Socks!

The afghan I am working on is proceeding slowly, but in the meantime, I finished the first pair of socks I have knitted in over a year!

The repeat was so large in this yarn that I would have had to splice the yarn somewhere, so I just knitted an asymmetric pair.  The yarn is some Sockotta I picked up from a sale table at Stitches about two years ago for only $5 a skein.  Sockotta can seem hard to knit unless you have the right needles (bamboo or wood are horrible for this) since it has a lot of cotton in it.  I've used it to make several pairs of socks for the girls, and they say it is comfortable to wear.

In future sweater news, the two sweaters that I have enjoyed the most out of the 9 or so sweaters I made recently are the pink jacket and the aqua lace.

I have plans to make more of these.  The aqua one would look nice in a purple, and I want to make the eyelet jacket in a cocoa brown and other colors.  The aqua one could be done in different lace stitches so I will have to look through my stitch dictionaries and get some ideas.

Vegetable Garden

This year we are expanding the vegetable garden.  Most of the new space came from back of the yard which used to be covered in awful ivy.  It took months for the spouse to dig it up and take down the old fence it was growing on, but now it is wide open and sunny back there.  There is a chainlink fence dividing us from the back neighbors, and they have said that they hate the fence and will replace it at some point, but in this economy, that may take years.  I've always wanted a chainlink fence to grow things on, so this year I'm planting the squashes and some sweet peas (flower) along there.  The added benefit is that it may shield us from the attempted attacks of their dog, Oscar.  Maybe if he can't see us, he'll ignore us.

Yesterday I got started on the seed starting.  So far, there are sweet peas and lettuces sprouting, but today I'll get going on the squashes and cucumbers.Here are some views of the garden in its wild spring state before the weeding and plowing.

The first climbing rose of the year bloomed this week. I think this is Pinata.

Projects in the Works

Sometimes it is Spring here, and sometimes it is rainy winter, so not much happening on the 'getting the garden going' front.  I have all my seeds but need to get them started.  Inside, there are lots of projects continuting:

The 'Use Up The Leftovers' Afghan

Trying to be efficient about it

A Dark Orchid V-Neck pullover

Socks for A

  It's been a long time since I felt like knitting socks but I'm on a roll now.  The second pair were originally a 'toe-up' pair with the first sock half completed.  I guess I wasn't in the mood for toe-up because those poor socks had been sitting untouched for over a year.  Since it was time to be ruthless, I ripped them out and started again.  I'm a little annoyed with this Sockotta color because the color repeat is so large.  Maybe that was why it was on the sale table at Stitches. I decided not to stress over it and just make some mismatched socks.  My daughter doesn't care, and you can't be perfectly symmetric all the time.  Or so I am telling myself.

Still Unfinished

All the knitting has been done for several weeks, but I got sidetracked starting a new sweater and sewing some blouses, so this neglected cardigan still needs to have its ends darned in and its buttons sewn on.  Other than that, I think it turned out very well, and I want to try another one using a variegated yarn for the colorwork.  After exercising my brain to figure out how to make a pattern fit into the available stitches, I realized that I didn't need to as long as the pattern mirrored itself across the front edges.  What I did was to center the pattern on the center back, then put markers for every pattern repeat around to the center front.  This made the patterns match (mostly) at center front.  Good enough, anyway.

Need a lot of markers for a project?  I just bought a box of brightly colored plastic straws and cut one into thin rounds to use for markers.  The whole box of straws cost less than $2 and I only used part of one straw, so it didn't matter if the marker took a flyer and lost itself under the couch, I just got another one from the container.  Cheap and effective.  Plus, it isn't a tragedy if you accidentally vacuum one up.

New Afghan or Maybe a Baby Blanket

There was a lot of yarn leftover from the African Flower afghan, so I am trying to use up some of that pink.  I had a pound of minty color for the background and some leftovers from the aqua lace cardigan, so those are getting used up also.  My goal is to not buy any more yarn but to just use what there is.  So far, so good.  I'm thinking it will probably end up as a small baby blanket, 5 squares across and 7 squares down.

 It's interesting and much better to crochet the squares together as you go along, but this requires a layout plan before you start.  I'm doing diagonal rows of color.  I found the flat braid method of crocheting them together online:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080112104311/http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/lffunt/flatbraid.htm

http://www.yarncrazy.com/?page=2

It's nice to have a crochet project in the works to pick up when you are tired of sewing a sweater together.  The yoke cardigan is mostly finished except for sewing in the ends and sewing on the buttons.  That was a really interesting knit.

Yoke Knitting

There are only a few pattern rows left to knit on the yoke of my first round-yoke sweater.  There was definitely a learning curve in the tension and yarn-holding department.  I had to figure out how to hold two yarns at once, one in each hand and make it work for me without falling into the trap of too tight tension.  One of the only other times I tried to knit a fair isle sweater, I held the yarns too tightly and the knitting was not smooth on the front side.  I still don't know if the first draft of this sweater will work out, but it is looking pretty good so far.  There was one try on with all the stitches moved to a long string, and it looked like I am right on track.  Since my gauge for the color knitting is a little bigger than the stockinette, I wondered if my yoke depth was going to work out since I forgot to figure in the neck ribbing, but I think everything is OK.  There is still one more decrease row to do after this pattern section.

Last week I saw several greeting cards on my cookbook shelf and decided to look through them.  I found a nice gift card to JoAnns that I had forgotten about.  I should really look through my greeting cards more often since this is not the first time I have forgotten a gift card.  I spent the gift card on, what else, more yarn.

Round Yoke Sweater

In my long knitting life, I have never really done much Fair Isle knitting.  Always willing to learn a new skill, my next sweater is a round yoke cardigan in dark gray with gold patterning.  I'm using up the leftover yarn from the gold cardigan, but I doubt if I will have enough.  If I have to buy new yarn, I'll make a matching gold hat from the leftovers from that skein.  Using my TNT cardigan pattern, I drafted the first version of a round yoke cardigan.  Don't know yet if it will work out or not, but on the other hand, I'm definitely learning how to do a better job at two-color knitting.

All of the plain stockinette portions were knit on the knitting machine (ribs were done by hand).  The yarn is worsted weight, and the fronts and backs were shaped at the top with short rows.  Short rows are really easy to do on a knitting machine.  I used an old pattern pamphlet I had in the stash for the Fair Isle design, but I moved it around a bit and changed it so much that it no longer looks anything like the original.

At first I thought the pattern knitting was a royal pain, but I seem to be getting into the swing of things, and my tension has certainly improved.  I'm tired of the long, long row, though, and am looking forward to the first decrease round.