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.
1 comment:
Great socks I love the design on them very cool spinning looks like it could be fun
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