Belatedly tangled

The nerdiest knitting thing I've done

Ever have trouble picking out colors for something online?

Especially smoky and subdued ones, like many Kidsilk Haze colors are?

What I did: dragged individual images when possible, took a lot of little screen shots when not (e.g., when there was a single shot of the whole color card), and then threw them into a single folder and turned Icon Preview on. All the pictures in each row are from the same source.

What this will be, someday, after socks and other things get done: a Modern Quilt Wrap, but a lot more subdued, and only 6 colors, instead of 9. (Someone should sell kits! The whole thing probably takes, oh, maybe 3 balls, maybe 4?)

The psychology of frogging

Why was I not able to actually frog back my helical Rosebud until I'd screwed up something else, too?

I caught the problem weeks ago. See, I'd forgotten to look at the pattern when it was time to start the empire waist and hence didn't know about the decreases in the first row of ribbing. As my less-used boobs deflate, I'm considering switching to a smaller chest size (I still need all the room in the hips, never fear), so I really can't afford to ignore those decreases.

I threaded a spare Addi through as a lifeline:

and left it there for a month, until my almost-done Parrot socks^* got long, but not wide enough. Time to rip back to just after the minimal calf shaping I put in, so that I can add some more. Threaded an Addi 0 as a lifeline, unraveled away, and remembered: hey, there's that sweater, too, with the four live strands and the elastic thread skipping promiscuously from one to the next.

Somehow the act of frogging the sock freed me to calmly approach the sweater. I spread out the four balls of yarn on the floor in a circle around the sweater, grabbed the card of elastic thread, and carefully wound one, wound the next, detangling the elastic as I went. It took less than 15 minutes in the end.

^* The only picture I have for those right now is of the ball of yarn, pre-socks:

That ball! It took me a week of stolen moments to wind. But I've worked over three-quarters of the yarn, making one sock from each end, and it's stayed usable the whole way down.

A sub-puzzle

Oh no!

There's a lot more tangerine brown on the right than on the left.

What happened? and what happens next?

A sad (and bitter) socknitter

I finished the first of the Manly (tm) socks. Can you, um, tell where I started a new skein of Kersti? (I can't pretend I wasn't warned—everyone tells you to stripe two skeins, and all four were visibly different when purchased.)

"But," you ask, "it's done, right? So what's all the wonkiness at the toe there?"

So, it's too big. I need to move the toe shaping back.

That made Beaker get all snitty: "If you're going to all this trouble, why shouldn't the toes be fitted for each foot?" I repeated Charlene Schurch's perfectly plausible reasoning for why not, but he was unconvinced.

Here's another view of the basting (and, no, I didn't stab him as I stitched it in):

I plan to duplicate stitch "L" and "R" in hot pink on the tops of the toes. However, I will flip a coin to decide whether to label them correctly, or incorrectly.

The only good news: I found the other partial sock, so I can work its instep and foot in peace before charting out what, exactly, to do with the toe shaping.

A sad (and lonely) sock

This weekend I went back to a sock I'd started back, oh, around Thanksgiving I suppose. Guns'n'Noro doesn't sell Koigu, and I got this yarn when we were in Weatherwood.

Beaker honestly wears wool socks year-round, so he should be a perfect target, right? But his feet are awfully big. I figured I'd try Kersti instead of KPPPM; bigger stitches means fewer stitches, right? I got 4 hanks, on the advice of the shop owner. I didn't believe her estimate, but the picture shows how far 50 grams goes. I think I'll end up using more than 3 hanks. (Beaker was in the store and helped choose the Manly (tm) colorway, but was kept  ignorant of prices.)

Once upon a time this was a simple ribbed sock straight out of Sensational Knitted Socks. The Interwebs told me that the few crazies who had made socks out of Kersti had used needles ranging from 2 up to 6. Tighter gauge means more durable socks, right? So I got a long Addi size 3, swatched, and got to work.

I couldn't hack it. The ribbing was very nice, but the stockinette sole was like leather. It was hellish to knit. Plus Beaker thought the instep too tight. I'd also had the bright idea of starting the second one before the first was done—two socks on one needle! ha!—and I dreaded picking it up and wrestling with the cord, wrestling with every stitch.

I can't destroy honest labor without a cooling-off period. After letting the mess mellow for a couple of months, I finally separated the two socks and ripped the first back to its heel flap. Set it aside and bravely continued the second sock. I couldn't find my Addi 4, so I went all the way up to 5. If I'd kept the top of the foot in ribbing, the gauge would no longer have matched the cuff, so I switched to stockinette. I'm trying to decide if I should decrease a little below my original stitch count, to make up for the gauge relaxation.

All good now, except: I've lost the cuff of the first sock, and the giant ball of Kersti it's attached to.