OK…. I have a little knitting content for you today. But very little, I’m afraid.

Because I don’t seem to have the time to concentrate on any larger projects In an attempt to keep 2006 the Year Of The Sock, I have two new socks-aborning on the needles.

To the left is the reborn Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock in Rainbow. My plans for these toes include a second stab at arch shaping a la Meg Swansen. I think I will work the instep and ankle in the stranded stitch from the Crusoe pattern in Knitty. These socks are being worked on my trusty Inox Gray US#2 circs.

To the right is a pair of socks I’m making as a gift. I don’t think the recipient reads here, but just in case I’ll only say that it’s someone who likes red and black a lot. The yarn is Cascade Fixation (I love-a love-a love-a this yarn) in colorways 3628 (cherry red) and 8690 (black). The needles are Clover US#3 circs.

Can you tell I’m glad it’s summer and time to start knitting cotton socks again? I think Fixation is so fun in its stretchy goodness, and it comes in such great colors. How much fun can one girl have? I’m thinking of doing the lovemeknot socks in it. But maybe not in red and black. I’m thinking lime green and maybe white.

Someone asked me a question about using the Magic Cast-On with striped yarns. How do you get the stripes to “fall right?”

Well… it depends on how you want the stripes to fall…

OK. I sorry for the smart-aleck answer, but it is true. The absolute middle of the sock toe will be between the two needles that are used for the cast-on. The tail makes the loops on one needles and the “working yarn” makes the loops on the other. You are probably casting on between 20 and 30 total stitches, and that doesn’t take much yarn.

If you want the first toe round to be one color, start the first loop in the middle of the color repeat so that the working yarn and the tail are both the same color.

If you want a little stripe of a different color at the toe, start the first loop where the color changes. This is nicely illustrated by the Rainbow socks in the picture above. These toes were cast on with the tail green and the working yarn yellow.

If you want both toes to start the same, measure how far it is from the needle to the next color change when starting the first sock, and start the second sock at the same place in the color repeat.

If you want your socks to stripe randomly, start in random places.

See? It’s not hard at all.

Cherries! Yum!

They’re almost ripe too. Now if I can just keep the birds away from them.

Every year the same thing happens:

1) I see that the cherries are almost ripe, but not quite.

2) I tell myself to give them one more day and then pick them.

3) I come out the next day to pick cherries, only to find that the local birds have completely stripped the tree, leaving me with nothing but a few seeds.

4) I promise myself that next year I’m not going to wait that extra day!

So… the countdown begins. I will report back on my cherry-picking luck.

And this is the promise of good things to come in September.

The grape vines were severely whacked back last autumn, so I didn’t think I’d have much of a harvest this year. But it looks like there will be just as many as there usually is. And that means all of my friends, my colleagues at work, and 1/2 of the neighborhood will be eating grapes until sick of them until I get sick of picking and leave the rest for the racoons until they’re all gone.

I really planted the grapes in order to shade the back patio. It’s in full sun all day in the summer and really needs the shade. But I wanted a deciduous vine because there’s no sun in the winter and I need the light. Grapes grow fast and fit the bill nicely. They covered the arbor and tried to take over the whole yard in 3 years. Now they get whacked back every year.

I only have two vines. Two. They produce bushels of grapes. I prune to keep them off the roof and to prevent a stranglehold on the cherry and silk trees and to keep them in line. I do not prune for production — never even think about it. I just whack. I don’t fertilize them. Heck — I don’t even water them. Makes me wonder why grapes are seen as touchy and hard to grow. Of course, if I planted an entire vineyard my luck would probably be decidedly worse.

No knitting news. I’m knitting, but nothing noteworthy right now. I frogged out the mermaid socks. I’m just not feeling the love there. I’ve strated that pattern twice with different yarns, and both times it’s gone in the frog pond. So I’m considering what to do with the rainbow yarn.

Helen declared my secret project to be “not socks.”

Nope. It was socks. I wanted to try a toe-up version of the fitted-arch socks in Meg Swansen’s Knitting.

Above are side, bottom and top views of the result. (Be sure to click on the pic to get the biggy version.) I made these anklets because my hands were too sore to knit with size US#1 needles any more I got bored knitting ribbed cables I think they look great that way.

The particulars:

• Socks That Rock in colorway Carbon
• two 24″ US#1 Inox Gray circular needles
• foot: stockinette stitch
• heel: Eye Of Partridge stitch
• cuff: ribbles (i.e. ribbed cables)
• technique: shaped arches

Lessons learned:

• I should have started the shaping back further from the toe. That would have kept the toe from being poochy underneath.
• This toe looks too pointy. I should try a toe that has the shaping closer to the sides.
• This colorway looks amazing in Eye Of Partridge
• For some reason the arch shaping kept the socks from pooling.
• Fitter arches feel great and I need to try this again.
• Band heels do not appear to fit my feet well.

On a completely different subject Daisy asks:

Can you give me more information on the Rose Festival? I am a single mom living in Wyoming, my daughter is attending college in Oregon, so I will be driving through Portland in two weeks to help her move out of the dorm. I have driven through Portland once, but did not get off the interstate, so I am not familiar with the city at all, I have always thought I would like to explore Portland, but don’t even know where to start. Would you mind giving me some information on the city?

Here are some links that hopefully will get you started on Portland and the surrounding area.

Portland Rose Festival, Portland visitor’s info
Mt. St. Helens
Multnomah Falls
Mt. Hood
the Oregon coast

One further hint: If you come during Rose Festival, bring your umbrella. It never fails to rain.

… there’s a rainbow…

I shot this pic last Thursday from a parking structure downtown. We don’t see the sun that often this time of year. It had been soggy all week, and then the sun broke through on the west side, although it was still raining to the east. And there between the buildings was a rainbow.

Do click on the picture to see the bigger version.

It’s Rose Festival now, or will be starting in a few days. We are, therefore, guaranteed rain for at least the next couple of weeks. But today the sun is shining, and ya gotta love it.

I hope everyone had a nice holiday! I had a very quiet holiday, although I did see a few friends. #1 Son is in and out and not much in evidence. He’s trying to get everything ready for the next tour, different band, starting soon.

This is what I worked on during the weekend. It’s a super-secret project. One of those just gotta try it, but will never admit it if it doesn’t work projects. So the picture is just a hint. I think it’s going to work.

Any guesses on what this is? Or, any guesses on what it should be? 😀

No progress on any other project. In fact, you can see that I haven’t even managed to get the page up for the Tipsy Knitter socks. It was a lazy weekend.

I need one of those every now and then.

… never let it be said that I can’t make a good one!

The task was not so hard. Not really. I simply needed to wind a hank of Socks That Rock into two balls. Usually I do that at home with my low-tech equipment (nostepinne and chair). Today I decided to wind at Tangle Knitting Studio because Alice has a yarn measure so it’s easy to tell when 1/2 of the yarn has been wound.

I have wound yarn there before. Really. But the yarn measure thingy is a little new to me.

It turns out that when the yarn goes through the measure thingy, the balls are wound sort of tight. I also had some problem with the ball winder coming un-anchored and falling on the floor. And I no sooner got that picked up and re-anchored than the center thing that the yarn winds around fell off with my ball on it. Needless to say that the first ball was a little strange looking. I decided to rewind it. I pulled on the center end, and it stuck. So I pulled a little harder, and the ball started to fall apart. Someone else needed to wind yarn, so I moved over out of the way and started trying to untangle my yarn.

And it got worse, and worse, and worse. At one point I actually had the yarn tangled through the slats on the back of a chair. I have no idea how I did that. I was afraid I would have to take the chair home. I told Alice I hoped she didn’t mind too much staying open for a little longer than normal.

When it became clear that my ball of yarn was becoming increasingly more tangled, I began to press other Tangle (oh what a now-appropriate name that is!) visitors and customers into service. Eventually there were three of us untangling different portions of the yarn while Alice tried to wind it with the ball winder.

Alice was only semi-successful because the part she had was so tangled.

But when the other end of the yarn was finally located and freed, and the chair was unchained, and we began to get a little bit of control back, I started winding the yarn on to the swift. Then it was down to myself swifting and Alice untangling, and we finally got it back on the swift.

From there I could wind it using the ball winder, and bypassing the measure.

I wish I’d thought to take a picture of us all hysterically untangling yarn. It’s amazing how tangled 500 feet or so of yarn can get. But I did not think to stop and grab my camera, so you will have to be content with pictures of my Tipsy Knitter socks, which I finished this morning.

The second picture is my happy feet enjoying the fine, yarny Tangle ambiance. Look at that lovely cabled heel! (click on the pictures for the biggy version)

And here are the finished socks after washing and blocking. They are a bit fraternal. But, strangely enough, if I hold my legs together the diagonal stripes on one leg meet the diagonal stripes on the other leg. There’s a couple of splotches of pooling, but both are under the foot, so who cares? I love their red rock stripy-ness. I think it fits the leaning ladders and cables perfectly.

The particulars:

• two Inox Gray US#2 circular needles
• Socks That Rock in colorway Red Rock Canyon
• The stitch pattern is called Tipsy Knitter in the Socks Socks Socks book and Tilting Ladders in Barbara Walker’s Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns. I used the pattern more as an inspiration than actually something to follow.

• Changes made: I knit toe-up instead of top-down. I used a star toe. I ribbed the top instead of using cables. I didn’t think the cables would hold the sock up as well as ribbing.

You can see from the pictures that the socks fit pretty good. They are a little big, especially in the toes. But I think washing without blocking will help them to pull in a little tighter.

They certainly fit a lot better than I thought they did on the night that I almost frogged them out!

And what am I doing with the yarn I was tangling up winding today? Ah… it’s something of an experiment. I will post pics if it works out.

Well, I didn’t get the Tipsy Knitter socks finished last night during Lost, although I knit before, during and after. I still have about 1/2 a pattern repeat and the ribbing. Then done. That’s a hard show to knit through, though. I had to keep stopping and paying closer attention. Some questions got answered. Only to raise new ones. What was with that ending, eh? It will be a long Lost-less summer.

So, since I have no pictures of the socks, I will give you more pictures from my garden.

When I was a little girl, my great aunts – my grandmother’s sisters – lived together in a little house. Or at least most of them did. Aunt Allie lived in her own apartment. I used to love to visit Aunt Allie because she baked her own bread, She would make special little loafs just for my brother and I. She baked them in a muffin tin, so they came out looking like little chef’s hats. It was the best bread I’ve ever had – flavored by memory, I know. And her apartment was on the parade route, so we would always visit her on parade days. I’m not sure why she lived alone, but the location was certainly good.

Aunts Bertha, Bess, Florence and Jose, who were all either widowed or had never married, and who were all childless, lived together. Some day I might write more about all of my great aunts, who were truly great. But this is really about their garden.

In the back yard, they had a bleeding heart bush. The climate there must have been better for bleeding heart than it is here, because their bush was as tall as me (not that tall back then), and mine isn’t even knee-high to a toddler (at least this year). I was always fascinated by this bush and by the heart-shaped flowers. Every time we would go to visit, I would ask if it was blooming. And if it was, I had to go out to the back yard and just be with it. Since I’ve grown old enough to have my own gardens, I’ve always planted some.

The Aunts also had a really cool little tractor sprinkler. You’d lay the hose out where you wanted to water and then set the tractor on the hose. It would follow the hose, watering as it went. I loved that thing.

Helga writes:

If you like the tea pot (I do, too!) go ahead and google “Siglinda Scarpa” and check out her pottery You will LOVE it, I’m sure. She is a (formerly) Italian artist now living and working in the USA.

I did and I found this site. And I love it! Thanks for sharing that with me Helga.

Shelly said:

Blogging is kind of like writing a book don’t you think? A tiny little bit, but over time a real body of work.

I guess you could think of it that way. But writing a book has always seemed to me to be… work. This is more like having my brain leak around the corners and catching the drips, except with more pictures.

The second picture is for you, Shelly. I took that picture yesterday. That’s my gallica, blooming away! So it’s time to visit Heirloom Roses!

Please report on what’s new this year! I must be able to squeeze one more rose in my yard… just one…