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Recently, Greta_Jane has been asking me for commentary on what makes a good match between handpainted yarn and sock pattern. Predictably, whenever I've seen her lately, we've been too busy with everything else to pull out socks and ponder patterns. Not to mention that it wasn't yet sock weather. Now that sock weather and Socktoberfest are here, though, I've been thinking about this question of match between pattern and yarn, and I thought I'd try to pull together a few thoughts on the blog.
Looking at the socks I've knit over the past couple of years, it seems there are a few factors I consider:
1) Plain vanilla stockinette socks
I choose these when the yarn is something special, when I want the colors to carry their own weight, or if I just want an easy sock to travel with. I also tend to choose stockinette when the yardage seems likely to be too short for a complicated pattern (as is often the case with the Jitterbug - the two bright blue socks).
   
2. Socks with ribbings
Ribbing seems to work well since the strong vertical lines counterbalance the horizontal effect of the handpainting. It's also usually easy to memorize, is stretchy, and fits well, all good combinations.
   
3) Things just go together!
Stylistically, this is my favorite option: when the pattern moves in such a way that it itself highlights the changes in the yarn, and the variegation of the yarn emphasizes the movement in the pattern:
   
Some patterns are just too intricate for self-striping. Knitty's Hedera strikes me as one example that really needs a solid-colored (or mostly solid) yarn.
What guidelines do you, readers, follow when pairing sock yarn and sock pattern?
I've been waiting for a day like this. Cool breeze, sunny, blue sky, a few leaves dropping and dancing down from the trees. Fall is really here! This week, we baked acorn squash and stuffed it with a rice/almond/parmesan cheese mixture, and we also baked a pumpkin and chocolate chip cake. They were supposed to be bars, but it came out more like cake - very tasty!
This week I finished one knit, came close to finishing another, and started one more. I couldn't help but take pictures on what turns out to be our new, giant mum, just now showing its color. Here's a new sock, the Mock Cable Wave sock from Favorite Socks. The yarn is Lorna's Laces in the Tuscany colorway - and yes, it's another holiday knit.
The Garter Rib socks have just one portion of a toe to go; I expect I'll finish those later tonight.
And finally, the Irish Hiking Scarf, done minus the blocking and weaving in of ends:
Pattern: Irish Hiking Scarf
Yarn: Rowan Yorkshire Tweed Aran, color #416, 2 balls
Needles: Size 8 (ie, treetrunks!)
Reflections: This was a destash project. If it weren't, I probably wouldn't have chosen such a scratchy yarn! I'm hoping it'll soften up once I block it, closer to the actual holiday season. For now, I have enough yarn left to make a hat-brim, with a coordinating yarn for the body of a hat. One holiday present done, several to go! Ho ho ho!
(By the way, I think I'm in love with that giant, beautiful plant.)
While patience has brought me fall and finished objects, it hasn't brought yarn. All week, I've been assiduously checking The Loopy Ewe, waiting for what they call a "sneak-up."* While a sneak-up came, it didn't bring with it the yarn I've been coveting! So I checked the website even more obsessively. Maybe there'd be another sneak-up? No. Sheri's blog now says that they waited-for yarn will be up the week after next! Since I don't even know whether or not they'll have the desired colorway this time around, I feel a bit silly doing all this waiting. I mean really, just how obsessed can one really get about yarn? ... I'm not actually sure I want that question answered about myself. Because then I'd be even more scared than I already am about this particular obsession!
Tomorrow, Coffeeboy and I are going hiking way up on the Parkway, to see if the leaves a couple thousand feet farther up are turning more than the leaves at 2,200 feet. Either way, I'm sure I'll have pretty pictures to show you for next week!
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*This isn't meant as a criticism of The Loopy Ewe. I've used them before and have been very pleased with their services. I realize (mostly) that yarn store owners have lives outside their stores... but that hasn't stopped me from being obsessed!
This past week, I traveled to Atlanta to visit my friend, "Greta Jane" over at Ivory Needles. The timing of the visit, of course, was September 19th - the Yarn Harlot coming to speak!
We waited in line with lots of other knitters, bravely ignoring that one had to wait outside and beside and virtually inside a Ben and Jerry's to get to the theater.
GJ was lucky enough to get on the Harlot's blog.
She'd brought three first socks with her, all for different pairs and none of them finished, which quite amused the visiting sock-knitter. (Stephanie was particularly amused by the giant Fuzzy Foot sock). Myself, I was just pleased to see the famous sock photographing and to make my own (largely botched) reciprocal attempt.
 
The rest of the week in Atlanta I spent reading, meeting GJ's grad student peeps, gathering books, and hanging out (with knitting, of course). It was so very much fun to get to interact with grad students! I hadn't quite realized how much I've been missing that. It was great to talk about my research, their research, their classes, their quibbles! I know that the people I currently live among are very nice - but they're not the same.
The other exciting event of the week occurred the following day, when Barbara Kingsolver came to speak about her new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about a year of eating locally in a place not too terribly far from where I now live. She and her husband read selections from the book, answered questions, and got me sufficiently interested that I bought the book in the very long book-signing line and started reading it later that night. I'm looking forward to reading more, but as the Yom Kippur hunger grows (since Coffeeboy isn't eating, and I don't want to eat in front of him while he's fasting, I've been [mostly] fasting, too) I find that I really don't think I can read it right now!
I need to get a bit of writing done this weekend; I might go attempt that now and see how that fares on a rumbling tummy and a sea of questions.
*Insert excited noise as an email downloads to my computer and I see its subject line:*
"frecklegirl has invited you to Ravelry!"
Yay! Ravelry! Knitting procrastination, here we come!
I'm glad I turned in that dissertation proposal earlier today! (Well, it's not done, but a sustantial draft is done.)
Find me there as "Lazuli" (go figure...)
(As for those of you with hundreds of spots left to go, it could happen any day now. I was pretty sure when I checked a couple of days ago that there were 350-odd people ahead of me, and the pop! I was on.)
Has it really been over two weeks since my last post? Goodness. Time flies when you're having fun and working hard! I might have to resort to a bullet-esque post, a la Sheepish Annie:
Labor Day weekend: Much fun! Greta Jane at Ivory Needles came up for a visit, so Coffeeboy and I showed her the sights. I think she might have planned on a little more knitting time. Instead, we went to an Apple Festival (which didn't have enough apples, IMHO), wine tasting (really not very good wine), eating (The Laughing Seed, again) and listening to music in Asheville, hiking off the Blue Ridge Parkway, blueberry picking, talking, cooking, knitting, etc. Possibly the best part? She found me an excuse to see her AND a ticket to see the Yarn Harlot in Atlanta next week!!
Dissertation proposal: Last week I sent my advisor a 2-page overview. He wrote back saying, essentially, looks good but vast, show me more. So since sometime last week I turned those 2 pages into about 24 pages of actual dissertation proposal. I was aiming for about half that, but the longer version turned out to be the only way I could articulate myself at this point. But yay! I have an actual draft of a dissertation proposal done! This is excellent! Libraries: I am very impressed by the ILL service at Coffeeboy's college. They get things here really quickly, which has proven quite beneficial over the past two weeks. September weather: It's cooling down a bit, more towards the lower temperatures these mountains are known for: low 80s, 70s. I haven't quite felt the first breeze of fall, but it will come, as evidenced by this tree we saw on our recent hike: Knitting: Oh, you mean frogging and floundering and flourishing? Because there's been a little bit of all three these past couple weeks. Remember the shawl with the psychedelic colors? Frogged. I decided (with a little help from Greta Jane)it was just too psychedelic, after all. Instead, I'm looking for the perfect woodsy, earthy combination of blues, browns, and greens. Any suggestions?* The socks? Floundering (well, a little bit). One is done, but another pair has yet to make it onto the needles. But what about flourishing? Well, I decided that a male someone is going to receive a (modified) Irish Hiking Scarf for one of the winter holidays. As you can see, I've been enjoying knitting cables on size 8 needles. Oh, the treetrunks! They fly so fast! Here's one ball of yarn out of two, almost all the way knit! Phew! There you go! I think I'm all caught up, for the moment! --- *I have something rather specific in mind: sky blues to deeper blues, forest greens to sunlit greens, dirty brown to the browns of tree trunks, with maybe the whites of clouds peeking through, dyed in such a way as to look nice knit up into a shawl with a leaf motif.
Well, if I finished a shawl and a sock, obviously it wouldn't do to not have one of each on the needles, right? The sock is no surprise: I always have those on the needles, and here's the latest:
I'm following the "garter rib" stitch from Sensational Knitted Socks. With this sock, I've officially started my holiday knitting - yay! I should have one item done at least! The yarn is a variation on the theme of Trekking XXL, in color 41. I first attempted these on size 1 needles, but alas, they were too huge and floppy, so back to the toothpick-sized 0s I went. Just to keep the balance of finished and unfinished objects right, I've also been working on another feather-and-fan shawl (this one's a few weeks old, actually). Mindless, goes well with beautiful handpainted yarn, and looks great, too! I'm using the Ingrid's Blues colorway from Claudia Handpainted yarn. This past weekend, Coffeeboy and I continued exploring our new area. This time, our travels took us up, up, up, five-thousand feet up, to the Blue Ridge Parkway, where all was fog, mist, and thunder. We stopped to pick wild blueberries from the bushes growing along the side of the road - a popular activity, judging by the number of people crawling all over the hillsides and by the lack of actual blueberries on many of the bushes. We didn't, however, get to go on a hike, because when we got to the trailhead, the rain started to come down more and more, a wet answer to the thunder we'd heard as we drove along.
I wasn't kidding! I actually have two whole FOs to show you!
First, the socks - the monkey socks! They're done! Each sock took a very small amount of time to knit, it was just the small matter of the second sock and, oh yeah, the move that got in the way! Well, here they are:
Pattern: Monkey Socks from knitty.com, by Cookie A.Yarn: Woolbearers sock yarn in (the yummy colorway) "Autumn Moon" Needles: K-P Options for magic loop, size 0 Thoughts: This is indeed the fun pattern everyone says it is! I loved making these socks, especially since each one of the pair was knit at an outdoor musical event of some sort! I do think they turned out a bit tight. I'm thinking I might need to size up to 1s for future sock-making purposes, that maybe my gauge on small needles has tightened up. This should be easier to do now that I know that Knitpicks has two versions of size 1 circulars, at 2.25 and 2.5 mm. (I've been wanting the 2.25 size). Nevertheless, I'm in total and complete love with the colorway - lavenders, pinks, purples, oranges, with tiny hints of green and maroon. Yum yum. Close-up of stitch pattern
In other FO news, a long long time ago (try about a month or so), I finished a feather-and-fan shawl/scarf. But for reasons unknown, I didn't manage to photograph it until this week, right before sending it off to my mom for her birthday. Pattern: basic feather and fan stitch, repeated 5 times across Yarn: Three Waters Farm superwash merino fingering weight, colorway "Lilac" Needles: Size 5 Bryspun circulars (pointy tips, not too slippery) Thoughts: This shawl was truly a dream to finish and block. The feather and fan pattern opened up beautifully and gave the shawl amazing drape and softness. My mom opened her birthday present yesterday, and was full of compliments about it! Yay! In the above picture, by the way, I'm standing on our new back patio-area, with the oh-so-threatening creek behind me in the trees. It's an amazingly lush, tangled area right now, with weeds and trees and flowers and invasive kudzu all mixed in together. I can't wait to see how it changes as we move from summer into fall!
I know, I know. This is a knitting blog, and all I can talk about is where I live. (I also know that you'll hang in there for the knitting, too. :-) I promise, you don't need to see pictures of boxes (you've seen your own) and you don't want to hear about the article I'm revising or how I'm easing back into dissertation work. Instead, I have pictures from Asheville's "Shindig on the Green," a weekly, free mountain music festival that takes place every weekend during the summer. Coffeeboy and I caught this past weekend's Shindig, and we had a very nice time, indeed!
I got a little bit of work done on my monkey sock...
...as we watched singers, pickers, fiddlers, and cloggers, adults and kids alike, showing their stuff on the stage. We even got up to join in the circular square dance! Well, OK, we stayed seated for the first round (that's the one in the photo), we moved our arms around for the "seated dance" ("everyone bow to your neighbor out there in the audience!"), and finally, for the second dance, we got up and ran to the big circle up front, confident this time that everyone else would likely be just as confused about who was "odd" or "even" and how, exactly, to promenade, as we were. Sunday was Coffeboy's birthday, so to celebrate, we took yet another hike! But before hitting the trail, we stopped to look at a few more waterfalls. Looking Glass Falls and Daniel Ridge Trail
Then, I took Coffeeboy out to dinner at Asheville's premier vegetarian restaurant, The Laughing Seed. The food was delicious and creative (we had wild mushroom enchiladas with mole sauce and feta, as well as mushroom risotto cakes with a beet-truffle sauce: yum!) and quite reasonably priced compared to what we were expecting! We ended the night at another Asheville establishment, Old Europe Cafe, sharing an "opera slice" and drinking decaffeinated cappuccinos while reminiscing about our favorite locales in Boston's North End. Yum. (And happy birthday, sweetie!!) Those monkey socks, by the way, are almost done... so I should have an FO - or even two - to show you soon!
Yesterday, Coffeeboy and I decided to check out a weekly summer event in our new town - square dancing on a block of Main Street. Yes, it's really called that! It was quite fun to see!
Older folks, kids, middle-aged people, all tried their hands at the promenade and the doe-see-doe, while a crowd of onlookers sat in their foldable camping chairs and chatted or watched. We didn't dance - at least one of us would have had trouble remembering whether we were an "odd" or "even" couple. In front of the courthouse (that building with a steeple), a band played fiddles and banjoes for the music. It reminded me of nothing so much as, well, "A Prairie Home Companion," except in the mountains of the south, rather than among the Lutherans of the north. Looking north at dusk from the top of the hill.
We live sort of behind that white steeple next to the phone pole.
I've never lived in a small town before. Prior to this, my life has been either entirely suburban or in cities, the exceptions being two college towns that sported large universities of many thousands of people. This town has 7,000 or 8,000 people to its name, and its population is more affected by the comings in spring and goings in winter of Floridian retirees than by the migrations of 700-or-so students in the summer and fall. This should be a very interesting place to live! I mentioned that we'd hiked to see some waterfalls? Well, here they are: High Falls and Triple Falls! (Click to see bigger pictures at Flickr!)
It's amazing to live in a place with such natural beauty so close by!
We may not be settled in, but we are at least settled down, with many of our boxes unpacked, a sense of where to go to find things we need, and even some time to relax.
We eventually did close on our house. It turned out we needed flood insurance, because the FEMA map the bank had said we were in the 500-year flood plain. Um, yeah. We all know how much anything FEMA says should be trusted! Regardless, it was necessary if we wanted to buy our condo, so we're happily insured against twice-in-a-century disasters!
It's been a long few days, and as usual when I don't blog for a while, I don't know what to say or where to start! Do I tell you about the cats, and how they survived 12 hours in a car, an overnight stay in a hotel room, moving to their new home, a week of guests, and eventual sibling rivalry? Do I mention that in our first week we had Coffeeboy's family who helped us move down here, college friends of his who happened to be driving through town just after we arrived, or a grad school colleague of mine whose family gathered this past weekend a few towns away?
Or do I write about my new neighborhood, this little town? How this small-town, mountainous location is definitely not New Jersey, given that neighbors here have parties by the creekside and actually talk to each other? Should I blog about the culture shock of moving to a place that's like nowhere else I've lived before, given it's in the rural south but is culturally far more liberal than the "rural south?"
Take Asheville, the closest city, about forty-five minutes away. Coffeeboy and I have already found two Asian-fusion noodle places there that we love. After we visited one this past weekend, we stopped to listen to a guy and a girl on the guitar and violin, doing a rendition of "Closer to Fine." A few feet away, a magician performed for kids and adults alike, and a block or two away, on the way to the car, we saw some more musicians, using the entrance to a very modern furnishings gallery to improve their acoustics.
Or what about my dissertation, the books now somewhat organized on a newly set-up shelf? I need to get back into that, but it all feels so far away, and my dreams are of distance and disconnect. I don't know yet how it will be to try to do this crazy amount of work while not "in residence."
Or do I write about the hike that Coffeeboy and I took this afternoon, visiting a few of the waterfalls of our new county. We watched bathers swim and frolic on the rocks, wondered about the pine trees and the deciduous trees and how it would all look in autumn, and marveled that we were most certainly not in suburban New Jersey anymore, Toto! And after watching local trout swim in the streams, we stopped at a natural foods store and bought some local trout, just caught today, and brought them to our new home for a fresh and tasty dinner!
Yes, I could write about all of this, but I'm too busy trying to live it, processing it by mind rather than "pen." Trying to write about even some of it shows me just how "unsettled" we really still are! When I get even more organized, I might even manage to eke out a picture or two to share or a chance to visit the "sit and stitch" at my very local yarn store!
Well, maybe not all of them. Maybe not all my clothes, the kitchen things, last-minute books, or my WIPs! But we're really doing quite well on packing and a Sunday pull-out.
We're having a couple of those "crises" which precede a move. The main one was our sudden realization that, though we're driving our own truck, we still need folks to help us load and unload! While we had a few helpers for the loading, we don't know anyone in our new town to ask to help unload. So, we hired some professional schleppers. This will be wonderful, as Coffeeboy, his parents, brother, and myself probably reasonably couldn't have moved all our stuff. Following the same logic, we realized that the same five people, plus a few odd grad students (all over-libraried and not so hot on the weight-lifting department like yours truly), wouldn't do much better at the starting end. So we've hired professional schleppers for here, too. The biggest confusion, though, is whether or not our new place is on a floodplain. For the last, oh, few weeks or so, we'd been told that it isn't. Now, the bank says that FEMA says it is, and we need flood insurance. Because our new town is small, the paralegal there has helped close all the condos in our new little development, and flooding hasn't ever been an issue. Until now. Suffice to say, we're hastily working on lining up flood insurance or getting the whole flood plain question sorted out. But really... couldn't this have happened sooner than 5 days before closing? At least packing is going well, and the cats are only a little spooked: See all the empty hangers?
We go off-line on Friday, so if you dont hear from me until well into next week, that's why! I can already feel the strangeness of being disconnected from the Great Big Interwebby Thing!
I even have a finished object to show you! What's even crazier is that Coffeeboy was excited enough that he tried them on in hot weather! Not outside, mind you, but still! Given his aversion to the heat, it was a true sign of appreciation.
Pattern: Gentleman's Fancy Socks, from Knitting Vintage SocksYarn: Brown Sheep Wildfoote, color "Mums", 2 skeins plus a bit of black yarn for the toes Needles: Size 0 DPNs Thoughts: These were a fun pattern to knit for the future professor. they had enough patterning not to be boring, but not so much that I didn't memorize it. Designed to be long, they'll sure keep him warm this winter! I added the little black toes because in both cases, I ran out of the skein at the very end, and decided he'd probably think the contrasting toes were neat. (I did have a third skein, but didn't want to use only a small bit of it, preferring instead to have a contrasting toe color). I've also finished my first Monkey sock; I need to cast on for the second! (Do I smell some second-sock syndrome here? Hopefully not, but moving is mighty distracting. The weather is hot and heavy. We've been packing and packing. I shredded years worth of old bills and so on yesterday; the more I shred, the less we need to move. You won't believe what I was still carrying around! I found health insurance plan details from jobs I left years and years ago, credit card statements for cards I don't have any more, and possibly the most telling one of all: pamphlets of information on deep vein thrombosis, or a blood clot in the leg, one of which I had in college. I know I still "carry" that episode around with me in a lot of worrying, so I wasn't too surprised to see just how much I still had from that experience. I kept the important stuff but ditched lists of symptoms, instructions on how to inject anti-coagulating shots, and the like. Maybe if I can ditch the paperwork, the same will happen to my mind? I doubt it, but it's worth a shot nevertheless!
There are some bloggers, it seems, that when the going gets tough, the fingers get typing. With me, it seems to be the opposite! The more I have going on, and have to say, the harder it is, in the end, to get it all in the blog. (I suppose it doesn't help that the latest edition of Blogger's posting feature is really, really slow on my computer. As in, type a key, wait a second for it to appear, over and over.) But I won't hold out on you any longer...
Be that as it may, I have some pretty fiber pictures for you, because otherwise you'd see pictures of books moved into boxes and of all the random things we're trying to get rid of (old furniture, random appliances like a breadmaking machine, microwave, yadda, yadda, that we won't need at our new place).
But on to the pictures! First, the second half of my trip to Massachusetts (a week and a half ago, now):
 We stopped at WEBS. Yes, I bought yarn. (If I remember, I'll try to take a picture of the booty). I felt a bit silly, posing with my sock outside this shrine of sheepiness, hence the lopsided smile. After that, we moved on to one of my favorite places ever: Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in Lenox, MA. I spent 2 months there in high school, studying the french horn, lying out under the trees on the lawn and listening to concerts while deciding whether to go to a conservatory for college, or to a liberal arts school. I chose the latter, based partly on that summer.   Now whenever I'm there, I'm transported back to a magical summer full of teenage angst and self-discovery. During that summer, I realized that I didn't have the drive, the will, that would be necessary to succeed (to master those high notes, that lip trill), as a professional hornist. Many of my other colleagues were much more competitive, though, and no doubt thought I wasn't terribly good. Once I realized I didn't want to compete with them, that I was (for once in my lifetime!) all right with being myself, it didn't matter that they were better than me, that they didn't think I was even good enough for second horn. Maybe that's one reason why I like visiting Tanglewood so much, that by some strange act of sympathetic magic, I think that returning again to a place of importance will somehow bring back that same sense of equilibrium. Of course, I like Tanglewood for other reasons: magnificent music, its beautiful grounds, stately trees, the variety of fanciness or simplicity with which people picnic on "the lawn," the surrounding mountains, the memories. This time, though, in addition to that and to hearing Sibelius's Second Symphony (which "my" orchestra played during that unforgettable summer), there was knitting: (Monkey socks!)
Everything cycles back on itself, or at least, that is how I find myself thinking about life, the past and the present each commenting on each other and helping prepare for the future. Going back to Tanglewood before leaving the northeast was Coffeeboy's idea - and I'm so glad he suggested we do it!
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