I Went to Stitches West! (or not)

and all I got was this gorgeous 3 oz of silk hankies…

Okay, so truth be told, if I actually went to Stitches West I’d be sure to have bought much more than 3 ounces of silk hankies. However, this was much easier on the budget and the body.

The wonderful (and frequent traveler for work) Amanda brought these back for me from Stitches West upon my request for semi-solid silk hankies from Chasing Rainbows Dyeworks. She did an amazing job of color choice (these are Mendicino Hedges). Enough color difference to make a nice rich and deep yarn, but subtle enough to not be garish or to barber pole too bad when plied etc. I’m so excited to work with these as I loved spinning from a bell in our spinning class with Maggie Casey at Shuttles, Spindles, and Skeins. I’m guessing this will grow up to be a shawl of some sort at some time. But for now I’m perfectly in love with gazing upon the gorgeous things in their hankie state (which is a good thing seeing as how I have 101 things that need doing THIS WEEK).

Meet Siren Socks

I would like to introduce you to siren sock, version 1.0. I’m not sure how much I like her. I *love* the concept, but I’m thinking perhaps this is an example of the concept being better than the reality. I haven’t knit on it (or anything for the matter) since Thursday because of my unease about the outcome.

The thinking behind this one? You have waves up at the top and fishes along the sides who are swimming into sea weed… Great idea, especially for something called siren socks, right? Well, I’m not sure… Here are two more views of it…

I’m not sure if I should rip back and get rid of the sea weed all together and let them be really similar to Spearfish (though in this case the lace panels are placed to run along the side of the instep without splitting it in half). Or, perhaps I should rip all the way back to the waves and have the seaweed go the full length??? Or, maybe do the lace all the way around? If I do the lace all the way around should I alternate the direction of the lace to make it a bit more interesting? It wouldn’t be quite as easy to memorize, but it could look really neat and unusual. Or, do I explore other stitch patterns to be the seaweed? Or not extend the seaweed so much onto the ankle???

Part of me wants to cast on for another sock so I can be doing something while all this marinates in my head (along with about 100 other design ideas for knitting and other things). But I’m not sure what I want to do if I do cast on for another sock. I have a yarn in my stash I’m kind of wanting to cast-on with, but I think it will also need the US0′s rather than the US1′s…. I guess I’m in one of those incredibly undecisive modes right now.

Last night I was thinking I should pull out some of the mohair in my stash and cast on for a Misty Garden scarf from Scarf Style. I mean mohair is only okay to knit with when the weather is cold and it sure has been cold (though that’s about to break today they say) and I have an unusual amount of it in my stash. And we’ve been watching countless hours of curling and other Olympic goodness. It seems foolish to not be accomplishing something while doing that. But, then there is today’s horoscope*…

You are a person with a multitude of talents. Still, at this point, there’s more to be gained from focusing intently on the projects you’ve already started rather than from bounding off to begin new ones.

Kind of creepily accurate isn’t it? Especially when I have some design commissions going on (not just knitting though)?? Hmmmm…..

*I’m not a big horoscope person, but I always find it kind of interesting when it seems as timely and spot on as today’s did, LOL!

Cough Syrup with Codiene Procured

The cough syrup Rx is in DH’s name, but it’s really for me ;-) Well, not for me to take, but so that I can sleep so I stand a chance of continuing to kick this bug in the @$$. I’m tired and I’m a bit drainy, but between my heavy vitamin C dosing, large amounts of fluids, frequent Epsom salt baths, and the Mucinex I don’t think this will become a sinus infection like most upper respiratory bugs end up being for me. But, when DH was coughing all night long I called in an appointment for him so that *I* could sleep. Selfish, I know…

I’ve been working on a new sock design with some other hand dyed sock yarn, but I haven’t touched it today. Partially because I decided I’d see how the yarn would be on US0′s rather than US1′s and compare over time how they hold up and for whatever reason that small difference in needle diameter makes a bit difference in my hands and requires frequent breaks and isn’t as enjoyable. But, also because I’m wishy washy about the design. It is quite similar to the very popular Spearfish. As I knit it I was deciding it was a bit too similar and switched things up a bit. I’m trying to decide if the switching things up was a good thing or if it is just a busy thing. Perhaps come Monday I’ll seek some suggestions. In the meantime I’ve half tempted to cast on for another pair on my US1s, but I have a plan for Project Spectrum with some yarn (from the stash even, I’m so proud) and that is the project that is consuming my mind right now but I should hold off on that a couple more weeks. But, I could be getting a *lot* of knitting done right now as we’ve been watching countless hours of olympic coverage.

Hopefully I’m able to continue to win the battle of the bugs over the weekend and I’ll be back to usual posting with more photos and excitement than of late…

Whew!

I should preface this post by saying that my “studio” (a 11 X 11 ft almost bedroom in the basement with a 1/2 bath attached) is a disaster area. You know how everyone has a junk drawer? Well, this room is the junk drawer of our house. If we have last minute cleaning to do for visitors this rooms catches it if it doesn’t have a home. I have no exposed desktop and hardly any exposed floor right now. It’s AWFUL, but I haven’t been well enough to attack it or at least to attack it on my own.

Well, one day this week I was looking for my stitch dictionaries and couldn’t find them. I made the studio that much worse trying to find them. While I was looking for them I decided to pull out all of my fiber arts books. As long as they were out I decided to finally catalog them. Yes, yes indeed, I am a geek of major proportions!

A few years ago we bought this great bundle of software from Collectorz.com. It was a bundle of the pro versions of Music Collector, Book Collector, and Movie Collector. We have our movies cataloged (well, most of them) but the music collection is huge so I told DH (the audiophile) I wouldn’t catalog them until we had a barcode scanner, but I may end up caving on that at some point. What is great about this software is that it allows you just enter the ISBNs (in the case of the books) or the UPC codes (in the case of the movies and music) and then it pulls the relevant info from sources such as Amazon, IMDB, Powell’s, Barnes & Noble etc. It even has options to pull info from Amazon UK, DE, etc. Then there are extra fields that you can populate or not such as store purchased from, purchase date, purchase price, MSRP etc. The pro editions also let you keep track of loans to other people! I *love* that feature!

One of the other features I really like is that you can export it to HTML and it auto inserts thumbnails of the covers. The only draw back is that the export isn’t dynamic so you can’t search for an author or an actor or a specific title. Though in most cases I find my browser’s search function does an okay job.

So, my fiber art library (knitting, spinning, tatting, sewing etc.) is cataloged and can be viewed at http://knitting.designedlykristi.com/library/ I know I find it interesting to see what others have chosen to put on their shelves. There are some pamphlet like things from the 60′s and 70′s that I got from Grandma Bakke about 1.5 years ago that I haven’t cataloged. But, I don’t see myself lending those out since most have loose covers and they have sentimental value. Also, since they don’t have ISBNs it isn’t so easy catalog them. I also made a fiber art book wishlist in this same format as well. What is great is should I get one of these books I just have to change the status and then it will be in the library rather than in the wishlist! How cool is that? If you have recommendations of titles you think I should add to the wishlist, I’m always open to suggestions :-)

These links now reside up top on the right in the “about” section should you care to scan them at some other point in the future.

I’ve also done a little housecleaning on the links section, adding some more blogs that I had been “test driving” and also adding a section for the PodCasts that I listen to that are fiber art related. I will be upgrading WordPress today or over the weekend and then I’m hoping to move the links onto their own page as the list is getting rather long.

As an aside, DH has been home ill since Monday. Yesterday I started showing signs of getting ill as well and had to go to the store to stock up on the meds and supplements that I can take (I have adverse reactions to most decongestants) and groceries before we got too much snow (yes, we’ve got a decent amount of snow on the ground now). But I’m a bit more on top of taking care of the bug now than he was so hopefully I won’t go down as hard or for as long as he did. Should I disappear you can assume my wishes weren’t granted and I have indeed fallen hard to the bug… But for now I mostly just have energy to do computer stuff alternating with knitting.

FO Alert!

Pattern: DK Swamp Socks (to be available soon), 64 Sts
Yarn: 1 Skein Knit Picks Color Your Own, in DK Bayou colorway, 440 yds Fingering Weight 100% Merino
Needles: 2 16-inch Addi Turbos in US 1 (2.5 mm)
Gauge: 8.5 sts/inch in st st
Recipient: Myself, because I’m greedy!
Process Dates: January 30th - February 13th, 2006

Notes: This pair of socks was an entirely new experience for me. I knit them on 2 circulars from the toe up. That meant learning a new cast-on (or two, I tried the provisional cast-on with a short row toe and then opted for the Turkish cast-on), making short row heels, and learning a new bind off technique (sewn bind-off). That said, this was one of the fastest pair of sock-weight socks I’ve knit despite two major frogging sessions between the pair (one session per sock). The gauge is a bit looser than I tend to usually use so I was using a smaller number of sts than my previous sock-weight socks so I’m not quite ready to conceed that socks soar on two circulars. Though I did like 2-circs much, much better than magic loop and may end up being a convert. We’ll see how I feel using them for top down varieties…

I wore the socks all day yesterday and have had no problems of the sock twisting on my foot like I feared would happen with the short-row heels. I did do one more set of wraps on the second heel to narrow it a bit and that did help get rid of the “ears” my heel had with the first sock. But I’m still not sure I’m a fan of the short row heels. I really don’t like that the sides of the heel don’t match (I know, how very knit picky of me) and despite picking up extra stiches at the rejoin with the rest of the stiches I had holes to patch upon completion. The short row heel will be the major deterent for my knitting more socks tow-up. I won’t say I’ll never do it that way, but I’ll probably think pretty hard before choosing to do that again despite my success with the Turkish cast-on and the reverse wedge toe. I do have some yarn from DH that I’ll do toe up so he gets the maximum leg length possible as I know that he likes long legs on his socks and I’d rather not play a guessing game.