With all of the distraction of moebii, I haven’t done a lot on the Moose Creek socks, but you can see that they are moving along. I have managed to knit my way up to the gussets. I have about two more increase rows to go before turning the heel.

I think about two more. These socks are slightly off my normal gauge and I haven’t bothered to do the math yet.

You will remember, gentle reader, that I started these socks just before the Magical Moebius Festival, where all thought of this pair was banished from my mind, to be replaced by the lovely moebius and other, very cool, socks.

Not that these socks aren’t cool. I love the way that this little lace pattern (the repeat is only 6 stitches by 8 rows) is knitting up. The outside is all textured and bumpy and cushy.

When I first started, I mentioned that Barbara Walker thought the wrong side of this pattern resembled little elephants. I wasn’t so sure, but I hadn’t gotten very far yet.

The left side of the picture is the inside or wrong side. I can see the little elephants now, the lines of knit stitches making their little trunks. Cute little guys, eh?

But on the right side, I still don’t see elephants. The right side looks to me like so many little owlets, peeping out with their wide eyes framed by feathers, each standing on the head of the little owlet below. Can you see that? (be sure to click on the picture for a closer look)

Please tell me I’m not the only one who looks for animals in stitch patterns. 😆

I hope you can see the stitch pattern well enought to see the little animals. I’m finding this yarn very difficult to get good close-ups of. The top picture, with the socks reclining in my little boat basket (that’s what I call it), is pretty close to the actual color. Dark. Dark and rich. Dark chocolate with little touches of milk chocolate and a bit of midnight blue.

If I had one of those amazing, bazillion-pixel cameras with close-up lenses and all, I could probably get a better picture. But then I couldn’t carry my camera around in my purse and madly snap picture everywhere I go. It’s a trade-off.

Note to everyone: I cannot write about the horror at Virginia Tech. My heart goes out to the families and friends of all those involved.

The light was good this morning so I made an attempt to photograph the Moose Creek socks. This was as good as I could get. The colors in this are too light. It’s really a rich, dark blend of chocolates and purples, with a very dark teal and some golds. But it has to be this light to even attempt to show the lace.

The lace pattern I’ve chosen is Hourglass Eyelet from Barbara Walker’s A Treasury of Knitting Patterns (the first one). It’s a fairly simple pattern with a 6-stitch/8-row repeat (actually 4 rows, but two of them are repeated multiple times). This book has only written pattern instructions. I charted this pattern and modified it to work it in the round vs. flat.

Lace, of course, needs to be blocked in order to be shown to it’s fullest advantage. I tried stretching the toes on my sock blockers, but I couldn’t get enough length to really stretch the pattern out. I’m not sure what it will look like on my foot — maybe it will be bumpy and honeycomb-ish. It’s very springy on the needles.

Barbara Walker asserts that the back side of this pattern reminds her of baby elephants. I’m not seeing it. But I may take a picture when I get a little further along and see what y’all think.

TutleyMutley knit the Snake River Socks and found a few… dare we say it… challenging places where the pattern didn’t quite match the actual finished product. Oops.

Since she has kindly shared what she found, I felt it only fair to update the pattern and remove the errata. If you downloaded the pattern before today, please download a new copy so that you have the latest version.

Or, you could just fake it. I’m not opposed to that, either.

Tomorrow I take off for the Oregon coast for several days of fun and knitting with Cat Bordhi. I can’t wait! Keep the home fires burning and I will return.

… 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!

I present to you, gentle reader, the first finished object of 2007 — Mountain Blueberry Socks.

I used Mountain Colors Bearfoot yarn in colorway Mountain Twilight. In reality it’s a deep, rich mix of purples, deep blues and just a bit of a purpley chocolate. My camera does not play well with these colors and this is the best I could do. The picture in no way represents the beauty of this yarn. It was nice to knit with, too — very soft and cozy.

I did take this pic outside so I would have natural light. See on the bare branches of my Japanese maple? Yeah… that’s frost. It was cold, cold, cold this morning (by Portland standards). I shivered in the cold as I stood outside in cotton pants, a sweatshirt and sockless feet inside a pair of clogs, taking pictures of socks draped across a bare bush. It’s OK. My neighbors are used to my eccentric ways.

This pair of socks was knit for a colleague.

The Particulars:

• Yarn: Mountain Colors Bearfoot (60% Superwash Wool, 25% Mohair, 15% Nylon/ 100g, 350yds per skein) in colorway Mountain Twilight — allmost all of one skein.
• Needles: Knitpicks Classic circulars, US#1 (2.5mm).
• Pattern: Blueberry Waffle stitch, used with my own standard sock pattern.
• Techniques used:
  • Knit toe-up, two at a time, on double circulars.
  • I used the Magic Cast On.
  • The heel flap is worked in Eye of Partridge stitch. I added garter stitch edges.
  • The cuff is 1×1 ribbing.
  • Kitchener (grafted, tubular) bind-off.

But really… I have to share this with you!

Look at those little clams! The shells are white chocolate, and the clam is this sort of dark chocolate mousse stuff, and look – it even has a little pearl! Aren’t those just cool. And the little chocolate presents with the gold ribbons. And the little chocolate roses.

P made these — made them with her own hands!

My knitbuds at Tangle had a little party on Tursday night in celebration of my birthday. I was shocked and awed, because believe me I wasn’t expecting anything. And in my wildest dreams I never would have expected…

… the best cheesecake I’ve had in my entire life, also provided by the amazing P.

I wasn’t able to snap a picture before 1/2 of it mysteriously disappeared. But this is better anyway, because I can show you how cool the swirly center was. And you can see that it has an Oreo crust.

Yeah… the whole evening was pretty much death by large quantities of chocolate.

Fortunately L brought some baked brie with bread to provide a little counterpoint and soak soak up some of the sweet.

It was a happy death.

My first clue that something was afoot were these balloons tied to the back of a chair in the knit circle. That and the usual suspects all saying you get to sit here because it’s your birthday.

Oh… I had so much fun! And I can’t begin to thank everyone there enough. It was just cool.

When I left Tangle, I hurried to meet #1 Son for dinner. He wanted to take me out for my birthday a day early, because he left for Seattle with his band on Friday night for a couple of days.

And I had to eat.

I tell you, gentle reader… greater love hath no mom than she will pretend to eat a tostada (it was the smallest thing I could order) after polishing off some of that cheesecake. But it was great to get together with #1 Son. Our schedules seldom jive anymore for longer than 5 or 10 minutes. That’s what happens, I guess, when your kids grow up.

Oh… and just maybe the evening included a little bit of knitting.

I can’t show you more than this because, well, it’s a surprise. (LT, avert your eyes!) But aren’t the colors just glorious in the sun!

Lisa writes that she’s been eying the Seasilk. Lisa… get out now while you still can. If any of this falls into your hands, you will be instantly addicted for life.

I’ve knit with silk before, but this stuff is just something else again.

Shelly — OK… I need to know more about why you were geologizing at Swan Valley in the Pleistocene. I mean… c’mon, girl! You can’t leave a comment like that and then expect me to let it lie there!

Happy weekend, everyone!

When I was a little girl, way back only shortly after the dinosaurs, my favorite ice cream flavor was Butter Brickle.

We didn’t have ice cream very often. It was a treat that was almost always reserved for family picnics and gatherings during the short Idaho summer. The grown-ups in charge of ice cream purchasing almost always stuck with the big three – vanilla, strawberry and chocolate – because almost everyone liked one of those. Sometimes, just for variety, they’d get Neapolitan. Yeah, yeah… my relatives really think outside the box.

I don’t remember many ice cream flavors back then. Sometimes on Sunday we’d go for a drive to a little town called Swan Valley. It’s along the South Fork of the Snake, on the way to Jackson Hole. There wasn’t much in Swan Valley (still isn’t) but a highway T-intersection, a bar, a gas station. And the Swan Valley Commissary, home of the square scoop. Nowadays the Commissary offers 30 flavors of ice cream displayed for your pleasure. Back then, the proprietor would ask my brother and I what flavor we wanted. We have vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, he would say. Even then I was a chocoholic and bro always wanted strawberry. The proprietor would return from the freezer with a big tub of ice cream. I guess we’re out of everything but vanilla. He’d use the coolest little scoop to serve our ice cream. It made little ice cream blocks instead of balls. I’ve tried for years to get one of those scoops. If you’re ever in the area, check it out.

But I digress… Sometimes, like on my birthday, I really got to pick the flavor I wanted. And I picked Butter Brickle. (Mama usually bought a 1/2 gallon of Neapolitan also, so everyone can have what they like.)

I was blessed by having a birthday late in the summer right before school started, when the weather was almost always perfect and everyone was ready for an end-of-summer bash. The blessing was tempered by getting to always share my birthday party with my Great Aunt Florence. In my later years I came to appreciate Aunt Florence very much. But when you’re 6 or 8 or 10, you just don’t want to share your party with a cheek-pinching sister of your grandmother.

So Mama let me pick the ice cream.

Butter Brickle became harder and harder to find, and by the time I was in high school there just wasn’t any. Although I’ve tried a lot of wonderful ice cream flavors, I missed my childhood favorite. Figuring that the internet is a large place, and somewhere there might be some Butter Brickle stashed away, I googled to see what I could find.

I found out that Butter Brickle was the trade name of an English toffee made by the Fenn Brothers Ice Cream and Candy Company. That company was liquidated in 1970 (thus the dearth of Butter Brickle). The secret recipe and the trademark were sold to the Heath company, which already manufactured an English toffee bar (i.e. the Heath bar) that was essentially identical to Butter Brickle. The Heath Company was sold to a Finnish company in the 1990’s, and then to Hershey in 1998.

Hershey, I learned, makes a Butter Brickle ice cream — but only in 3 gallon drums that won’t fit into my freezer.

But today at the grocery store I spotted… drum roll please

Heath Bar Ice Cream

I don’t remember whether Butter Brickle had a toffee swirl in it. But when I tasted that first bite of Heath Bar Ice Cream, I was transported back to those lazy summer picnics — mustard on my fingers from the hot dogs; trying to balance Mama’s amazing and dense potato salad on a plate made from (it seemed) tissue paper; tossing balls and jumping rope; Aunt Florence letting me blow out the candles; and getting to pick the ice cream.

I’m a big girl now. I drizzled a little Kahlua over it.