Last week #1 Son asked to borrow my vacuum, just for a couple of days. I consented.

He came over last week while I was not home because I was knitting away in sock class and picked up both my vacuum and my carpet steamer. Later in the evening we had a phone conversation in which I tried to explain how to actually use the vacuum:

#1 Son: How do you use the attachments thingies?

Me: You have to pull the long handle tube out of the flexible tube thingy and then you attach the flexible tube to the other side of the handle and then you can put the attachments on the end of the long handle tube.

#1 Son: Is the flexible part supposed to go in the vacuum somewhere?

Yeah… it was one of those conversations.

I have called #1 Son a couple of times since… OK, more than a couple of times… to inquire after the health of my vacuum and find out when it would be returning. Soon I was promised. Soon.

Come back, vacuum… I need you…

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!