Ordinarily when I start a pair of socks, I’m fairly careful about the stitch I pick for the instep and ankles. It has to work with, not compete with, the color. The pattern repeat must divide into the total number of stitches without a remainder. Or, alternately, the pattern repeat should be wide enough that it won’t look weird used on the front and back and combined with a different pattern on the sides. It’s not that hard to figure out… usually.

I wanted a feather-and-fan variation for these socks. The one I chose — k2, m1, k1, m1, k2, sl 1, k2tog, psso — worked pretty well with the color in the yarn. I just needed to tweak it a little to make it fit. K2tog on each side instead of the double-decrease used elsewhere across the instep. Yeah… that was the ticket. We’ll come back to that later, gentle reader. I usually plan a little better.

I was really happy with the Eye Of Partridge stitch on the heel flaps. You can see a side view at the top of the picture on the left-hand sock, and the whole heel flap on the folded right-hand sock. EOP looks so cool with multi-colored yarns, and fits in with the whole bird theme, dontcha know. So clever of me.

Then I finished the heel flaps and it was time to extend that lovely pattern to the back of the legs.

Remember how I tweaked the stitch pattern just a bit to make it fit across the instep? There’s this funny thing about decreases: If you want the total number of stitches to remain the same, each decrease must be paired with an increase. That tiny tweak on the sides meant that the increases and decreases were paired and all was right with the world. But, if I knit exactly the same pattern on the back as I was knitting on the front, I would have two double-decreases next to each other on the sides. Ick.

I wanted the socks to be symmetrical. I didn’t want the double-double-decreases on each side. So, as I rounded the turn from front to back, I moved one stitch from back to front and changed the k2tog to a sl1, k1, psso. And I confidently headed off across the back… k2, m1, k1, m1, k2, sl1…

You can see it coming can’t you, gentle reader?

I got all of the way across the back of the first sock before I realized what was going to happen. The original instep pattern had two stitches decreased over four stitches. I changed that a bit so that two stitches were decreased over three stitches. Twice. And that meant that there were two extra stitches there.

I stared at the offending sock in disbelief. Two extra stitches? Why? Oh yeah… I see why. Oh @#$%. Well… that was the least of what I said. I suddenly felt not so clever. Not clever at all.

I got out graph paper and started charting. I could either decrease two stitches in the back to make the pattern fit, or I could increase 6 stitches. The socks are nicely snug, and there is a wavy pattern, so I elected to increase 6 stitches. I started across the back again, doing a set-up round of increases. I must have been concentrating really hard. Really, really hard.

I concentrated soooooo hard on the stitches that, on the second sock, I picked up the wrong needles and started knitting and ended up with this sort of magic loop going on from the fronts of both socks to the back of the left-hand sock, and with the back of the sock on the right hanging by itself on its own needle. I stared at the needles in disbelief. Oh @#$%.

That took me awhile to untangle considering that I’d also managed to wrap the yarn several times around the needles between the socks. But I eventually made it around a whole repeat just as it was time to head off for lunch with M and then Saturday knitting at Tangle.

There’s this other thing about increasing and decreasing and working on pairs of circular needles: If the increases and decreases aren’t paired on each needle, the needle with more decreases will have fewer and fewer stitches each round, and the needles with more increases will have more and more stitches, and eventually the whole thing will end up rather unbalanced and hard to knit unless one either continuously moves stitches from one needle to the other, or at least moves enough stitches so that the whole thing becomes balanced. I stared at my needles in disbelief. Oh @#$%.

I don’t know if my fellow knitsters knew why I was cursing under my breath or not. Perhaps they decided that it was better not to ask. I finally did manage to get a balanced number of stitches on both needles so that I can now happily knit around and around and around and all is right with the world.

But I didn’t have much more time to knit this weekend because I did something even more fun than trying to fix my bollixed-up attempt at a nice feather-and-fan variation for my socks.

I did taxes.

~Kristie — sent you some info via email. Feel free to get any colorway. Chance are good the lovely ladies at Blue Moon made more than one skein of Covelite, so mine will not be one-of-a-kind. 😉

Sigrid — welcome to the rank of Yarn Collectors!

… I truly do miss my brain the most.

As I pulled into Tangle last evening to teach a sock class, I realized that I’d forgotten all of my class materials at home. Oops.

Alice loaned me a package of stitch markers. My wonderful students rallied and let me borrow their books and rounded up a few pencils. Fortunately we had done all of the “sock math” last week, so the lack of calculators didn’t cause too much of a problem.

Last night the sock magic happened as everyone knit back and forth, back and forth for awhile, and suddenly… there was a heel. I never get tired of the look of delight on people’s faces as they realize that they’re actually knitting a sock — look! There’s a heel! — and it’s not that hard at all! 🙂

A small addition to the collection was waiting in the mailbox at home after class.

Gentle reader, I can’t begin to tell you how much I have lusted after this yarn. This is Blue Moon Seduction in the colorway Covelite. Even though I had to take an icky artificial-light picture, the colors are fairly true on my monitor. It really is that deep chocolate, purple and mauve.

With 50% merino and 50% tencel, it has a wonderful sheen. I can’t wait to knit with it!

Oh… I could just eat it up!

I think I’m going to have to teach a sock class very soon!

Well… that was the upgrade from hell.

I think it’s all OK now. I hope. After completely rebuilding my WP installation from scratch and completely revamping my theme. I think we’re good to go.

Do let me know if you find something that’s broken or weirder than usual. And thanks for your patience.

Confidential to WP developers: Your opinion that something doesn’t make sense should not be taken as an indication that it’s OK to remove functions that users have come to rely on, or to make those function suddenly out of reach of those who aren’t comfortable hacking about with their templates. Nor is it OK to just willy-nilly rename stuff simply because it would be so much cleaner. And, yes, I realize that this is a labor of love for you. How wonderful. Working for a large company where that sort of no-warning impact to downstream users would get you fired might give you a slightly different point of view. It’s not about you any more. It’s about your thousands of clients who want things to just keep working.

Persistent Illusion was down for awhile yesterday during a fairly major WP upgrade. The changes should be mostly transparent. But if you find something that’s broken, please let me know!

No, those two things in the subject have nothing to do with one another really. It’s an accident of proximity.

After spending the entire week in the knitting black hole where hours of knitting produce… nothing… the Rooster Feather socks are up to the gussets. At last. They might still be in the black hole, except I decided rather nonchalantly that I would check my row gauge. Yes, gentle reader, when knitting socks there is a difference between 12 rows/inch (assumed gauge) and 11 rows/inch (actual gauge).

By a stroke of good fortune, the knitting gods smiled on me and I checked gauge just when I got to the place that it mattered. What are the odds that will ever happen again?

What can I say except do as I say and not as I do!

Here we see the Rooster Feather socks being used as a neck warmer by my blackboard chicken. She seems a little surprised, don’t you think? The color pooling is still playing happily with the condensed feather and fan pattern. It was a good choice for these socks.

I wish I didn’t need to take flash pictures, but it’s so dark at my house in the winter. At this time of year, the sun makes it over the mountain for only a brief time before setting. Although we’ve been having temperatures in the 40’s during the day, there is still ice in the gutter in front of my house. It’s cold in the shade, and there just isn’t enough sun to warm things up all the way. The good news is that no more water is being added into the mess so whatever leak there was up the street must have been fixed. The ice is slowly evaporating. If we could get above-freezing temperatures at night, I think the ice would finally melt.

Yes, that is the Periodic Table Of The Fruit And Nuts hanging behind the chicken.

When not using the blackboard chicken to leave a message for #1 Son, I used to write Welcome! on the chicken’s side. A nice little greeting for visitors, you know. My message would be crossed out and added to by #1 Son and his teenage cronies. For a long time it said pay homage to my chicken gringo. I never exactly understood that, but I’m willing to go with the flow. We live on the nutty side of the above mentioned periodic table.

Some people have had trouble commenting. 😥 Last night I fired my old spam-blocker and hired a new one as I think that was contributing to the issues. Please leave a comment to help me do a shake-down test. Thanks!

So… not much knitting to show. The Rooster Feather socks are in the knitting black hole. It doesn’t matter how long or how diligently I knit on them. If you look at the picture in the last post, that’s pretty much what they still look like. Progress only comes in tiny little increments. I have an inch or two left before the gusset increases start. I have to be ready to turn the heels by Tuesday. I. Will. Make. It.

You know, when #1 Son moved out I lost half my blog-fodder. I must resolve to do something more than work (not blogged about) so I have more stuff to blog. Either that or I’m going to have to start hanging out with #1 Son and all his buddies.

No… As much as I love him… well… I think not.

Confidential to Maia: Your first comment was put in moderation. I have no idea why, since there didn’t appear to be anything remotely spam-like about it. At least it didn’t send you to the FBI site, which is what it used to do. There seems to be a very fine line between “spam” and “not spam.” I’d really like to eliminate the former while letting the latter go through uneventfully. The technology just doesn’t seem to be quite there yet.

If anyone else ever has problems posting a comment, please let me know!

On another note, gentle reader, I don’t know if you have seen the new article by Kate Antonova in knitty.com titled It’s not a stash… It’s a collection? It’s a good article. But, just remember, you heard it here first.