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!

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!

Travel knitting #2

Last weekend I was at a really great math conference in College Park, Maryland and then I got to spend Sunday afternoon with a childhood friend who lives in DC and works in the White House!  It was a great weekend, and I got quite a bit of magazine reading done on the plane (I'm within a month of being caught up on my New Yorker subscription!) but not much knitting.  That little bump in the center of the photo is the beginning of the gusset, and it is the sum total of the knitting I did on my trip.

Quiltcon!

I went to Quiltcon two weeks ago!  I had an awesome time!  The quilt show was really beautiful and inspiring.  Many of these are the kinds of quilts that I like and aspire to make (and feel like I could realistically maybe someday make quilts like them).  There are a lot of really amazing quilts at quilt festival, too, but so many of them are art quilts, using techniques I can't ever see myself learning, or are very traditional or otherwise not really my style.  I took lots and lots of pictures of my favorite quilts in the show.  I also enjoyed the vendor hall - I found some really great fabric for a baby quilt I'm going to start soon.  And there was a really generous swag bag!  There were several fabric samples, and patterns and magazines, and little gadgets.  The tote bag itself is really high quality, too.

But my favorite part of Quiltcon was the classes I took.  The blocks up there are from Lee Heinrich's Advanced Piecing Crash Course on Friday night.  I learned paper piecing and partial seams!  Paper piecing is something I've wanted to do for a long time, but I was afraid of it.  Now I'm confident!  Lee walked us through the two blocks and gave us a bunch of tips to make the pieces fit together and place each new piece.  The only downside was the sewing machines ... I'll probably never buy a BabyLock.  The machines in the class were BabyLock Rachels, and they were advertising a special show price that I don't remember, but I think it was in the neighborhood of $500 plus or minus 100.  The machine was about the same size as my little Brother machine (which has a tiny harp space and cost about $100) but didn't sew anywhere near as well.  Several of us, including me, had seemingly unsolvable tension problems.  It was computerized (which my machine is not) and had a needle down feature, which was nice but not worth the other problems it had.

The other class I took was Elizabeth Dackson's Find Your Go-To Fill.  It was great!  We used wonderful HandiQuilter Sweet16 mid-arm machines and did a lot of sketching and practice of five or so different filler patterns.  In contrast to the BabyLock experience in the other class, if I had a spare $5000 and a permanent space to set it up, I would definitely consider buying one of these machines.  They quilted so smoothly and were really easy to use!  I came home inspired to do more free motion quilting!

Vacation knitting!

 I've been working away at my toadstool socks, and I finished the first one while Robert and I were on vacation the last ten days.  I did an afterthought heel over almost 60% of the stitches.  I'm pretty happy with it.  I started the second sock, and I'm already counting down the toadstool repeats left to go!

 The white crescent shawl was my airplane knitting project, and it's almost done.  I have fewer than ten rows of lace left to do.  This thing got really wide - I'm pretty sure it's longer than my long circular needle.  I guess I'll just block it for depth as much as I can and hope it's not too long and unwieldy.  I still have a lot of yarn left - probably enough to make another small or crescent-shaped shawl.

A serger, a vacation, and a new skirt!

 Robert and I got back on Sunday from three weeks of vacation - a week with his grandparents and two weeks with my family in Denmark.  We had a lovely time, including a little backpacking trip with one of my cousins that was just lovely.  Before we left, I needed a bag to carry my sweater project in, and it was the perfect opportunity to use my new serger for the first time!  I'd had these two fat quarters of 30's-type fabric sitting around for quite a while, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to use them:

 I especially love the little dogs on the green background.  I used the serger for everything except sewing the casing down for the ribbon drawstring.  I'm happy with the result, but I couldn't quite figure out how to get the raw edges at the drawstring to be finished.  Next time, I'll use this tutorial, which I found yesterday.  I think it looks really clever, and not too much extra work.

Sometime my senior year of high school, my mom bought me this skirt.  It was my favorite skirt all through college, until my first year of grad school, when I decided it was just too worn out to be worn anymore.  There were some holes in the outer skirt near the zipper, and all the years of washing and wearing had stretched the yoke out a bit, so that when I lost the weight I had gained in college the summer after graduation, I started having to use a safety pin to hold it up.  So when I saw some similar fabric at JoAnn about a year ago, I snatched up way too much of it, with the intention of making a replica.

 This being my favorite skirt, I was pretty nervous about messing up the replica, so I let it sit around for months and months, until this summer when I decided that what I really needed to do was sew myself some new clothes, and this was next in line.  So I cut out all the pieces and took it with me on vacation, and convinced Robert's Grandma (who is a sewing EXPERT) to help me with it.  It was so much fun to get to sew on her super-fancy Pfaff sewing machine, see how an expert uses the serger to make things more professional, and pick up some little tips and tricks.  The skirt turned out WONDERFULLY!  In one afternoon, we got everything finished except tacking the inner skirt down at the zipper and hemming the inner and outer skirts. 

Yesterday I sat down and finished it.  I just did a rolled hem for the outer skirt, and then I cut off the ruffle from the lining of the old skirt, trimmed the inner skirt to the right length, serged the inner skirt, and attached the ruffle.  Here's the new skirt.  It's very close to how the old skirt was, with the improvement of pockets!

A Robert Project

Robert and I were on spring break week before last. We went backpacking with some family friends. Robert spent most of our daylight non-hiking time working on a beautiful hiking stick - removing the bark on the upper part and smoothing the surface with his knife. None of my pictures show him hiking with it, but I think our friends have some.

My new tote bag

(somehow the picture got turned sideways when I uploaded it. I'm not sure how to fix this)
I bought exactly one souvenir (not counting a pair of new sandals) in Italy this summer. It was this tote bag, which I bought at the Vatican Museums gift shop. It shows a fresco from my very favorite room in the Vatican - the map room. It's a long narrow room with frescoes of maps of the Church's holdings as of the 16th century, plus one of ancient Italy. It's that one that's on the bag.

The only problem with the bag is that it is unlined. I would like to use it kind of like a purse, so my plan is to put in a lining with some pockets and some sort of closure mechanism at the top. I don't think this will be difficult, but it is not at the top of my priority list right now.

Traveling!

I have returned from my travels! I actually got back a week ago, but now I am over my jet lag and fully back in the swing of studying. I didn't do a ton of knitting while I was on vacation, but I did some in the car on our road trip around the western states, some on planes, and some while I was visiting with my grandparents in Denmark. I love to talk about handwork with my grandmother - she and her mother were both very accomplished needle-workers, and she has many beautiful tablecloths and bedlinens made in a wide variety of crochet, embroidery, and lace types. My grandmother always asks about my knitting and other handwork, and if I'm lucky, she also tells me about things she made when she was a girl and a young woman - for example, from a very young age, her father purchased from her the handknit socks she made for all of the members of her family. She told me about one pair of socks she made, from yarn she got by ripping out a skirt she had previously knitted for herself and dyed bright red. She said the first time the socks were worn (and I unfortunately don't remember who she said she made them for), the wearer's feet and ankles turned bright red from the dye!

Before I flew to Europe, Robert and I stopped for a day in Yellowstone on our way to visit various people in our families. We saw a lot of really amazing things, including buffalo!
Here we are standing in front of one of the hot springs. It's not entirely clear in the picture, but the water was a bright clear turquoise color, the steam rising off of it was green and blue and red, and the whole thing was surrounded by great colonies of bright orange thermophilic bacteria!
And, I did make it to the Vatican, where I wore my Vatican skirt! Here I am in a courtyard in the Vatican museums:
We/I had a lovely trip, and I acquired a special new project that I will post about soon. I also have several new and newish other UFOs to add in the coming days.