More socks, and on to bigger things
I finished my second pair of springtime socks last weekend, and things warmed up enough around mid-week that I got a chance to wear them. Woohoo! Of course, it's rainy and cold again now, but that's April in Western Oregon (perhaps I should be knitting socks to go with galoshes).
The details:
Pattern: Hedera, by Cookie A.
Yarn: Crystal Palace Panda Silk (50% merino, 25% silk, 25% bamboo) in "Berry Smoothie". Two 204-yard skeins, with maybe a fifth of each skein left over (I could have made these longer, but I like my warm-weather socks no higher than 3-4 inches above the anklebone). One could get a couple more inches of sock length from this yarn, though.
Needles: US 1 (2.5mm). As is my habit for socks I'm going to be hauling around with me, I knit these on two Susan Bates powder-coated circulars instead of DPNs, which I tend to yank out of the stitches when I'm getting them in and out of the Ziplock I use as a portable knitting bag.
I've been knitting a lot of toe-up socks lately, so it was fun to go back to cuff-down construction, and Hedera's a pleasing pattern to knit; the four-row repeat is easy to memorize and to "read," so I was able to catch errors (I tend to drop yarnovers) as I was going and fix them before I'd gone far. The pattern has my preferred gusset shaping and slip-stitch heel, too. And boy, has my Kitchener grafting improved over the past couple of years - the toes are as neat as can be.
Panda Silk is yummy yarn, soft enough for baby items but with enough elasticity from the merino content to hold the shape of the lace. My generally loose tension, combined with the drape of the silk and bamboo content, means these are a little slouchy; next time I knit with this yarn (and I will), I'll try going down a needle size if I want the socks to cling a bit more.
Now I'm working on Juno Regina, the pretty stole from the Fall 2007 Knitty. I'd been waffling over the yarn for this one, and I'm on a bit of a tight budget thanks to recent travel and camera acquisition, so I dug into my stash for the two skeins of Hand Maiden Sea Silk (in the Nova Scotia colorway) I've been hoarding for a year-and-a-half, since the pattern I had in mind for it hasn't been published yet (gentle *nudge* to brightshadowsky, who I know has been pretty doggoned busy).
I had to go down to US 3 needles to get gauge, and even without a ton of knitting time I've already made it through the diamond section at one end and am merrilly (and almost mindlessly) working my way through the long center section while waiting for my computer to boot up, sitting in meetings at work and waiting for the doors to open at rehearsal each night.
Because Sea Silk is both drapey to the point of floppiness and lighter-weight than pure silk, I decided to work some iridescent glass beads into the piece to add a little weight and sparkle; I'm slipping them on the necks of live stitches with a wee crochet hook (rather than pre-stdringing them on the yarn, which is a pain in the as), so that slows things down a bit but also keeps me focussed.
Knitty rates this pattern "piquant" (Knitty-talk for "requires a fair amount of experience and/or brains") but other than having to pay attention - which, really, is true of any pattern more complex than a garter stitch rectangle - I'm finding this very easy, and a lot of fun to knit.
Here's what it looks like so far: A wad ofshiny blue-green loops puntuated by iridescent green beads. Such is the nature of lace, at least until it's been blocked. This will be a lovely wrap for the theater and other dressup occasions, even though it's outside my usual color palette (but the greens look surprisingly good against deep purple, so there!)