Knitting this Fall

With a baby, a toddler, a full-time job, and a pandemic going on, I didn't get much knitting done this summer and fall.  But I did get a little bit done.  The baby needed a hat, and I wanted to knit it for him, so my mom was gracious enough to watch the kids while I sat in her family room and knitted almost half a hat one day in October (even though we don't live in our house, she's the 5th member of our household for pandemic purposes).  I used about half a skein of the same Malabrigo Rios I used for his newborn frog sweater, which no longer fits.  The pattern is Tin Can Knits' Beloved hat/bonnet. I made the toddler size for my then 7-month-old, and it fits him perfectly.  

The other knitting project I finished was a pair of socks for a friend.  Her younger son has Down syndrome, and World Down Syndrome Day is celebrated on 3/21 by wearing crazy socks.  When I saw this pattern from one of my favorite knitting bloggers, I knew I had to make these for my friend!  The yarn is KnitPicks Felici and Stroll sock.  Blue and yellow are the Down syndrome awareness colors.  I started these socks in early March and had the wild idea that I'd finish them in time for World Down Syndrome Day 2020, but I didn't manage it.  Instead, I managed to finish them in October and did a front porch drop-off at my friend's house.  She was delighted with them, and pointed out that I finished them in plenty of time for World Down Syndrome Day 2021!

Here's a photo of the index card I used to keep track of the pattern.  It was fun and fairly easy to knit!

 

Striped Skew Socks

These are Skew socks, with Knitpicks Felici yarn.  I really like how they turned out in self-striping yarn!  I used 2mm and 2.25mm needles.  I started them in May 2019 and finished them at the end of February 2020.  I did most of the knitting in the car riding to and from church (I'm a Unitarian Universalist and my church is in a city about half an hour away from the town where I live).

This is my second pair of skew socks (although maybe I should say third, because I knit the first pair twice!).  My first pair are one of my favorite pairs of socks.  They fit me really well, although they are a bit snug to get them on and off - but that also means that they stay put really well once they're on.  They're also interesting and fun to knit.  I rarely knit the same sock pattern twice, but I like this pattern so much that I'll probably knit it at least one more time!

Process-Oriented Knitting

Since my baby was born a year ago, I've really been savoring my crafting time.  So I'm not upset to have frogged and re-started two knitting projects in the past week.  It also helps that I don't have a time deadline on these projects, so I can just enjoy the knitting process without rushing.  The first project is this striped raglan sweater.  It's a pullover version of this cardigan that I made for my niece a few years ago, and my intention is for it to fit my son this coming winter.  I've been really enjoying the knitting, and was very pleased with myself for learning a new technique for jogless stripes!  Unfortunately, it was coming out way too big (which didn't actually bother me, it will fit at some point), and I ran out of the grey yarn before I finished the first sleeve.  So I frogged it, and I've started knitting it again in a smaller size.  So far, I'm enjoying it just as much the second time.

The second project is a pair of Skew Socks in KnitPicks Felici self-striping yarn.  I started the toe, got several rounds in, and then noticed that I'd done the Turkish cast-on wrong.  I have now ripped it out and restarted.  I don't mind re-knitting this small bit of toe so that I'll have a nicer pair of socks when I'm done.

New Baby Socks

I cast on the first of these socks almost a year ago, as I was sitting in my hospital bed waiting for things to get going on my induction.  In the few hours before the contractions got too painful and close together to keep knitting, I finished most of the leg of the first sock.  

Then almost all of my knitting time vanished.  This winter, I discovered that I can knit in the car on the way to church or other activities in the nearest city (while my husband drives us there) - and I started making progress on my socks again.  Then, the baby started sleeping more hours at night than I need to, and so we started to be able to watch a little bit of TV in the evenings after baby bedtime, and I started making more knitting progress.  I finally finished these socks a few weeks ago, almost a year after I started them.  

Here's my "pattern."  The yarn is Regia Design Line by Arne & Carlos 4-ply in color 3657 Summer Night, which was a birthday gift from my mom last year.  I have about 27 g left (of the 100 g skein) so I should be able to do something with the remaining yarn.

Fixing my socks

In the six years I lived in Texas, I knit a lot of socks and almost never wore them.  When we moved to the Midwest a year and a half ago, I had about 20 pairs of handknit socks, and each of them had only been worn a few times.  Since then, they've all been worn a lot - and I have new opinions about them.  I'm finding that I like my socks to fit with some negative ease, and to be knit at a tight gauge.  I like them to have some structure, so they don't twist around or slide down in my shoes (this problem is worse with boots, which I now own two pairs of (previously, I owned zero)).  In general, I prefer a traditional, top-down heel-flap heel to almost all of the toe-up/short-row heels I've tried. 

With this new knowledge, this Fall I fixed some of the socks in my drawer, to make them more wearable:

This pair, my Deflect socks, were just too long in the foot.  I had knit them long because the cable pattern has a very long repeat, and I convinced myself that it would be okay, but once I started wearing them often they were not okay.  I had at least an inch of extra length beyond my big toe.  So I ripped out the toe half of the feet and re-knit them significantly shorter.  Now I enjoy wearing them!

The green pair (which I apparently made before I started the blog) fit well, and I enjoyed wearing them, but I made them in a very soft yarn.  I wish I had knit them at a tighter gauge - I think they would have worn better.  As it was, wearing them often for a year, I wore a hole under the ball of the foot of one sock.  Luckily, I still had the extra yarn, so I was able to repair the hole with a knit-in-place patch, following this tutorial.   I was somewhat surprised to see how much these socks have faded from wear - the color difference is pretty clear in the photo!  I was mildly concerned that I would be able to feel the patch when I wore the repaired sock, but it hasn't bothered me at all.  I'm glad that I can wear one of my favorite pairs of socks again.

The last pair are my Skew socks, which I knitted while I was on the job market in Winter and Spring 2016.  They were too big, especially in terms of length in the foot.  Unfortunately, because of the unusual toe-up way these socks are constructed, I couldn't just re-knit the toes, like I did on the red pair.  Instead, I frogged the whole pair and re-knit them with the same yarn, but on smaller needles.  It was a little bit time-consuming, but totally worth it.  I love the way these socks fit!  They have a right and left foot, so they fit snugly in the toes across both feet, and the way the heels are constructed, they don't shift around in my boots at all.  They are a little firm to get on and off, but once on they're really comfortable.  This is the only construction I've used so far that I actually prefer to top-down heel-flaps.  I will definitely be making more of these - maybe I'll try to embellish them with some cables of lace, since the pattern is pretty plain.

Me-Made-May: Week 1

What I wore:

• Monday, May 1: My favorite thrifted jeans (RTW), a casual button-down shirt (RTW), Lofoten sweater, light brown handknit socks, and Geneva underwear
• Tuesday, May 2: Purple Smartwool tights (RTW), my navy gathered skirt, half-slip, plum-colored long-sleeved t-shirt (RTW), blue sweater (RTW), Geneva underwear, and my green lace shawl
• Wednesday, May 3: Favorite thrifted jeans (RTW), mushroom socks, long-sleeved t-shirt (RTW), Lofoten sweater
• Thursday, May 4: Blue tiered skirt, long-sleeved t-shirt (RTW), mended striped cashmere sweater (RTW with a visible mend by me)
• Friday, May 5: Lady skater dress, the same blue sweater I wore on Tuesday
• Saturday, May 6: In the morning I was gardening so I didn't wear any me-mades.  In the afternoon I changed into my brown floral skirt, a pink short-sleeved t-shirt (RTW), and aqua cable henley sweater (RTW)
• Sunday, May 7: Blue Washi dress, yellow cardigan (RTW)

What I made:

Well, I immediately strayed from my intention to only make for myself in May.  I ran out of time to finish a little dress for my cousin's baby that needed to be finished before the last week of May, so I finished that up.  And I realized that two little boys in my family are turning two at the end of May/beginning of June, so I ordered fabric to make a little polo shirt for each of them.  Then I started sewing on a top for me.  I had hoped to finish it during the first week of May, but didn't quite make it.  I still need to adjust and finish the side seams and do the hemming and finishing.

On the knitting front, I frogged the skew socks on the left in this photo.  These two pairs of socks were enough too big that I decided they're unwearable, so part of my plan for May is to re-knit the skew socks using smaller needles and to take out the toes and shorten the feet of the pink socks on the right.  Here's what the "new" skew sock looks like right now:

I also did a little bit of spinning - for the first time in many months I'm not knitting things for other people that I feel like I need to prioritize!

What I thought:
I realized that I don't have any me-made shirts.  Everything I've made for myself is either a skirt, a dress, socks, a shawl, a sweater, or a winter accessory.  Thinking of my wardrobe as a whole, that's not really a problem for casual wear, since I have a pretty wide variety of casual tops, especially tanks and short-sleeved t-shirts.  Where I have a big hole is long-sleeved tops, particularly work-appropriate ones.  I own enough work tops so that I don't have to iron too unreasonably often, but I don't have very many that I love or even like.  Several of them just don't fit and are in colors that I don't feel comfortable wearing.  So that will definitely inform my sewing plans going forward.

I've been reading a lot of blog posts lately about capsule wardrobes, and feeling like maybe I should do that for work.  But choosing just a few colors to base the whole thing off of feels stressful and restrictive.  I'm coming to the realization that while I like the idea of having a relatively small number of items, I can make that work without restricting myself to just 1-2 neutrals and 2-3 accent colors.  I'll make (or buy second-hand) things that I like and that I'll wear a lot, and not worry about capsule rules!

Mending

I learned a new skill last week!  This sock (the first pair I made for Robert) has been sitting in my mending pile for several weeks.  I finally sat down and worked my way through the whole pile so I wouldn't have to move un-mended clothing.  I used this tutorial on how to knit on a patch, and I'm happy with how it turned out.  Next time I would pay more attention and make sure to knit the patch in the same direction as the socks - it didn't occur to me that this would be an issue when I was picking up stitches, but I think that would make it easier to graft the live stitches to the sock at the end of the patch.  I wasn't really thinking and knit this patch in the heel-to-cuff direction, even though the socks were knit cuff down.

The leftover black yarn from these socks is long gone, so I used some of the leftover navy blue from Robert's new socks.  Hopefully the patch will be hidden under his pant leg, so he can continue to wear these as dress socks!

Birthday socks

Robert's birthday was just over a month ago, and he had been wanting another pair of handknitted socks.  I knitted them in secret, but I didn't have enough secret knitting time to finish them before his birthday.  I ended up wrapping a package with one and a half socks in it, and then I finished the second sock a few days later.  He's happy with how they turned out, and they will help keep his feet warm in the cold Midwestern winter!

Pattern: From the recipe in More Sensational Knitted Socks (Alternating triangles stitch pattern)
Size: 70 stitches
Yarn: Cascade Heritage Sock in color 5601
Needles: US1 DPNs
Started/Completed: April 2016/May 2016
Modifications: No pattern to modify!

Knot theory socks finished!

I finished the knot theory socks in time to give them to my advisor on the day of my Ph.D. hooding.

As I said in my first post about these socks, the left sock (on the right in the pictures; it has four crossings) is a braid representation of the figure eight knot.  The right sock (on the left in these photos, and with six crossings) is a braid representation of a link: the Borromean Rings.

The Borromean rings are a 3-component link, meaning that it consists of three pieces of mathematical string, arranged in 3-dimensional space, with the two ends of each string glued together.  If we ignore how they are arranged in space, what we have is a collection of three circles.  The special thing about the Borromean rings is that they are the simplest Brunnian link.  A Brunnian link is a non-trivial link (with any number of components) with the property that if you remove any one component, the rest form an unlink.  (An unlink is a link in which each component is an unknot, and the components don't interact with each other at all.)

I think these socks turned out wonderfully.  I want to make a pair for myself!


Pattern: The cables are my own design. I referenced the book More Sensational Knitted Socks for numbers of stitches in the heel and toe.
Size: 64 stitches
Yarn: Knitpicks Stroll Fingering in Blue Violet Tonal
Needles: US0 (2mm) DPNs
Started/Completed: April 2016/May 2016
Modifications: No pattern to modify!

My last CMS knitting

Every Thursday of the academic year for the last six years, I've gone to two seminars: CMS, the graduate student seminar in my department, then tea and cookies followed by Colloquium, our department-wide seminar (which is almost always a guest from outside our university).

I've brought my knitting to almost all of these talks (with the exception of several weeks last Fall when I brought my job applications because I needed more time to work on them).  Last Thursday was my last CMS.  It turned out that the week before was my last colloquium, since the speaker scheduled for last week fell ill and was unable to come.  I'm graduating!  I might have to come up with a new excuse for some kind of weekly update post.

My knitting last week wasn't particularly interesting.  I knitted most of the gusset on the first sock in the pair I'm knitting for my husband's birthday next month.  The black/navy yarn is pretty hard to see.  Knitting men's socks is much more time consuming than women's socks - I'm really noticing that this sock is going much more slowly than the purple knot theory socks I'm knitting for my advisor!

Knot theory socks!

I'm a knot theorist.  (I've posted about this before.)  I defended my Ph.D. thesis last week, my semester ends next week (with me grading lots of finals ... ), and my graduation will be in mid-May.  I can barely believe I'm actually done, and I'm really excited to start my new job in August!  These knot theory socks are a present for my advisor, to thank her for all of the many, many things she has done for me.  I feel so lucky to have such a great advisor.

So, about the socks: purple is the unofficial team color of our research group, so choosing purple yarn was obvious.  I wanted a design that was knot-theory related, so this sock has a braid on the outside of the leg.

A bit about the math:

A knot is an embedding of a circle into 3-dimensional space.  Intuitively, we can think of a length of string that has been tied up in a knot and then had its ends glued together.  It is in some essential sense still a circle - if you were a tiny ant walking along the string, you would eventually get back to where you started, so all you would be able to tell would be that it is a circle (you wouldn't be able to gather any information about how it was knotted up).  In simplest terms, the basic question of knot theory is how to tell different knots apart.  More generally, knots and links (with more than one circle, but still knotted up somehow) are really important to how mathematicians understand 3- and 4-dimensional spaces.

Every knot and link can be represented as the closure of a braid.  A mathematical braid is a set of strands, all oriented in one direction, that can cross over each other but not loop back on themselves.  To take the braid closure, we glue the top and bottom ends together, with the rightmost top end glued to the rightmost bottom end, and so forth.  If we take the braid closure of the braid on this sock, we get the figure eight knot, which is a really cool knot!

The figure eight knot is the second-simplest non-trivial knot (the simplest is the trefoil), and it has the property of being amphicheiral, which means that it can be stretched and rearranged into its mirror image.  This is a very cool property!

The second sock (which I've already started) will have a braid whose closure is the Borromean Rings.  I'll explain why they're so cool once I've finished knitting the braid.

CMS/Colloquium knitting

I finished the leg and knitted the heel flap on the first of Robert's birthday socks.  I ended up just sitting with nothing to do with my hands for the last 20 minutes of Colloquium on Thursday, because I didn't bring the More Sensational Socks book with me, and I needed it to tell me how to start the heel turn.

I also brought this with me to church this morning and knitted in between the services.  I finished the heel turn and started the gusset.  It's zipping along!

CMS/Colloquium knitting: Secret Socks

I started a new project in CMS last week - a project I'm not working on at home, because these socks are going to be a birthday surprise for Robert.  The yarn is Cascade Heritage Sock in a color that I think is navy but other people seem to think is black.  I cast on 70 stitches and I'm working a stitch pattern from the More Sensational Knitted Socks book (which is a fantastic book!).

I made a good start on it in my two hours on Thursday afternoon, and it came to church with me this morning.  I have a bit over a month to get it done, so I think it's definitely doable!

Knitting on airplanes

I knit these socks almost entirely on airplanes and in airports ... they're my job interview socks!  I started them on the way to the Joint Math Meetings, where I interviewed for a whole bunch of jobs, and then continued knitting on my way to and from several campus interviews.  Now I'm finished with the socks, but unfortunately not quite done with interviews.

This pattern, Skew from Knitty, has a very interesting and unusual construction.  The socks are knit from the toe up, on the bias, and then there are some extra increases and decreases, and suddenly you're grafting the back of the heel together and continuing up the leg.

There is a left sock and a right sock.

The yarn is Shibui Staccato Sock, and it was lovely to work with.  I got it from my mom a few years ago, and when I decided to knit socks from it I went on the hunt for a pattern that would show off the color changes in the yarn.  I think Skew was perfect!

Pattern: Skew
Size: one size
Yarn: Shibui Staccato Sock
Needles: I already can't remember - US2 DPNs?
Started/Completed: January 2016/March 2016
Modifications: none

Interview socks

I'm graduating this year and on the job market, so I'm traveling a lot for interviews this spring. First there was a trip for conference interviews, now multiple trips for campus interviews. Before my conference trip, I decided I needed a new project, and here it is: Skew socks from Knitty.  They have an unusual geometry, which is interesting for a mathematician knitter. Also, there is a right and left foot, which is cool.

The yarn is a sock yarn I got from my mom and have had in my stash for a while. The color changes in the yarn are perfect for highlighting the unusual shaking in the pattern!

CMS/Colloquium knitting: Stripey Socks!

I don't have any CMS knitting to report on from this week, since I finished my self-striping socks in Colloquium the week before.  I'm thrilled with how they look and how they fit!

I spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of heel I wanted to knit - I didn't want to interrupt the striping pattern, so a traditional heel flap and gusset was out.  I tried a fleegle heel on the first sock, and that made the stripes very narrow in a way I didn't like, so that was out, too.  I thought I didn't want an afterthought/forethought heel because those tend to be way too tight around the arch of my foot.  I ended up doing a lot of internet research on sock patterns for self-striping yarns and ways to make short-row heels fit better.  I settled on a mini-gusset for a forethought heel, from a fantastic sock article by Kate Atherley in Knitty (link below).  Then I knitted a round heel.  I was a bit amused to see that the round heel put a green dot on the underside of my heel - it's visible in the picture above.

The round heels pucker when the socks are flat, but they fit really well on my feet.

Here's how much yarn I have left over.  I used almost all of it!

Pattern: My own toe-up, forethought heel sock pattern, using the toe from Fleegle's basic recipe, the section of Knitty's Socks 102 article on "Adding Gussets to a Short Row Heel for Better Fit," and for the heel, the round toe/heel instructions from More Sensational Knitted Socks
Size: 64 sts for foot and leg
Yarn: KnitPicks Felici self-striping sock yarn in "Wizard"
Needles: 2.5mm sock DPNs
Started/Completed: July 2015/January 2016
Modifications: I added an additional 6 stitches on each side of the top of the foot for the gusset.  Then I started the ribbing on the "back" half of the leg (the half without the extra gusset stitches) immediately after knitting in the waste yarn for the heel, while keeping the front half stockinette until I had decreased away all of the gusset stitches, then switched to 1x1 ribbing for the front as well.  This helped eliminate a bit of bagging at the back ankle, without drawing attention to the fact that gusset decreases were happening.

Re-knitting.

I feel like I'm not making any progress on my knitting lately.  I seem to be knitting everything at least twice.  This is a sweater for my nephew.  It's going to be a Christmas gift.  I knitted almost the entire body in the car on the way to and from our vacation in August ... and I'm going to rip it all out to start over.  August was way too soon to start a Christmas gift for an infant.  This is way too small.  I'm going to start over with the next size (or maybe two sizes) up.

This is my second attempt on the second sleeve of my Lofoten sweater.  I knit the first sleeve twice, too, and then I didn't think to mark which of the two sets of increases (for the two times I knit the first sleeve) was the correct one.  So of course when I got ready to knit the second sleeve, I followed the wrong one.

This first sock picture was my second (maybe third?  I can't quite remember) attempt at stripey socks.  Then I tried it on, decided the leg was too short, and ripped it back to the top of the heel because it was also kind of gapey at the back ankle and I didn't want the leg to be half ribbed and half not.  

Here it is now.  I'm much happier with it, and hopefully on this one I can replicate it on the first try when I get to the second sock.

Stripey socks: Take 1

I'm almost to the heel turn on my first stripey sock, but I'm going to rip it out.  I started doing a Fleegle heel (which I recently learned is also called a Strong heel) like I did on my last pair of socks.  I decided that this time I wanted a slipped stitch heel pattern, so I started doing eye of partridge at the same point where I started the gusset increases.  I was inconsistent about the edge of the pattern though - next time I will place markers to delineate the slipped stitch area.  I would also wait to start the slipped stitches - I think it looks a little strange to have them go a third of the way down the sole of the sock.

Once I had decided I would rip it out, I decided I don't want to do this kind of heel after all.  I chose it because short row and afterthought heels are usually too tight across the instep on my feet.  But now that I'm getting to it, I'm deciding that I don't want to distort the stripe pattern at all.  I did a bit of research on heels for self-striping socks (and almost ordered this book from Amazon but managed to restrain myself) and came across this article on Knitty.  I'm going to try a gussetted afterthought heel.  Hopefully it will fit better, and the stripes will be just a tiny bit narrower around the heel, but not any narrower than the last two stripes in the photo of my Fleegle gusset, which I think is fine.  I'm excited to see how it turns out!

I still want the Sock Architecture book.

Swans Island Socks finished

I finished my Swans Island Socks last weekend.  I'm really happy with how they turned out!  I used Swans Island sock yarn, which is an organic superwash wool.  It's a really beautiful color and has great texture and stitch definition.  The socks are soft and stretchy.  I made up the pattern as I went along, using Fleegle's toe-up heel.  The cables at the toes and cuffs are inspired by these socks.  I finished the cuffs with Jeny's Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-Off - this was the first time I've used it, and I really like how it turned out.

The yarn looks grey in some lights and light brown in others.  I think they're beautiful!

According to my blog, I started these socks at the beginning of April, so they took just over three months to finish, although I definitely wasn't working on them very steadily for a lot of that time.

Travel knitting

I was away at a conference and camping last week.  The top picture is how my knitting looked when I left, and here it was when I got home:

I finished casting off on the last plane home, and then I couldn't remember how to do the Turkish cast-on to start the second sock.  It's probably just as well though - two of my friends and I had spent the previous night trying to sleep in a freezing cold airport terminal, and I fell asleep while I was waiting for the seatbelt sign to turn off so I could get up to go to the bathroom and woke up as we landed at our home airport.

I never knit as much as I think I'm going to when I travel for conferences.  I don't take my knitting with me to talks, and I'm usually out of the hotel from early breakfast until late night after dinner and socializing, so I just don't have time.  I also always expect to get more reading done than I do.  This time I split my flight time evenly between reading and knitting and didn't do any of either while I was actually at the conference.  It was such a great conference that I don't mind at all!