The Snake River socks are progressing up the ankles. No, I have no pictures. Yes, it’s still raining. No, there is no light. It might stop raining briefly this weekend, at which time I will madly snap all kinds of pictures of anything I have knit lately.

Yes, I would like some cheese with that whine.

I just found out that I need to provide a $10 - $15 gift for a gift exchange. I’m thinking that knitting a quick hat (need to have it by Monday) would be much preferable to venturing out into the malls and shopping centers of America amidst crazed shoppers looking for that perfect bargain with only 10 shopping days left before the immovable Christmas deadline. If I use something stripy like Noro it will look a lot harder and more expensive than it was. What do you think, gentle reader? Can this knitter, to whom deadlines have not been kind lately, actually produce something on time?

Since I still have no real knitting content here, I will offer this picture of my lovely and wonderful niece Z at her school’s Christmas program. (She attends a private school so they can still call it a “Christmas Program.”) The kids were all super cute and the program was fun. I’ve sort of missed this kind of thing a bit since #1 Son has grown up and stopped doing school programs.

Lovely Z is in the middle row, 3rd from the left. Bro and Sis-In-Law are rightfully proud of their little girl! (And so am I!)

I’ve tried several time today to take a decent picture of my progress on the Snake River Socks, but I’ve been unable to get decent light all day. Even at work, where I sit next to a window, the gloomy rain, rain, rain has turned my pictures to gray blobs. So you will have to take my word for it that I am up the ankles and on the home stretch. I’m very pleased with the heel. I ripped it out a couple of times before I came up with something that I like. You’ll have to take my word for it that it looks great.

I hate winter. Actually I just hate the gloom. If we could have a bright rain falling from blue skies, I wouldn’t mind at all.

Note that I don’t mind not having snow.

#1 Son, Bro, Sis-in-law, Neice Z and I all went out for dinner last night and then to Christmas With The Trail Band. It’s a holiday tradition for us. The Trail Band, founded by Marv & Rindy Ross (once of Quarterflash) are marvelous musicians and their show always includes wonderful guest performers. I love listening to selections from The Nutcracker performed on glockenspiel and hammered dulcimer (with help from others). One of my favorites this year was an arrangement of Baby, It’s Cold Outside featuring recorder and reed contrabass (think tuba only with keys and a much, much, much lower register). The alphorns were pretty cool, too. One of the performers, Cal Scott, told a story about riding the train during Christmas time.

It reminded me of my own riding the train story, which I offer to you, gentle reader, in lieu of knitting pictures.

I don’t remember what time of year it was. I was very young - maybe 4 or 5 at most. We were traveling by train to the magical world of Disneyland. We were my Mama and Dad, Bro, my cousin Margaret, and myself. Margaret is older than I and must have been about 15 or 16 then. She was along to help with the kids (that would be Bro and I). By train it was an overnight trip, so Mama and Dad had booked accomodations in a Pullman car. There was a really cool pull-down berth, as I recall. And a table the folded out from the wall. I was quite fascinated with it.

These were the days when dining cars were formal, and children of such tender age as Bro and I were not allowed. To this day I’m not sure whether that surprised my parents, or they had counted on it. At any rate, they left us in the compartment with Margaret while they dined in style, and then they brought our dinners back to us on trays.

The little table was unfolded and our dinner layed out, and I knew that I had gone to heaven because dinner included fruit salad. The canned type. And right on top was a whole half of a big maraschino cherry. Canned fruit salad was absolutely my favorite thing in the whole, wide world. I usually had to fight Bro for the cherry — but there was my very own. Right there on top! And not a little piece, either, but a whole half!

I lifted up my spoon to dig in…

The train went around a bend…

All of our dishes slid off the little folding table and on to the floor with a crash and a splash.

And that was the end of my fruit salad.

My parents called for the Porter and the mess was quickly cleaned up. But by the time they went back to the dining car, service was closed. They were gone a long time, or it seemed like a long time, because it took awhile to find someone who was willing to make a couple of sandwiches for hungry kids. We did eventually eat, but there was no more fruit salad to be had anywhere on the train. I was unconsolable. Even the adventure of getting to sleep in the really cool pull-down berth did not assuage my sadness. I mean… I didn’t even get to eat the cherry!

I remember nothing of Disneyland or of the journey back. But I remember watching my fruit salad slide off the table just like it was yesterday.

I do like to journey by train even today. But I hang on to my food now with a tenacity that probably surprises my fellow passengers.

I really was beginning to think that I’d lost my sock mojo. Maybe each of us has only so many pairs of socks in us, and after that it’s on to sweaters or hats or something. Socktober was not a happy time for me. I ended up frogging out the first pair. And then the Jaywalkers, even though I really like the results, were just a hard, hard, hard slog all the way from toe to cuff. And the Downpour socks, while fun to knit along with the class and while I love the results, were also a bit of a never ending, interminable slog.

I didn’t use to slog through socks. Socks were my thing! Socks were nothing! I could knit them with my eyes closed, and I loved every one. Is the mojo gone?

Gentle reader, let me introduce you to the newest pair. I started these only a few days ago, and even though I have had not a lot of knitting time, they are just falling off my needles.

This pair is based on Sock Bug’s free River Rapids Socks pattern. Except, as is my wont, I changed it. I am knitting toe-up instead of cuff-down. And I decided I didn’t want them to be lacy, so I am using M1 increases instead of YO’s.

The stitch pattern reminds me of snakes. So at first I was thinking snakes on a sock, but that’s been done before.

But the color… The yarn is Koigu. The color — although this is a bad, early morning, no light in Portland winter picture — is fairly true on my monitor. It’s green with flecks of blue and red and orange and darker green. It reminds me a lot of Big Springs. There’s a large pond there, with water shaded by the trees and dappled green and brown. Take a look at the water in this picture and you’ll see what I mean. There’s a bridge that crosses the pond, and from the bridge you can see the fish in the water — rainbow and cutthroat trout, mostly, speckled and with orange and red sides flashing. Big Springs is the source of Henry’s Fork (the northern fork) of the Snake River.

This pair of socks is hereby dubbed Snake River Socks.

Interestingly enough, I’m have not hit the usual instep black hole where I knit a bazillion rounds for hours and hours, only to gain a whole 1/2″ of knitting. This time I knit a few rounds, and suddenly I have four inches. Maybe it’s because the stitch pattern is fun to knit and fun to see what it’s going to do next.

Ah…. the mojo is back…

Now I can knit a sweater.

The sun made a brief appearance today and the light was just right to take this picture. The Downpour socks are posing on my wisteria, bare in the winter chill. The colors are perfect to set off the stripy gray and brown and taupe of the yarn. It’s fitting that these were knit during the wettest November on record in Portland.

And look! No pooling! It’s a miracle. The stripes do get thinner over the gussets, but it’s not unattractive. The stripes are much wider on the ankles than on the feet, even though there is the same number of stitches around and my gauge remained constant. The only difference is that the ankles are ribbed all the way around.

They are a little shorter than I usually like to make socks. But since I knit until I ran out, it’s as long as they can be.

The Particulars:

• Yarn: Socks That Rock ( 100% Superwash Merino/ 4.25 oz, 350yds per skein) in colorway Downpour — all of one skein.
• Needles: Knitpicks Classic circulars, US#1 (2.5mm).
• Pattern: My own toe-up ribbed guy’s socks.
• Techniques used:
  • I used the Magic Cast On.
  • I used heel stitch on the heel flap.
  • The top of the foot and the ankle are knit in K3P1 ribbing.
  • Not thinking what I was doing, I missed on the heel stitch and ended up with the ridges matching up to the purl stitches in the ribbing. I decided I liked how it looked - it made the ribbing stand out - and when I started the K1P1 ribbing at the top I offset it from the ribbing on the leg.
  • When I started the ribbing on the toe, I started with the purl stitches in the middle first and then each row I started a new purl rib at the next spot away from the center. So the start of the ribbing follows the curve of the toe, if that makes sense.

It’s not a good idea, it turns out, to pose socks or other knitted items amongst roses, even though the drying rose hips looks so cheery. Roses, it turns out, have thorns and thorns can snag yarn (and fingers) and lead to time spent carefully rearranging loops of yarn. Just saying.

I have started the next pair of socks. You may note from the progress meters that they are chartreuse. I am saving pics for later posts. I gotta have something left over for blog fodder!

hpny knits asks:

I LOVE your snow video. How did you do that (post it)? its great.

I took the film clip with my camera, which stores video as an .avi file. I converted the .avi to an .flv, reduced its size, and uploaded it. Then I used Joshua Eldridge’s Flash Video Player plugin for Wordpress to display it in the little flash player.

It took me about 10000 times as long to figure out how to do it as it did to write it down in the above paragraph. You may have noticed a couple of days where there was a dearth of blogging? Picture me, seated at my desk, swearing…. I know I can get this blasted thing to work!

Finally, I saw this at ~Kristie’s blog, and I just had to post my results because they were so right on!

Christmas Elf Name My Christmas Elf Name is Get your Christmas Elf Name at JokesUnlimited.com

I’m still fighting the cold thing, and the work thing, and the other distract-Judy-from-knitting things. How many pictures of half-finished socks and crumpled sweater pieces and long-forgotten UFOs can I show you, gentle reader, before you run screaming from this blog?

So, in stead of not-much-has-happened pics, I offer you this little video of the snow falling on my back yard last Monday. It was so pretty! I wish I had taken a longer shot. The thing that looks like a weird rope hanging on the left is one of my grape vines. I didn’t have shoes on, so shot this while leaning out the back door. Yeah… that’s how big my back yard is. I have tablecloths that are larger. But that’s OK.

PoliticalCritic (do you knit, too?) asks:

How is the weather normally in Portland? I’m on the east coast, but am considering a job out there? Does it rain as much as Seattle?

Personally, I love the Portland area and can’t imagine living anywhere else. But that’s just me. Does it rain as much… you know, I’m not sure. I think it might rain a little more in inches in our fair neighbor to the north. But we certainly have as many gloomy days. It’s a little warmer here in Portland. Seattle gets more snow, but snow here is a rare occasion as is freezing rain. December and January are hard to slog through. But we usually have some lovely spring-ish weather in February. September is glorious. And the rain? You don’t have to shovel it…

In other, non-knitting news, you will recall that #1 Son and I usually head to Las Vegas for a few days over the Christmas holidays. We see a show, take a tour, I do a little gambling, #1 Son does a little sleeping. It’s quite an enjoyable interlude.

This year, #1 Son has informed me that a tour has been booked for the time between Christmas and New Years because that is the only time that they can all go, and so he will not be available to go to Vegas. But maybe we could do something before or after the tour? I pointed out that the time between Christmas and New Years is all of the time that I have off, too.

I admit to being in a snit for a few days.

How dare he? How dare he grow up and act like a responsible adult and have a life and make plans that didn’t include his mom? How dare he?

Then I realized how stupid that sounded. I mean really.

So I will go to Vegas by myself. Why not? Vegas is lots of fun… it will mean more gambling time, right? Hopefully my pocket book will hold out!

I can report that the class socks are nearing completion. I’m almost out of yarn, so the end will come most likely today. Nothing else has progressed past the point you last saw it.

~Kristie opines:

I guess the stripe effect on your socks looks different because there is NO pooling!! LUCKY LUCKY!

I will try and post a finished pic tomorrow, and you will see that the socks never pooled. On the gussets the stripes changed a bit, but still didn’t pool. Ever.

I can’t take credit for it because pooling / not pooling is always, for me, completely beyond my control. I am open to any/all suggestions because, believe me, I don’t like things to be beyond my control. Just ask #1 Son (see above).

hpny knits offers:

striping socks- hmmm, some stripes depend on # of st per round, and changing that just a bit- can get it right.

So right! But I hate to choose between the correct stitch number for the yarn and having socks that fit.

One of my challenges is that my feet are skinny, so when making socks for myself I use a small number of stitches per round than average for my size of sock. That throws the pattern off sometimes. There’s not much I can do about the width of my feet, as much as I would like to!

I also like to knit a flap-and-gusset heel. Increasing for the gusset offers another challenge in that the number of stitches changes and throws off the yarn colors again. I could alleviate this by knitting a short-row heel. But short-row heels don’t fit my feet as well because I have high arches. So, again, I could have well-fitting socks or socks that stripe nicely.

It’s a conundrum, gentle reader.