Tangle farewell party

Last Thursday the usual suspects held a little goodbye party for Tangle Knitting Studio. It was a chance to laugh and cry and reminisce. And there may have been adult beverages involved. (Did you know, gentle reader, that there’s such a thing as blueberry vodka? And it’s not, actually, blue? Whodda thunk it.) And there was plenty of food, too. We’re not just a bunch of lushes.

I feel like I have lost something that can’t be replaced. But I know that Thursday Night Knitting will continue, in some way, in some place. I probably won’t be able to buy yarn at the same time, but the important thing is that I will still be able to see my knitbuds on a semi-regular basis. I’ll just have to plan to come with plenty of yarn. It can be done.

It’s not like I don’t have an extra project or two on the needles.

Thursday night was also the night before #1 Son took of for a whirlwind tour of Europe with his band. And it is whirlwind – 28 shows in 9 countries in 28 days. Thursday night, the plan was that #1 Son would drop his car off at my house around 9:30 PM and I would give him a ride back to his house. They had a ride to the airport arranged for Friday morning, so I would tell him goodbye when I dropped him off. But I will pick him up on his way back home next month. That was the plan. This is how the timeline actually worked out:

[10:00 PM]
#1 Son (on the phone): Hi, Mom. I have just a bit of running round still to do. I should be there really soon.

[10:30 PM]
#1 Son (on the phone): Hi, Mom. It’s taking me longer than I thought. A lot longer. I’ll be there as soon as I can. It’s probably going to be late, though.

Mom: It’s already kinda late.

#1 Son: I know. Sorry. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Lots of stuff to do. I’m leaving for Europe tomorrow!

Mom: I am aware of that. 😀

[Midnight]
#1 Son arrives home. He still has stuff to do, mostly involving my computer and printer. The Truck has usurped the place in front of my house again, so he parked in my driveway, but way over to the side so I might be able to squeeze out past it (I park in the garage).

[12:50 AM]
#1 Son is ready to leave. We hop into my car. I back out carefully, avoiding his car, and we’re off. His phone rings constantly. In between brief, monosyllabic phone conversations, he give me driving directions. Don’t go that way. Turn left here. Take the freeway north, then east.

[1:11 AM] – we are almost to #1 Son’s house
#1 Son: $#!&

Mom: What?

#1 Son: I left my guitar and the bass in my car. We have to go back.

Mom (looking for nearest freeway exit to turn car around): $#!&

#1 Son (to caller on phone): Yeah. I know your ride is leaving my house. Go ahead and go home and I’ll just have my mom drop your bass off at your house. [ed. note – that’s as far from #1 Son’s house as my house – only in the opposite direction]

[1:30] – we arrive back at my house

[1:32] – we leave again. (Take the freeway again only go past my house. Head east. I’ll tell you where to get off. No! Turn left here!) – guess who said that

[2:10] – we arrive at the bass player’s house (I have to think of a good name for him, suggestions welcome). I wait in the car while #1 Son and Bass Player have a long conversation including many gestures and pointing at a sheet of paper that has something #1 Son has written on it.

[2:20] – we leave Bass Player’s house

#1 Son: Get on the freeway.

Mom: No.

#1 Son: But it’s faster! We’ll have to go through downtown if you go this way!

Mom: It’s 2:30 in the morning. I’m incredibly tired. I don’t want to drive on the freeway. It won’t take that much longer.

#1 Son (to caller on phone): It’s going to take longer than I thought. My mom won’t take the freeway so we have to drive through downtown. It’s going to take forever. I’ll be there as soon as I can. [ed. note: it added less than 10 minutes to the trip]

[2:40] – we arrive at #1 Son’s house

#1 Son: It’s really late. I’ll probably just stay up all night ’cause I can sleep on the plane tomorrow.

Mom (wishing she had a plane to sleep on tomorrow): I love you. Have a wonderful time. Be safe. Come home safe.

#1 Son: I will, Mom. I love you!

[note: he called me last night from Germany. The tour is going well. He is having the time of his life. I’ve almost caught up on my sleep.]

Monkeys Without Borders

I have not been idle. I finished the Monkeys Without Borders socks last Thursday. (Sorry, but I really can’t think of these with any other name.) I wore them last Friday. They fit quite nicely, thank you very much. 🙂

I know that you folks back east are having a heat wave. Here in Portland: not so much. Yesterday it was almost 70 with sunshine. But today we’ll be lucky if it makes 60 and it’s definitely not sunny. It’s still wool sock weather here. It’s been Rose Festival season, and that means rain and cold. Since it’s Rose Festival, though, I though it only right to pose these socks with roses. The only one I had in bloom when these pictures were taken was Eyepaint, and it’s the perfect color.

This is the first pair of Monkey’s that I’ve knit – I know, I was a little slow to hop on the Monkey bandwagon. I loved wearing them on Friday, and I can see these becoming one of my favorite pairs (thus the heel stitch on the bottom of the heel).

I love the way that this colorway knit up in the Monkey pattern. The white stripe is very subtle, until it gets up to the cuff where it becomes wider and more bold. Of course, there’s a sploosh of white during the heel turn. On one sock the sploosh is under the heel, and on the other it’s on top of the instep.

MWB heel

I don’t mind that STR pools around the instep. I could have knit these with a short-row heel if it had really bothered me.

The Particulars:

• Yarn: Blue Moon Socks That Rock Light (100% superwash merino / 4.5oz, 360yds per skein); one skein of Knitters Without Borders
• Needles: a pair of Knit Picks Harmony circulars, US#0 (2.0 mm)
• Pattern: Monkey by Cookie A.
• Modifications:
  • Knit toe-up, two at a time, using Judy’s Magic Cast-On.
  • Heel stitch under heel and on heel flap.

As soon as these socks were finished, I immediately cast on a new pair of socks with Stitchjones yarn in Andes Mint. You can get your own over at her Etsy shop.

I’m not sure what the new pair of socks are going to look like yet, but I’m not worried. The yarn will tell me what it wants to be.

Lantern Moon swag

Friday evening, Twisted, one of our wonderful local yarn shops, hosted a Lantern Moon trunk show. Lantern Moon is also a local Portland company. It’s just amazing how blessed we are here as fiber-ists. (Do I love my city? Oh yes, I do!)

Lantern Moon sources their wonderful products mostly from southeast Asia. They believe in being economically and environmentally responsible. They pay fair wages and help to provide training and safe working conditions while encouraging local artisans to continue the centuries-old hand crafts that are quickly disappearing. At Twisted, the Lantern Moon folks showed a very interesting slide show of their trips to Vietnam and some of the artists (I can call them nothing less) who create the beautiful products that Lantern Moon sells.

Twisted had a full range of Lantern Moon products available, and it was all on sale. So I think I showed admirable restraint.

From right to left… A set of US #0 Sock Sticks in ebony. Yes, I do use these every now and then. Really.

A silk needle cover for the two sets of Lantern Moon straight needles that I now have. (Before Friday I had one pair. Now I have two. You do the math.)

Two silk scarves – one that was hand batiked with this delightful picture of women carrying baskets, and a twisted scarf from Cambodia.

silk scarves

Then, when I had already gathered up my swag and paid for it, I happened to wander by Twisted’s wall of sock yarn (an entire wall of sock yarn, gentle reader), and spotted this skein of STR in the legendary colorway Calico which is not available on their website, and which I knew actually existed and wasn’t only mythical because I’ve seen Cindy knitting with it. Yeah. It came home with me. (There’s one left, Portland knitters!)

In this picture, I’ve untwisted the beautiful Cambodian scarf.

Yes, it really is those shades of green and dark berry, shifting together as the fabric moves. I have no idea how the weaver gets that effect. But it’s so cool and beautiful.

And please pop up the pick and biggy-size it so you can see the batik scarf. Look closely at what the women are carrying in their baskets. Balls of yarn. Is that not the coolest thing? Lantern Moon had this design exclusively made for them. There was one (ONE!) hiding under some other lovely silk scarves in a big basket, and yours truly snagged it. And that was followed by other knitters searching in vain for another one. But I wasn’t giving mine up! 😉

In local news, I will be teaching a couple of sock classes this summer at All About Yarn. This is a four-week, toes-up, two-at-a-time class. If you are interested, please contact the shop.

I don’t know if you have heard the news from Uruguay?

I am sure that Malabrigo would appreciate some prayers / good thoughts / energy sent.

I thinks it’s safe to say that my feet will not go cold in the winter. My sock drawer holds quite a few pairs of hand-knit socks. But I have my favorites. And I tend to wear my favorites more than the less-favored (but still nice) pairs. And because I tend to wear them a lot, I tend to wear them out. I am rather fond of blowing out the bottoms of the heels. It may be because my feet are narrow, and my heels even more so, and my shoes tend to be a little loose. Whatever the cause, I usually fail to notice that a pair is inching towards disaster until one morning, bleary eyed and caffeine-less, I pull on a pair of socks and realize that something just doesn’t feel quite right and my heel is a bit drafty…

I am then faced with a choice: to darn or to toss? So far, since it’s always been my favorite pairs, darning has won out. Since I have a pair that needs darning, I thought I would share the process with you, gentle reader, in case you also might want to darn a sock or some other knit object.

the tools of the trade

These are the tools of the trade:

• Thread for guy-wires. Any color can be used but a contrasting color is easier to see. It will be removed after darning.
• Yarn for mending. I had some yarn left-over from these socks and amazingly enough actually found it. I can use it for mending. If I couldn’t find it, I would try first to match the same yarn in a different colorway. Failing that, I would look for yarn of the same weight and ideally the same fiber content. Color is the least important factor because the patch will be on the bottom of my foot.
• Two needles: a sewing needle (for the thread) and a darning needle (for the yarn).
• A darning egg or some other roundish object to provide a solid surface on which to work.

adding structure

First, put the darning egg inside the sock and position the hole over it.

Examine the hole in the sock. Are stitches missing? Or has the fabric become thin and perhaps torn, but everything is still there? If all of the fabric is there, you can skip this step. But my socks have an actual hole with several missing rows of knitting. Before I can repair the hole, I must first create a structure to hold the yarn while I repair.

Thread a length of the thread onto the sewing needle. Starting on a row where all of the stitches are present, run the thread through the tops of the stitches of that row.

Turn and run the thread through the tops of the stitches of the next row. If stitches are missing, continue across the blank space with the thread and through the stitches on the other side of the hole.

Work back and forth with the thread until you have once again reached solid fabric. Secure the thread on both ends so it won’t pull loose while you are working.

duplicate stitching

Now thread a length of yarn onto the tapestry needle. Starting at the bottom of the hole – far enough down so that you are working in solidly knit fabric – begin duplicate stitching the first row.

When you reach the end of the first row, turn and begin duplicate stitching the next row above it. As you duplicate stitch this row, be sure to work through the stitches you just created in the previous row.

Continue working up the fabric, duplicate stitching through the stitches that are there.

filling in the hole

When you come to the point where there are no stitches – only thread – loop the top of your new stitch around the thread. The thread will keep the yarn loop that forms the stitch from accidentally dropping.

On the next row you will duplicate stitch through the loops that are held by thread in the same way as you duplicate stitched through the stitches held by other stitches.

In this picture, the brown stitches on the previous row were created by looping them around the thread. Now I am creating red stitches by stitching through the brown stitches on the bottom, and looping the red yarn around the thread on the top.

Continue duplicate stitching up the rows of the sock until you are stitching through the solidly knit fabric at the top of the hole.

finished patch

Once the patch is finished, weave in your ends and remove the thread.

Here is the finished patch on the bottom of my sock heel.

Although the other sock is wearing thing, it doesn’t yet have a hole in it. Since I’m darning one, however, I may as well go ahead and darn them both. The second sock will be easier because only the duplicate stitching is necessary. There is no actual hole, so the thread guy-wires aren’t required.

Darn those socks!

P.S. I will add this post under the Techniques menu so it will be easier to find in the future.

unblocked swatches

Dear Knitnana,

I love the Star Of Evening shawl you are knitting with Zen Yarn Garden in the Meezer colorway. Thus my reply — Why?!?!? – when you emailed that you were ripping it out. Because, you said, it’s superwash so it can’t be blocked.

My first thought was… Really? I don’t recall every pondering this particular question before. Certainly the socks I knit — which are mostly some variety of superwash merino — benefit from the blocking I give them at their first bath so that they photograph well.

And that got me thinking. Why can’t it be blocked?

Animal fibers shrink and felt (with varying degrees of success or failure, depending on your point of view) because of tiny scales on the fibers that open up and then lock together. Wool is made washable by one of two different processes: either an acid bath is used to strip off the little scales, or minute amounts of polymer are used to glue the scales down. The wool loses its ability to felt. But does it lose some other essential wool-ness that allows it to be blocked?

Obviously an experiment was in order.

blocking swatches

I knit two swatches using a chart from one of those wonderful Japanese stitch pattern books. This is the second book in this series that I’ve purchased. I don’t read or speak a word of Japanese. But the books have beautiful photographs and charts, and illustrations of what the more unfamiliar chart symbols mean, so an adventurous knitter can puzzle it out. The patterns appear quite unusual and lovely to my American eyes. The first book is all knit patterns, mostly lace and cables (often combined). This book is 1/2 crochet, with not only patterns for larger objects, but some gorgeous edgings and appliqués. Many of the knit patterns feature embroidery, beading or two color stranded or slipped-stitch knitting where one of the yarns used is metallic (are you drooling yet?).

I chose a pattern mostly at random, but avoiding the beads and embroidery and such. It was a 16-stitch/8-row repeating pattern. I added an extra repeat of the first 6 stitches so that my swatch was symmetrical, plus a 2-stitch garter border on both sides, plus an extra stitch to match an extra in the pattern – total 27 stitches. I repeated the rows three times, or 24 rows, plus a 2-row garter border on both ends – total 28 rows.

Both swatches were knit on the same needles — US #5 (3.75mm) from my Denise set.

blocked swatches

The first picture shows the unblocked swatches. On the right is STR in Blue Brick Wall – a 100% Superwash merino fingering weight sock yarn. Every good experiment needs a control. Mine is on the left. I couldn’t find any non-superwash wool in my odds and ends. This is Frog Tree 100% Alpaca fingering weight. It’s approximately the same WPI as the STR. It’s not wool, but it felts if you so much as breath on it hard, so as a control it meets that test. I had hopes that it would block nicely.

You can see that both swatches are approximately 4″x4″ unblocked. I think you can also agree with me that they would benefit from a bit of blocking. But not too much, because this pattern has some dimensionality that I don’t want to lose.

In the second picture, I have wet-blocked both swatches by pinning them out to 5″x5″. I felt that a 25% increase in both directions was probably sufficient. It opened up the YOs, but didn’t completely flatten the pretty twists on each side.

After pinning, I gave both swatches a goodly spritz with water, then left them for 24 hours to dry.

close up and personal

At the appointed time, I unpinned the swatches. To make this a really fair test, I picked up both swatches and tossed them around a bit, as though they were objects that I might wear for a day. After scrunching and tossing and smooshing and all, you can see in the third picture that both swatches lost a fraction of an inch in size – not much bounce back here for either yarn. On a 60″ wrap, it would work out to less than 1″. That doesn’t seem excessive.

The last picture is a closeup so you can see that, despite the difference in the texture of the yarns themselves, the stitch definition after blocking is pretty similar. (I also just noticed that in the last two pictures the alpaca swatch is upside down.) The alpaca bloomed a tiny bit, and the finished swatch is softer. Which is no surprise because it’s alpaca and the STR… isn’t… although it’s a very nice, smooshy wool.

Both swatches still have quite a bit of give in them. I think I could have blocked them more severely, but I’m not sure that I really would have wanted to. I’m quite happy with the results of both swatches.

So I think, by the results of my little experiment, superwash wool blocks quite well. Of course, your mileage may vary. When in doubt, it’s always a good idea to knit a swatch, block it, and the decide if you like the results.

Thanks, Knitnana, for bringing up such an interesting question. I can’t wait to see what yarn you decide to knit your shawl from and the results (which I am sure will be lovely).

Hugs,
Judy