (pattern by Cari Luna). So far the Toasty Toes is not living up to my hopes in terms of how the colors work together, and the dye is getting on my fingers, which I hope doesn't bode ill for washability. Here's what I have so far:



The colors, though kind of muddy when all knitted up together, are much richer than I was able to capture in a photograph.

I'll keep going and see how things shape up. It's not a project that should take a long time, so the risk is low. And I'm using the knitting as a meditation for my mom, who went through back surgery on Friday and is in the painful part of her immediate recovery. Since she's hoping to visit the grandson this jacket is for (my son, due in April) when he's born, and this should be near the end of her period of activity restrictions during her recovery, it seems like the right kind of project for such meditations.

Hypnotized

I'm feeling distinctly indistinct. Sort of foggy. I just spun for about two hours, nearly continuously, on a Schacht Matchless single-treadle spinning wheel on loan for my spinning class. Our homework was to spin for an hour straight, to get a good rhythm established. Here's what I spun:



It's Corriedale, which I washed last week and carded yesterday.

I'm finding the wheel difficult, mostly the treadling. Things got easier when I tied it to my chair legs so it would stop running away. But something still feels weird about it. I suspect I will prefer a double-treadle wheel. In my spinning class, we can take home a different wheel each week to try it out. I'm hoping for a Schacht Ladybug or Lendrum DT folding wheel this next week. I want to try out a Kromski Sonata, too, but they don't carry those at my LYS, so I'll have to make a field trip to try it if I don't fall in love with another wheel soon.

My spinning teacher warned us before she passed out wheels that the wheel we have the first week never seems to get a fair shake, because we're still working out our own technique, so anything will feel awkward at first. And I will admit it got a lot easier once I worked out some kinks in my treadling and drafting/feeding techniques. But I definitely want to try the others!

In the meantime, I still have my spindling-in-the-grease project for more portable spinning. I wound my white Lincoln into a ball (a very tight ball the size of a good-size tangerine, almost a tennis ball) in preparation for plying, and I still have the greasy brown Corriedale to card and spin. I bought a Schacht hi-lo student spindle so I could have two spindles at home, because DD (age 3.5, so I'm not holding my breath) says she really wants to try spindle spinning, and I don't really want her to try it in the middle of my first yarn project. :/ I like the Schacht better than the Louet student spindle I was issued in class. I seem to be able to keep the Schacht spinning longer with less trouble, which makes sense to me since the Schacht is rim-weighted and the Louet is evenly weighted.

Can you tell I can't think about anything but spinning right now? Time to break out of the fog and fix some lunch before I expire from the low-blood-sugar effects of fiber fever!

FO: Diagonal Cross-Rib Socks

Hooray -- they're done! Here's the standard foreshortened, there's-no-one-else-here-old-enough-to-operate-a-camera blog shot of them. Maybe I'll get a better one when DH returns from his business trip.



The stitch pattern comes from an Ann Budd pattern in Interweave's Favorite Socks, but the construction is straight-up Priscilla Gibson Roberts from Simple Socks: Plain and Fancy. The yarn is 2 skeins of Reynolds Soft Sea Wool with just a tad left over, reinforced at toe and heel with Woolly Nylon. I hope the nylon does its job so these will last! It was very easy to work with and pleasantly stretchy.

Toward the end of the project, I finally started to get the hang of the left twisted/traveling stitch (shown on my right foot), but it still looks very different from the right. I like both, but they're different. Grr. At least the socks fit really well and don't seem like they'll be itchy. When I spend 20 hours plus or minus on a pair of socks, I want at least that consolation. (Yes, I'm a slow knitter, at least with fingering yarn on bamboo DPNs. I'm looking forward to trying my KnitPicks metal DPNs, but they haven't arrived yet. And no, I didn't actually measure how long it took me, but I think I'm close.)

You'd think I would already have cast on with the Toasty Toes, but two other projects are calling my name. One is the last 10 minutes of knitting on my baby blanket. I've been procrastinating because I realized I can't really write that pattern without redoing the blanket in miniature to make sure some of the directions are correct; I just can't be sure of the stitch counts around the miters, or the best way of starting the center square, or the best way to write the pattern where the border turns a corner. Fear not, I'll do it. Maybe tomorrow. The idea of having no UFOs hanging over my head (I'm brazenly not counting the hibernating sweater and lace scarf) is getting almost as compelling as the call of the Toasty Toes.

The other thing that's a lot of fun right now is spinning -- and I'm still just on a spindle! I am looking forward to this Friday's class with great anticipation, though. We'll get our introduction to wheel spinning and get to bring a wheel home to work with. When I got my big bundles of white Lincoln and dark-brown Corriedale fleece, I washed most of both, but reserved a few big handfuls of each to spin in the grease. Today, in addition to finishing the socks, I finished spinning the Lincoln and carded up several rolags of the Corriedale, which is looking lusciously spinnable. Too bad that it's hard to show well in a photo, being such a dark color. But here they are, my full crop of white singles so far and my first five dark rolags:



My spinning today happened while visiting my daughter's Waldorf kindergarten/preschool class. They sometimes have non-teacher adults just come and knit or spin at the side of the room during class and play time, to give the kids another kind of exposure to someone doing real work with their hands. It was pretty cool. I got about three hours of guilt-free spinning and knitting, and several kids got their first exposure to where yarn comes from. As my spinning teacher pointed out, until just the last 1000 years, give or take (and that's out of perhaps 10,000 years of spinning history), all yarn and thread was produced on spindles. Think of the Viking ships' sails! Oi, the hours of work! I dig the down-to-earth-ness and the historical grounding of this craft. Hope you dig earth metaphors. ;)

If you want to read more, here's an article I enjoyed about the history of spinning.

The Siren Song of the Next Project

Have you ever seen a yarn so yummy you were kind of afraid to buy it?

I've been watching a yarn like that at my LYS. And then I noticed that the supply was dwindling without being replenished. And then I started a spinning class there, which gave me a 10% discount on everything in the store. It was time to make my move. Here's what I bought:



It's Toasty Toes, from Interlacements, in color 212, 100% superwash merino, hand-dyed by Judy L. Ditmore. It's hard for the photo to do justice: coppery golds, warm red-browns, complex dark greens and grays, and some lighter bluish bits for punctuation. Truth to tell, it wasn't my favorite colorway. That one (magentas, golds, and purples) already sold out, and the LYS isn't planning on restocking it. But hey, now that I know I'm carrying a boy, what better reason to buy a soft, washable yarn for making a masculine-but-beautiful baby sweater? I have in mind Elizabeth Zimmerman's Baby Surprise Jacket, though if the yarn's dye spacing doesn't like that pattern, I'll do something else. I'd love to put some yummy buttons on it, but I fear that DS will find them literally yummy, so I'll probably go for something low-profile and really securely attached.

Now here's the lashing-myself-to-the-mast part: I'm not going to let myself start this project until my current socks are done. Just having the Toasty Toes sitting where I can see it, singing its song to me, makes me want to knit and knit and knit so I can get done, even though the left twist stitches in the second sock are pretty much kicking my butt. Someday maybe I'll learn a smoother way to do this stitch. For now, I'll finish the socks and see if washing or fiddling in other ways evens things out a bit. See, the twisted stitch comes every other row. In the right-twisting sock, it was easy to make the twisted stitches and the intervening stitches look the same. Just an easy pattern all the way around. But the left twist is just difficult to do, and it makes big stitches that contrast with the little knit stitches on straight rows. Bleah. I like this pattern, but if I do another pair, I'll just make them both right-twisting unless I find an easier method for LT. (In case you're well-versed in LT lore and can offer a suggestion, here's the one I'm using: knit through the back of the second stitch on the left needle, but don't drop it from the needle. Then knit through the backs of the first two stitches on the left needle together. This would probably be easier for a looser knitter, but that's not me.)

Here's my progress:



I've turned the heel, so I have 10 pattern reps down and 10 to go. Only the last ten have ten horizontal repeats per row instead of four. Oh, well. This is why a lot of my projects are dead simple: I need time to recuperate from stitches like this LT.

With all this whining, you wouldn't think I'm enjoying it. I am, actually, and I'll love having this pair of socks ready to wear. That Toasty Toes is just calling my name, louder and louder, and spurring me on.

I did a little more spinning today, with more greasy Lincoln fleece, while my washed-last-night Lincoln and Corriedale dries. I was reading an online description of drop-spindle spinning because I suspected there was something weird about my draw. I mean, it was working all right, but it was slow, and I was having a hard time seeing how I could use it for fatter or softer yarns. It turns out that, compared at least to the part of the spinning world that writes online and posts videos on YouTube, I was spinning in a weird way, using my top hand (the one holding the predrafted fiber) to add spin to the spindle instead of my bottom hand (the one controlling the upward travel of the twist). This meant the predrafted fiber had to be draped over my shoulder instead of around my arm, and it was prone to falling off and getting caught up in the hanging yarn or the spindle. Too much trouble! So I carded up some more rolags and tried it the other way. It seems much faster and more versatile. I think I'll stick with it.

The spinning is fun -- so much that I want to spin up this whole bag of fleece, which I suspect is meant to last me most or all of the six-week class. Hmm. I may have to see if I can buy another fleece if I'm having too much fun and run out! Next week I have a date with DD's preschool teacher to sit and knit in her class during free play time (Waldorf, dontcha know?). What do you wanna bet she'll be happy if I show up equipped for carding and spinning? Cool beans, I tell you, cool beans.

I'm Spinning! She's Knitting! Oh Yeah, Yeah, Yeah*

*Maybe it tells you something about my child's taste in movies that I hear the title of this post to the rhythm of Marlon's celebration upon escaping from the deep-sea anglerfish in Finding Nemo.

The Spinning Begins
I just came back from my first spinning class at my LYS: Shuttles, Spindles, and Skeins in Boulder, CO. Though it's a wheel spinning class, today we started out on drop spindles. Well, actually, we started on the floor, learning how to pick out a good fleece. Then we teased, carded, pre-drafter, and THEN got to spinning on drop spindles. Meanwhile our teacher was washing one of the yuckiest pieces of the fleece, to show us how and let us see how much difference the washing makes.

I was having problems with the twist traveling up into my pre-drafted fiber so I couldn't finish drafting it, but then I got the hang of it -- I just have to make sure my spindle has enough momentum for me to let the twist up into the full length I have drafted, then spin the spindle up again before I draft more (or park and draft if the twist is getting out of hand). It was delightful. I loved the feeling of the greasy wool, the feel and sound of the fibers moving past each other, the feel and look of the fluff twisting up into yarn, and more.

Slowing down, with pictures this time:

I started with this.



Actually, this picture is of the cleanest part of the fleece, which I reserved for spinning in the grease (with the dirt and lanolin still in), while I wash and dry the rest. I have a big paper grocery bag, half full of this white Lincoln fleece, and half full of dark brown Corriedale fleece.

I used my fingers to tease part of the fleece out into a halo of fiber, picking out a very few seeds and grass bits as I went. I didn't get a picture of this halo, but it's the kind of thing that makes you want to make an Afro-style clown wig. Just a big ball of really loose fluff. Then I used these:



I carded the halo out into a more-aligned mass of fiber that looked like troll hair. This is where the first great sound came: not the teeth of the carder bumping each other, but the sshhh of the wool sliding and straightening as I pulled the carders away from each other. Then I rolled the wool off the carder, making some of my first rolags:



When I showed this to my husband at home, the rolags got his first "Neat!" response. It is a pretty remarkable change from the original fleece, and it only takes a few minutes!

Then I pre-drafted the rolags and set to spinning. After spinning maybe six of these small rolags, my spindle looked like this:



I can't seem to decide yet whether I'm spinning the finest thread this spindle can produce without breaking (don't worry, I did that too -- the breaking, that is), or something that will knit up more quickly. And I'm not sure whether that decision, in this first week of practice, will be made by my brain or my fingers! But I'm sure it will come eventually.

Many questions come to mind. My singles are soooo tight! I know plying will relax them a bit, but how much? What kind of yarn will the style of draw I've fallen into produce? Will it be something I could stand to wear, once knit up? I've read enough spinning blogs now to know it might take months or years before I am guessing well enough at the answers to these questions to adjust my spinning accordingly. But right here at the beginning, I'm having fun yet, and I don't need answers. If I can't knit this up, I'm sure my daughter will enjoy using it for something. She's three. No object escapes being made into a toy for long.

Speaking of which...

Ever Taught a Three-Year-Old to Knit?



Well, now I've begun. Yesterday I sat DD (three and a half) down and taught her finger-knitting. I've been building up to this for a while, and she keeps referring to "when I learn to knit," so I asked her if she was ready to begin. She said yes, and she caught on pretty quickly and started producing that loose I-cord you may remember if you did some finger-knitting in grade school. Her attention span didn't allow for more than a bracelet's worth at the first sitting (that's the bracelet up above), but after dinner she told me she wanted to sit down and knit with me again until bath time. That even-shorter attempt ended up being unraveled and wound back on the ball, with no protest since I let her do it herself. We'll see where it goes from here. She was so pleased and proud to be "knitting" alongside me. And her first question on seeing me spin was when she could have a turn with the spindle. I don't know if I'm the right person to teach her. But perhaps we'll figure it out! I'll have the use of the spindle for the duration of the six-week class, so maybe once I'm rolling on the wheel (so to speak), she can give it a try. And then there's that great gift certificate waiting to be spent on something. Maybe a spindle would be a good investment in DD's fun and self-esteem.

Wish us luck -- we have each embarked on a journey these last 24 hours. Here's hoping they're long, happy, and productive ones.

Baby Stepping Beyond

My husband was reading my blog recently (nice, eh?) and asked what happened to my posts about the FlyLady BabySteps. Drum roll please...

I finished them!

No, my house is not in impeccable shape. Things still get cluttered sometimes. But I have basic routines that keep life sane. Now I'm in the process of tweaking those daily routines, establishing some weekly cleaning routines, and working to take care of myself rather than obsessing about the house and running myself ragged. The blechy way I've recently been feeling physically means I've pared down to the minimum on those routines, but still we are in better shape than we were when I started. The bills are paid, projects to organize and declutter the disorganized spaces in our house are progressing, and my kitchen is usable every day. We have clean clothes to wear (oops, need to start today's load of laundry to keep that true) and food to eat, at least when one of us is feeling well enough to cook it. There is a calendar on the wall that accurately summarizes each family member's commitments, and there's a slot in the back for stuff we will need for them (e.g., forms for upcoming dental appointments). And I still have time to knit, rest, and do things like visit a sheep farm (see my last post), though I need more rest than usual to get through this whatever-it-is that is slowing me down.

The slow process of setting up routines one item at a time, as the BabySteps have encouraged, has allowed me to think about what works for me and my family, and to make changes as necessary so that things make sense. My latest change was to buy and organize a cleaning caddy with tools and supplies for cleaning our bathrooms. In my previous home, we had only two bathrooms, so I just left supplies in each. Now there are three, and not enough safe places to keep supplies out of children's reach, so one caddy goes with me for the bathroom-cleaning rounds. Is this exactly how FlyLady says to do it? No. But it's what works for me, and FlyLady does urge us to adjust the routines to fit our families.

Check!

Sheep Encounters and FO: Binary Hat

It's been a slow few days. I have some kind of mild intestinal yuck that's keeping my days very low-key and close to restrooms. Fortunately, I seem to perk up a bit in the afternoon and/or evening, depending on when and how much I've slept. Two cool things have happened during "on" times this week.

The first was Monday night, when I went to a Rock Day potluck and spin-in/knit-in at my LYS. Rock Day, I'm told, is the day after Twelfth Day, when spinners in England (?) went back to work. Rock seems to be another word for distaff, or the staff on which flax was held for spinning. It seems that boys in certain trades went back to work a day or two later than the spinners, so they'd amuse themselves in the meantime by setting the flax on fire. As the organizer pointed out, a potluck sounded like a great deal more fun! She also told us that the only time spinners (knitters? textile workers? Not remembering this so well...) could start a project for themselves was between Christmas and Twelfth Day. Aren't you glad you don't live in old-time England, or wherever these customs held sway?

Anyway, the potluck and knit/spin-in were great fun. There were a ton of folks there (perhaps 30 or more; I didn't count), and many wonderful projects and conversations were underway. I ended up sitting next to C., who keeps the membership files for our local fiber handweavers' guild, and who was spinning top produced from one of her own Corriedale sheep fleeces. We talked a fair amount, and I found out her sheep love to eat Christmas trees. I offered mine.

That led to the second fun illness interlude today, when I took my tree and some home-canned red pepper relish to C.'s farm, and my daughter and I got to meet her current group of lambs -- Lincoln, Corriedale, and various crosses. One pair of twins hung out close together and walked around in formation a lot. It took DD a couple of days to psych herself up to meet sheep, but she was ready, and it was great fun for us to meet, pet, and feed a fir tree to these lovelies. We also admired C.'s cashmere goats, llama, and friendly sheepdogs.

If you've never heard lambs' voices, they're worth the trip.

My current project, which was started during the twelve days of Christmas (whew!) is still the Diagonal Cross-Rib Socks from Interweave's Favorite Socks. I cast on and knit the toe of the second sock at the Rock Day event, and have made it a little farther. Here they are:



And finally finished is DH's Binary Hat, which is based on a pattern by Erica Barcott. See my last post for the story of this one. It survived its short-row surgery and now fits happily and gets worn more.



Looking ahead, on Friday I start a wheel-spinning class at my LYS! I'm so psyched! You can be sure I'll have something to say about that. I have been hanging around spinners and reading up for a month or so now, but have never actually touched either a spindle or a spinning wheel myself with intent to produce yarn. I will say that I've handled some sublime fibers at my last two spin/knit-ins, though! I'm looking forward to meeting more of the local folks who produce this yummy stuff. On Monday, besides C., I met The Redhead (here's her web site), who had a decadent merino/alpaca/silk blended batt (I think that's the right link) for spinning, as well as other goodies, with her.

New Year's Knit-a-palooza

I'm back from my holiday, visiting my folks in Texas for New Year's. It was delicious -- just hanging out together, having four adults instead of the usual two caring about my daughter, and getting to knit. A lot.

On the bus to the airport to go there, I started a hat to go with the Ravenclaw scarf. Same colors, same needles, different design. It's undergoing major surgery right now, though, as DH figured out it's not quite long enough to keep his ears warm. I picked out a row of stitches just above the brim and added short rows around the back two-thirds or so of the crown section of the hat, to keep his ears warm without covering up his eyes. Now I just need to graft the pieces back together. Here's what it looks like now:



The inspiration for the pattern comes from the Binary Hat, a pattern I found on Ravelry. But I didn't have the pattern with me when I was knitting, so I went on my best memory of it plus Elizabeth Zimmerman's hat wisdom from her Knitting Workshop DVD, which I recently watched. I knit the ribbing on the same needles, but with yarn held double, to make it extra thick (for style) and warm (for comfort). The original binary hat says "hat" in binary ASCII code (yes, we are geeks here), but DH asked me to make his say "CPU" instead, to represent what he covers up with his hat. (Yes, we are really geeks here.) DH was kind enough to work out the binary ASCII code for me himself.

I also worked a lot on the baby blanket, which is about 15 minutes from finished, and on writing a pattern for it. I worked out an border treatment I really like. But I need to do some swatching to make sure what I wrote down for the pattern will really work, hindsight being not quite 20/20 in this case (I must start a notebook for stuff like this)! You'll find the pattern here when it's done. Here's a teaser:



When I'd done as much as I could stand on the blanket and its pattern, I turned to some sock yarn I bought just before the trip, expecting to run out of knitting. Turns out it was totally the wrong weight for the project I wanted to do. I was planning to try the Austrian Socks from Interweave's Favorite Socks (click on "view more images" and go to the sixth one shown to see the picture -- I love that Knitpicks includes pattern images in their book section!), but I got 50% more stitches per inch than the gauge. Guess I should have listened to the "sport weight" recommendation in the pattern. I ended up doing a short-row-heel, toe-up version of the diagonal rib socks from the same book. It's my first time trying traveling stitches, and I dropped several stitches early in the sock. I'm still clueless about how to repair dropped traveling stitches, but they've been fairly forgiving of my bungled efforts. Here's my progress so far:



The yarn is Reynolds' Soft Sea Wool from my LYS. It feels really yummy soft, even though it's just labeled 100% wool, not merino. I hope it wears well. I'm carrying some Wooly Nylon thread along on the toe and heel for added durability. The needles are US size 2 bamboo double points, with which I get about 8.5 st/in, so the sock is on 68 stitches in the foot, 70 in the leg to accommodate the pattern repeat. I usually knit socks on two circulars, but felt like being a little more old-fashioned this time around. DPNs are quieter and a little simpler to deal with all in all, and so far I'm not seeing major stitch ladders. Wish me luck. One of my DPNs splintered a little today, but only on one end, so I'm not sunk yet. I'm considering getting a set of Knitpicks' Options wooden DPNs with a gift certificate my dad gave me for Christmas. But I love knitting on metal, so maybe I'll order a pair each in wood and metal first and see what they're like. I've just never tried metal DPNs before, only circulars and straights. The other first here is anything but stockinette and 2x2 rib in socks. I hope they fit! This diagonal rib seems to pull in pretty well, so I'm hopeful.

An update on Simple Stripes: Many early posts to this blog showed some socks I made from Knitpicks' Simple Stripes sock yarn (75% superwash wool, 25% nylon), which is no longer on the market. I speculated at the time that this was because it felt so scratchy. But after eight or ten wearings and washes (machine wash cold in lingerie bag, line dry), they are feeling great and wearing well. Still just a smidge itchy around the ankles when I'm in a warm place, but then my skin is pretty particular about wool. So if you come across some, I say give it a try! By the way, the spit-splices seem to be doing just fine, despite the wool being superwash. Go figure!