Sockghan Square 3

The easiest square yet is based on Hermione's Everyday Socks by Erica Lueder.

Other than purling the plain knit rounds, no modifications were necessary for this extra-simple pattern, which only requires the ability to count to four. Cast on 38 (32-stitch pattern plus 3-stitch border), knit three rows of garter, knit pattern until it seemed like the right size, knit three more rows of garter, boom.

This Sockghan thing is going so well that I don't really have anything to worry about here. So I've moved on to obsessing about something else.

Which books should I take?!

Sockghan Square 2

So far, this project is going swimmingly. The next entry is Cookie A's Monkey.

The original, well-loved Monkey sock.

Details: Berroco Vintage worsted, size 8 needles, CO 38 (32-stitch pattern plus 3-stitch garter border on each side).

This one was slightly more challenging to knit flat because, in the original pattern knit in the round, there's no plain knit round between the pattern rounds, so when knitting flat you can't purl back to the start and thus keep the pattern entirely on the right side. That meant keeping close track of when purling really meant purling and when it actually meant knitting, and vice versa—not a major headache, but something to pay attention to. I was also never able to find a satisfactory way to knit through the back loop in reverse (you'd think it would be knitting through the front loop, but nope), so the bottom of each V has a tiny unintentional purl bump that no one but me will ever notice. Well, and now you. Please keep it to yourself. Given that I'm going to need 54 squares and have chosen only 12 patterns, I'll get to practice this a few more times and hope to find a solution.

And boy are these fast! Like the Wanida square, this one also cranked out in about 3 hours over 2 days. Getting all the squares knit shouldn't be a problem. Seaming them together, on the other hand, will probably be my downfall.

I haven't decided which square to do next, but I'll try to pick something other than a Cookie A. Because it's not like I'm obsessed with her designs or anything. At all.

The Great Sockghan Experiment of 2015: Square 1

Hi Blog! I missed you!

But yeesh, have I been busy with the earning a living thing.

I'm fine. The dogs are fine. The cat is fine. Perpetually angry, but fine.

Nothing much has struck me as worth a blog post for a while, but I thought it would be fun to tell you about my knitting dilemma and how I'm planning to solve it. Later this summer I'll be on a road trip that involves a couple thousand miles of road and several dozen hours in the car. How to fill the time when I'm not driving? Knitting, of course, but what? The criteria for a road trip knitting project are pretty simple: (1) It has to be small enough to fit comfortably in your lap. (2) You don't want to get bored with it. (3) There has to be enough of it.

So shawls and scarves and sweaters are pretty much out. Certainly socks are an option, but--and I hesitate to even mention it--I might be getting a wee bit bored with socks. I could get back to that mitered square sock yarn afghan everybody was working on a couple of years ago, but . . . no, I get bored thinking about hundreds of mitered squares, let alone actually knitting them, although the results of those who actually manage to finish them is always stunning. Crochet afghan squares? No, crochet for too long makes my wrist hurt, but afghan squares, now there's an idea. . . .

And it hit me: My favorite sock patterns, knit flat, as afghan squares. Knit square by square, the project is small enough for comfortable car knitting. Every square will be different, so boredom won't be a problem. And it's an entire afghan. There's no way I'll run out of knitting in 10 days, no matter how much time I spend riding in the car.

To my Ravelry Project Page!

Skimming through my Ravelry project page and simultaneous brainstorming reveals these possibilities, not all of which are actual sock patterns:
2x4s (a 2x4 rib)
Rock-a-Byes (a traveling rib from The Joy of Sox)
Monkeys (Cookie A)
a self-striping in stockinette
Hedera (Cookie A)
Sunday Swing (Knitty)
Diamond Gansey (Socks from the Toe Up)
Almondine (Sock Knitting Master Class)
Inlay (Knitty)
Hermione's Everyday Socks (Erica Lueder)
Wanida (Sock Innovation, Cookie A)
an Eye of Partridge pattern

Linking to each of these would take an age, and if you've read this far, you're a knitter who can find these patterns on your own anyway. I will link to Wanida, the first experimental square. Here she is:

I cast on 37 (the 33-stitch pattern for the top of the foot, plus a 2-stitch garter stitch border) in worsted Berocco Vintage on size-8 straight needles. I knit two rows of garter stitch, and then started the pattern (purling the plain knit rows, of course), knit it until it looked about square, knit two more rows of garter, and cast off. I blocked it to 8 inches square.

So it looks like the general principle of an afghan made of sock patterns is sound. Whether all of the potential patterns will lend themselves to afghan squares so easily I can't say.  At 8 inches square, I'll need 54 squares to make a generous 48" x 72" afghan. I may decide not to be so generous. We'll see. :)

Bertie Sue is SENSITIVE, Y'all

Or picky. Whichever.

A year ago at just about this time, I made a sweater for Bertie Sue. I was inordinately proud of it, because, even if just a dog sweater, it was the first knitted object that I ever conceived of and knitted on my own without a pattern. And it was awesome.

Mostly.

I learned one important lesson while constructing that sweater: You should put the leg holes in where the legs end under the chest, not where they start up at the shoulder. This is an important feature for dog sweaters because doing it wrong adds a lot of unnecessary fabric across the chest and probably makes walking feel kind of funny. Miss Bert would consent to wear the sweater for trips in the car or to go outside for a quick potty, but she refused to go on walks while wearing the sweater. It may be that she is fashion conscious and the grab-bag quality didn't fit her personal style, but I think it's more likely that it felt strange to walk in.

So I cogitated on the problem for a while and decided that the best way to put the leg holes in exactly the right place is to leave them out altogether. Here is the result:

I found the purple mystery yarn in the yarn cabinet wound neatly into a cake with no label. No idea what that stuff is except that a flame test proves it to be an acrylic. (Bert won't be hanging out unattended in this sweater. That stuff melts.) The red ribbing is a design feature in the sense that I ran out of the purple mystery yarn and didn't have anything else to match or coordinate, so I decided to go with full-on clash instead. Embrace the ugly, people. The body is the honeycomb stitch most frequently seen of late in the Honey Cowl. The tummy is all ribbing so that if we manage to help Miss Bert lose the 5 pounds she needs to drop, it will still fit. I hope.

The innovation that made another dog sweater worth knitting is the single giant leg hole.

Sorry about the blurry photo, but that is an insanely difficult angle to photograph and that's the best I could get before Bert wandered off to see if Brew needed to have his rear end sniffed. (He did.)

So far, so good. She can run! She can jump! She can stroll leisurely up the block sniffing every third leaf!

Don't worry that Brewie might be chilly. He's always toasty in his ultra-hip fleece hoodie.

A Knitter's Word Problem

Noelle accidentally knit an extra pattern repeat, including increases, on the yoke of the February Lady Sweater. She now has 235 stitches, but she only needs 227. Should she:

A. Tink back 470 stitches.

B. K2tog 8 times.

C. You know you can buy sweaters at Target, right?

Next week's problem: If Knitter 1 leaves the LYS at 10:45 am with a bag of Malabrigo and Knitter 2 leaves Michael's at 11:02 with a bag of Patons Kroy, they will have a violent and virulent disagreement on Ravelry about yarn quality at what time?

Knitting on the Job

Yesterday I started a new job. It's a wonderful job. It's right up my alley, and the people I'll be working with seem to be pleasant, friendly people. Plus it's part-time, so I get to keep copyediting and teaching, too, which makes me very happy. As usual, I'll be very busy but what I won't be is bored.

I'd love to tell you all about this wonderful job. But then I'd have to kill you. Or, more likely, I would be fired. This excellent job happens to be for a branch of government, and it was explained to me this way: As a private citizen, I can say whatever I want about politics or anything else. As a government employee, I can't express an opinion on so much as the weather, let alone political or religious issues. That would have a bit of a chilling effect on the ol' blog. I don't write about politics or religion often, but I do on occasion have something to say, and you know I have some very specific opinions on controversial issues like dogs and yarn. So, although it seemed weird not to write anything at all about this major change, I've decided to keep quiet about the details of the new gig in this public space, even though I'm VERY EXCITED and want to tell you ALL THE THINGS!

I will tell you this: We have to wear ID badges on a lanyard, and there aren't any rules about what the lanyard looks like. I'm knitting mine.

   

Things Finished

First I used the wrong yarn, then I used the wrong needles. But I will not be thwarted, especially not by my own bone-headedness. I finished the hat.

Slouchy, hair-containing wondrousness.

Angst

You may think you have problems. You may think your struggles about jobs and kids and finances and flat tires and bad roofs and skunks living under your deck are the worst problems that could happen to a person. But you know nothing. Nothing, I tell you.

I can't decide what to knit.

Should I start this purse?

Braided Cable Handle Tote by Amanda Silveira

Or this hat?

Wurm by Katharina Nopp

I bought the yarn for this cardigan . . .

Rimes the Reason by Jodie Gordon Lucas
(Let's please not talk about how much it bothers me
that the apostrophe is missing.)

. . . but I swore to myself that I wouldn't start it until I finished this pullover . . . 

Doreen by Berrocco Design Team

. . . which is basically done except that I need to rip out the first sleeve and make it longer, and finish the second sleeve in the first place, and seam the shoulders and knit the neck, but I don't have the right-size needles for the neck, and I don't want to buy them because I'll probably never use them again, and then seam the whole rest of the sweater, and really it's not looking good on wearing this one this year, even though it's so close to done.

And lest you think I got tired of making socks, I need to turn the heel on my fourth pair of these socks so they can go back in my purse to be worked during car rides and long waits in restaurants, doctors' offices, grocery stores, and so on, because I can knit basically anywhere at any level of inebriation, but turning a heel is math and the rest of the world generally frowns on crazed knitters yelling, "Shut UP! I am trying to COUNT!" at the frightened diners at the next table.

Sunday Swing Socks by Krystal Nyberg

Oh, and then of course there's paying work like grading papers and editing and such that needs to get done, too. So you can see my dilemma.

I Think I'm Gonna Do It

Somehow the winter edition of Knitty came out without my noticing, and I just found it this morning. And I've spent the rest of the day periodically returning to the Rime's the Reason cardigan. I tried to talk myself out of it, but I think I'm going to do it anyway.

I'm going to have to buy all new yarn because I was planning to knit a sweater in bulky, and this is worsted weight. But I'm going to do it anyway.

I tend to dislike knitting cables. But I've finally decided that if I want to wear beautiful handknit cabled sweaters, I'm going to have to actually knit them. So I'm going to do it anyway. 

This sweater has a zipper and buttons. I've never installed a zipper or knit a button band in my life. But I'm going to do it anyway.

I printed out the pattern and it's thirteen (13) pages long. Thirteen! That's a long pattern. But I'm going to do it anyway.

Knitty rates the pattern as "extraspicy." That's the highest rating. I've knit a "tangy" before, but never an "extraspicy." I'm going to do it anyway.

So the schedule is as follows:
1. Christmas knitting
2. As-yet-to-be-determined lace stole/wrap/scarf/something out of the laceweight alpaca I got this summer because I want to wear that this winter
3. The Rime
4. Debilitating knitting defeat. Or a stunning knitting victory. Stay tuned to enjoy my yarn-related emotional breakdown. It should be along sometime in late February or early March.

Did I mention that the pattern is thirteen pages long? That's really a lot of pages. 

Update: When I was making this plan, I forgot that there were a few other things I've been wanting to make that rightfully should be ahead in the queue. Like a sweater for Bertie. And a Honey Cowl using all that yarn I thought I was going to use for a Christmas present that I wound up not liking. And about five other things. Screw planning. When it's time to start something new, I'll cast on whatever I feel like. Or all of it. There's nothing wrong within having two or three or twelve WIPs going at the same time!

This Thing I Made

It might be stretching it to call this a "design," but let's stretch it just for fun. Without further ado:

The Grab-Bag iPod Sweater!

Directions:

1. Put some leftover yarn in a bag. You know, so you can grab it.

2. Choose double-pointed needles appropriate to your yarn. In this case, you're looking at mostly worsted weight, except for the orange, which is more of a DK, on size 7 needles.

3. Check your gauge. Ha! Ha! Just kidding! It's a sweater for an iPod. Let it go.

4. Reach in your bag and grab a color, and cast on an even number of stitches in multiples of 4. I cast on 36 stitches for my 2.25-inch-wide iPod. I probably could've gotten away with 32. However many you choose to cast on, make sure it's an even number in multiples of 4, unless you happen to like wonky ribbing. 

5. Divide your stitches over three or four needles, and join to knit in the round. Do I need to tell you to be careful not to twist your stitches? I didn't think so. Use a stitch marker to mark the beginning of the round if you want, but for a project this simple, real Knitters just keep an eye on the tail to find the beginning of the round. Are you a Knitter or a mouse?

6. Go to town knitting 2x2 ribbing. Knit with your first color until you're tired of it or you run out. Then grab another color. Continue on, switching colors as the mood strikes you, until you have a tube of ribbing long enough to hold your iPod, about 4.5 inches, or whatever it is you're knitting a sweater for. (I don't want to know. This is a family-friendly blog, people. More or less.)

7. Move your stitches onto two needles (I divided my 36 stitches into two groups of 18), and kitchner the toe. Okay, it's not a toe, but it's late and I knit socks, and I honestly can't think of a reasonable word for the bottom of an iPod sweater. Probably "the bottom of an iPod sweater." (If you don't know how to kitchner, just search online. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of written explanations and YouTube videos more eloquent than I am capable of writing at the moment.)

8. Pick up four stitches at the top middle back of the sweater and begin knitting an i-cord handle. The back of the sweater should be facing you so that when you fold the i-cord over to button in front, the front of the i-cord will be facing the same direction as the front of the sweater. Does that make sense? I hope so. If not, please feel free to send me snippy letters. I'm a college instructor. I can take it.

9. Knit your i-cord as long as you'd like. I wanted mine to button onto the belt loop of my jeans or the handle of my lawn mower, so I kept it short--about 2.5 inches. A slightly longer cord would fit nicely over your wrist.

10. Now you need to create the button hole in the i-cord, and this is the part I'm kind of proud of. I'm pretty sure I thought this up myself. Google gives some results for "button hole in i-cord," but I can't see any like mine, and mine is better because you don't have to cast off and re-cast on. So try it. To knit a button hole into the i-cord, put the 2 far left stitches on waste yarn or a spare needle, and just work the 2 right stitches as its own little i-cord for 3 or 4 rows. (If you've already picked a button, you can guesstimate how much space you'll need. Generally, the answer is less than you think.) Then stop working the right stitches, and go back and work the 2 left stitches for the same number of rows. You'll need to use a different piece of yarn. I used the yarn from the outside of the center-pull ball. When you've worked the same number of rows on both sides, start knitting all 4 stitches together again for another row or two, and then bind off however you would normally choose to end a piece of i-cord. Totally up to you. This is your show, man. 

11. Pick a button from your button collection that will fit through your button hole and sew it on the front wherever you want it. If you don't have a button collection, start a button collection.

12. Weave in all your ends. Or tie them in knots. Again, it's a sweater for an iPod. Quality is important in any undertaking, but let's not overdo it. 

13. Post on Facebook about how you just knit a whole sweater in 2 hours. Your knitting friends will be all, "Wait. What?" Your non-knitting friends will be all, "God, will she ever shut up about knitting? But if she stops talking about knitting, she'll start talking about her dogs again. Where is that mutherfreakin Hide button. . . ."

P.S. No, this has not been tech edited. Again, it's a sweater for an iPod. I got the idea while I was in the shower this morning, and I knit it tonight while watching Wheel of Fortune and It's a Wonderful Life. If you find a mistake, let me know and I'll fix it.

P.P.S. For personal use only. You should please not sell this "pattern" or anything made from this "pattern," such as it is. If anyone's going to make money off this booger, remote as that possibility is, it's going to be me. 

Bragging

TA!

FREAKING!

DA!

TOIA My Biggest (Yarn-Related) Problem

The problem with being a knitter is that when you notice that all your light-weight cardigans are old and kind of ratty, your first thought is not, "Hey, I better run by Target and see what I can get on sale," but "Hey, I better check Ravelry for a pattern and the yarn shop to see what they've got in sweater quantities, and, yes, I know there's already a cardigan in the closet that's just waiting to have its ends woven in and be blocked, you're not telling me anything I didn't already know, but that's a dress cardigan, and I need an everyday cardigan, and I am going to go YARN SHOPPING!" And then your eyes kind of cross and the drool starts to run and you become a yarn zombie, which is a condition that can never really be cured, but can be sent into temporary remission by the sense of shock that occurs when you realize you just spent $70 on what is essentially fancy string.

Meanwhile, you're still wearing an old, ratty sweater.

It's Good to Have a Hobby

What do people who don't knit do when they have computer problems?

I've only been knitting seriously for about 2 years, but already my memories of the time before I became A Knitter are vague and hazy. I seem to remember that intractable computer problems eventually resulted in lots of cigarettes, and when that didn't work, it came down to tears.

But now that I am A Knitter, I don't need cigarettes, and I can't remember the last time I cried in frustration. Instead, when I'm waiting for the computer to restart for the umpteenth time and desperately hoping that this time I've eliminated whatever bizarre font is causing Word to have an identity crisis, I knit. I stitch and stitch and stitch. And then I stitch some more. And as I stitch, my mind relaxes and sooner or later the solution appears.

It is very good to have a hobby.    

Being Delusional Helps

I did it. I knit seven Christmas presents and one birthday present in six and a half weeks, and I did not go crazy. (Or crazier, if you prefer.) Five of the eight came in pairs, and any sock or mitten knitter will tell you that one half of a pair counts as a finished item, so I could claim thirteen finished items. But I won't because a little bit of glory is enough, and I got all the glory I needed last night when my stepmom looked at my sister's Snuggle-Licious Snow Day Socks and said, "You made those? You've come a long way in a year." Then my brother-in-law generously offered to set me up in my very own Ebay sweatshop in which, if I understand correctly, I would do all the knitting and he would take all the profits. When I write my own knitting book, I'm going to ask him to write the blurb for the back cover because you just can't buy that kind of praise.

 

From left to right:

• Brother-in-law's Cowboys scarf (Yes, it's still on the needles in this picture, which was taken Christmas Eve; I cast off Christmas Day afternoon in time to give it to him that night.)
• Sister's Snuggle-Licious Snow Day Socks (That's my name for them. The Paton's pattern just calls them "Fair Isle Socks." Boooooooring.)
• Cousin Lily's Christmas stocking (Mom made a coordinating stocking for Lily's sister Georgia.)
• Mom's Snuggle-Licious Snow Day Socks
• Miles the Boxer's Christmas stocking (I forgot to put the hanger on, but luckily noticed when I was wrapping it and took yarn and needles to Christmas dinner. I added the hanger while everyone else was opening presents. Whoops.)

At the top of the picture:

• Stepmom's red and gray slippers
• Dad's light brown and dark brown slippers

These slippers are what made the impressive knitted gift item total possible. They're in bulky and from cast-on to seaming and blocking, including 20 minutes of soak time, each slipper takes three hours. I did one slipper per evening every night between Tuesday and Friday of last week and only stayed up past midnight once. They are completely simple yet completely awesome slippers.

And last but not least, Mom's birthday socks:

 

Of which I am not a little proud.

But next year? No knitted presents. This time I'm serious.

I Am a Process Knitter (in which I use the word "Gee-Whillikers")

I have knit a lot of stuff in the past few months. I mean a lot. I spend time knitting when I should be working, knitting when I should be doing yard work, knitting when I should be doing the dishes or cleaning the house. I knit in restaurants and in the car when I'm caught by a train. The one good reason I can think of to move to a big city with good public transportation would be so that I could dump my car and knit while riding trains and buses. When I'm working with adults, I knit while I tutor. When my computer starts acting up, I run extensive automated clean-up procedures even though a simple restart would probably do the trick, and use the downtime to knit a few rounds. I am trying to get good enough to knit and read at the same time, at which time I will probably disappear completely from human society.

All this knitting has produced a lot of stuff: three shawls, some hats and scarves (some lacy, some plain), and socks--five pairs of socks this summer. Imagine my surprise when it got cool enough to actually wear them and I suddenly realized that although I spent my summer making purple socks and blue socks and pink socks and red socks and pink-and-red socks, what my wardrobe actually calls for are brown socks and cream socks and maybe the occasional dark green socks. Red socks? No.

But I still love my socks and might even adjust my wardrobe accordingly. I just love socks. I love the skinny yarn and the way it feels as it glides over the ring finger on my right hand. I love the tiny little double-pointed steel needles and how they clink together as they make tiny, perfect stitches. I love heels. I mean, really, who would expect that you could make fabric turn a corner?! Perhaps more to the point, who would expect that I could make fabric turn a corner? Socks have some kind of weird magic. I don't want to be one of those knitters who only ever knits socks, but I fear that's the direction I'm heading. So I started looking for projects that have the same elements I love in socks but that are not actually socks.

Enter the long-sleeved fingerless gloves. They're knit in the round on small double-pointed needles in fingering-weight yarn. They're just like socks except instead of a heel, they have a thumb. Thumbs are not as awe-inspiring as heels, but they're pretty cool. And this is a very practical project for me. My desk is against an outside wall, and the desktop can get uncomfortably chilly. Some long-sleeved, fingerless gloves that keep my forearms warm while still allowing me to type would be perfect. ("Wear one of the 83 sweaters in your closet," you say? "Shut up," I say. "There's no fun in that," I say.)

So I have knit these gloves. Or rather this glove. Singular. I should have two by now, but I have a congenital inability to accept the obvious. I cast on on a Saturday. As I was knitting, I kept trying it on and thinking things like, "Gosh, that's kind of tight" and "Golly, that's really tight" and "Gee-whillikers, every time I try this on, my fingers start to tingle." On the following Wednesday, at which point I had already knit the entire arm and half the hand past the thumb (i.e., I was an hour or two from being done), it finally dawned on me: "This glove is too tight. If I actually try to wear it, it will cut off the circulation in my arm and my hand will likely turn black and fall off."

This is when I discovered that I am a Process Knitter. When a knitter knits 16 inches and then discovers that what he or she has knitted simply will not work, the knitter will experience some combination of two basic reactions. The first reaction is overwhelming rage that will cause the knitter to yank the object off the needles and start using it as a dust rag until it unravels to the point that it must be thrown away. Knitters who experience this reaction are Results Knitters. They don't particularly love the actual knitting. To them, the point is to get to the finished object. When they are thwarted, they are likely to give up. When a Process Knitter faces the same scenario, on the other hand, he or she giggles gleefully because having to start over means that the knitter gets to knit some more! Yay!

Most knitters are some combination of Results and Process. I swear to you that I did not giggle gleefully. In fact, I was pretty darn annoyed. But I--and this is where I shocked myself--was not angry. I was irritated because it is likely that my hands are going to be cold for another week before I get this set of gloves finished. (In my world, there are no other options like wearing sweaters or turning up the furnace. In my world, I must knit gloves.) But the idea of having to knit the entire first glove again did not bother me a bit. Except for the 2x2 ribbing at the cuff and fingers. I am not fond of 2x2 ribbing.

So I calmly--yes, really, calmly--put down the glove and spent the rest of the evening working on a Christmas gift that shall remain unnamed at this time.

I took the boa-constrictor glove to SnB on Thursday and had a heart-to-heart with Shelley, who pointed out that, although my gauge was dead-on and I was knitting exactly the size specified in the pattern, the model wearing the thing in the picture was a skinny bi . . . well, you know. She really is, too. This woman's neck and head look like a toothpick holding up an orange. For the glove to fit me, a regular human-sized woman, it would be necessary to add a lace repeat or go up a needle size. I opted to go up a needle size, which is a fairly predictable move for me. Adding a lace repeat would've required some math; going up a needle size required buying a new set of needles. Duh.

I then toted my doomed glove and my new needles over to the table, and let the other SnBers sigh sympathetically as I ripped back 16 inches of knitting. (I have to say, ladies, you need to work on your sympathetic sighs. They sounded a little bit like muffled laughter.) They then had to listen to me muttering to myself about how stupid 2x2 ribbing is and whining at the end of the night that I had accomplished only 1 inch of it.

So here I am, ten days on from the start of this project and five days on from the second cast-on for the first glove, and I have one whole glove. It fits. I'm wearing it as I type this, and it does a lovely job of keeping my forearm warm while leaving my fingers free to type. I was worried that the thumb was too long and would interfere, but it seems fine. My left arm is feeling left out, not to mention chilly, so I've already cast on for the second glove. Once again, I have 1 lonely inch of 2x2 ribbing. The only good thing about 2x2 ribbing is that it is not 1x1 ribbing.

If You're Interested:
The pattern is Sparrow Fingerless Gloves, and the yarn is good old Berroco Comfort Sock, the workhorse of sock yarn.

The SnB is at Twist Yarn Shop and Shelley is Shelley Stilger, Resident Yarn Genius.

Why did I put the glove on my right arm and use my awkward left hand to take blurry photos when I could've reversed it and taken decent photos? I don't know. All I can say is that I took them when I got home from school last night and it was the end of a 13-hour day. The critical-thinking part of my brain had long since stopped functioning.

UPDATE: The second glove was finished Saturday, 10/23/10, at 6:44am, 13 days and about 12 hours after casting on the original doomed glove.

The "This-Summer-Scarf-Totally-Rocks-My-World" Scarf

So, some of you may have noticed that I've been knitting a lot lately. My grandmother was a prolific knitter and my mother also knits, and they both taught me several times, but it never stuck. I finally figured out on my own how to knit about five years ago. Okay, I didn't so much figure it out as learn it from a book. Okay, it was a children's book called I Can Knit! But it worked, and I've been knitting on and off ever since. For my birthday last December, my mother gave me an excellent book recommended by a friend of a friend called Stitch 'n Bitch. Since then I've gone from a casual, I'm-bored knitter to an obsessive, I'd-rather-knit-than-read knitter, which is a little strange for me, since reading has been my favorite thing to do since I learned to do it. It might have something to do with having recently quit smoking and needing something to do with my hands. Who knows? You can figure out the psychological motivation if that's your thing. In the meantime, I'll keep knitting.

That little story is just an introduction to explain why I am so excited about this scarf pattern that I feel compelled to write about it. (See the discussion on "obsession" in the previous paragraph.) The pattern, designed by Twist's own Susan Gilroy and Shelly Stilger, is available for free on the Twist Yarn Shop website at http://bit.ly/am4t35. They call it the "Double-Wrap Stitch Scarf." That name is certainly descriptive but a little prosaic, so I have decided to call mine the "This-Summer-Scarf-Totally-Rocks-My-World" scarf. I hope they won't mind!

There are three basic reasons why I love the Rocks-My-World scarf. First, it's fast. I may have been slightly influenced by the fact that the scarf I finished just before this one was about 7-1/2 feet and made entirely of seed stitch. It looks wicked cool, but it took about 2 weeks to make, and that was after a week of false starts while I decided whether I wanted ribbing, garter, to combine two colors, etc., etc., ad infinitum. The Rocks-My-World, on the other hand, took 3 days! Many of you know that I'm an instant-gratification kind of girl, so I practically started drooling as the Rocks-My-World spooled off my needles inches at a time. I started it on Saturday evening, as a balm to my shattered nerves after KU lost the second round, and finished it on Monday evening. I did spend most of Sunday working on it. Someone who knits at my medium-steady pace but is less obsessive would probably take about a week to finish it.

Second, the Rocks-My-World is very easy, although people who don't know anything about knitting will think it looks very complicated. I had one of the helpers at Twist (I would like to credit her, but I never caught her name) show me two stitches that I hadn't used before, but I had actually already figured them out myself. I just needed her to reassure me that I was doing them correctly. The whole scarf is just variations of the knit stitch, the simplest stitch.

Third, the Rocks-My-World is FUN! "Fast" and "easy" certainly influence the fun factor on this scarf, but it's also fun because you can use any kind of yarn to achieve any kind of effect. For this incarnation of the Rocks-My-World, I used approximately 2.5 98-yard skeins of Borroco Origami multicolored yarn in an overall reddish hue to achieve a 5-foot scarf. It's pretty stretchy, so it wears more like a 6- or even 7-footer. The summer theme is apparent not only in the loose-weave design that probably wouldn't be much use in winter, but also in the multicolored yarn, which is simply beautiful. It has every color you'll ever see in a summer sky, from a sunrise to the moments before the hail starts falling.

For future projects, I plan to use a monocolor ribbon yarn (like the bamboo yarn the pattern recommends) to make a more sophisticated version. Actually, I intend to make multiple versions in as many colors and yarn weights as I can get my hands on and can afford. The next time you see me, odds are good that I will be wearing one of these scarves. And, yes, women in my family should not be shocked to find a Rocks-My-World among their Christmas gifts next year. Send me your color preferences now, ladies.

I'm also going to try making a skinny, short version of this scarf to use as a head band/doo-rag/something-or-other-for-hair-containment device. I've got several different ideas for how to do that, but when I try to design things myself, silly things happen like spending 2 weeks on a seed stitch scarf, so we'll just have to wait and see on that one.

In conclusion, the Rocks-My-World Totally. Rocks. My. World. If you're a knitter, it can rock yours, too.

P.S., If you live in the area, go buy something at Twist, even if it's just some fancy stitch markers for your grandma! No, I don't work there. I just love them.