Grandpas are always welcome!

Sunday we did some stuff in the yard. I bought a couple of rose bushes to put in, and Nate dug the hole. When I asked him to dig a hole for each plant, I pictured just a little 10″ hole, the size of each pot. But what I got was a very impressive kidney-shaped bed with a berm on one side. Very nice. Very 3 or 4 hours’ worth of digging. Mazie and I sat inside for a while, then had to go see what Daddy was up to!

We got out our lounge chairs and Mazie watched Daddy and I knit my sock.

Mazie fell asleep.

My sock:

You can hear his truck from the living room, the starter’s so bad. He has to park and turn it off between every house on our block, because we all have our mailboxes on the houses instead of on the street. So he’s turning that thing on and off at nearly every single house. He probably could park at one end and walk the whole block in a few minutes, but he likes to drive.

ANYWAY…

Two days ago I was running around the house doing whatever and there’s a knock at the door. This lady’s standing there with a square priority box in her hand. (Apparently a package that may-or-may-not belong to me had been mis-delivered to her house.) She was holding it up and squinting at it through her bifocals and asked me what the last name was at this house. I told her, and she said no, that wasn’t it. So we both shrugged and she got in her car and started backing down the driveway. And I’m thinking…”Wait! Maybe I had something delivered to Glampyre Knits!”

SO, I caught her a few feet down the street. Before she rolled down the window, she clutched my package to her chest like I was coming to rob her! I told her about the Glampyre Knits thing and she handed it over. But, you guys, she did NOT want to give up that package!

It was a pretty surreal interaction all the way around. Especially that she thought I was so shady. She really took her self-assigned duties as Postal Deputy seriously.

And…it turned out NOT to be my needles. It was SOCK YARN from Unwind Yarn Company in colorways “Carnelian and turquoise” and “Parrotfish.” It’s 70% Merino, 30% Seacell. GORGEOUS. This combination of fibers is lustrous and really has a great squish to it. I think I’ll use 2s to knit these socks.

My needles didn’t get here until yesterday. I knew it might be a while, and they were totally within the 5-14 day time limit, but after day 9, I was really getting jittery. I’ve managed to keep the sock casting-on to ONE new pair so far, but I have a few new yarns that I really want to try out.

This is some that I bought while we were living in Germany. It’s really shimmery. 45% bamboo, 40% superwash, 15% polyamide. I’m knitting my first “toe-up-two-at-a-time-on-one-needle”s.

Amy Swenson wrote a few days ago to invite me to teach at her shop(Make One Yarn Studio)’s Fall Fiber Arts Retreat. We had talked about it briefly a few weeks ago, but I didn’t want to say anything until it was for sure for sure.

And now it is!

I am so looking forward to it. Amy and I have been friends since the early days. (Amy’s been blogging as Indigirl since 1996 and I’ve had this blog since 1998.) We started out together, in a way, and it is so cool to be doing a workshop together. I have a really cute picture of me and Amy together at one of the TNNAs, but I can’t find it! If I do, I’ll post it.

Teaching at workshops is my new favorite thing. I love meeting people, especially other knitters. And…I get to talk about knitting and yarn for the whole weekend!

I’ll be teaching:
Anatomy of a Top-Down Sweater
Fitting Your Knits
Converting Flat Patterns to Circular

I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful place for a knitting retreat!!
It’ll be so wintry and cozy there!! ACK.
(Mildly hyperventilating.)

…and here is one for the worsted weight slipper socks from my dye experiment.

I’m up (more insomnia) and thinking crafty. My striping yarn experiment has gone awry and I’m a little jacked up about it.

I wound that merino into a center-pull ball, and then decided it was too fine for socks. SO…I got out a hank of Fisherman’s Wool that I’ve been hoarding for just such an emergency. You’re a knitter, you know that there ARE emergencies that require undyed hanks of yarn needing to be hoarded. All kinds of yarns are hoarded for some emergency or another…

ANYWAY…I did my calculations and skeined the yarn, walking around and around these two chairs in the back yard (in the dark, mind you)…and ended up short. I calculated for 2-3-2 row stripes, but I ended up with 1-2-3 somehow. ugh. Oh well. Right? It should still work. At least it wasn’t like 1-2-2.3786 or something.

So, I *wanted* to use cake dye for this, I really like how the browns and oranges can get all rusty-autumn. WELL, I couldn’t FIND my Cake dyes. So I had to use KoolAid packs. I’ll take pics in the daylight, but this yarn looks electric. I was going for subtle, so I used straight blue and straight green, then mixed the blue and the green for the mid-tone, thinking that they’d harmonize. And now I don’t know if my greens are different enough to really show up as stripes.

And I have to WAIT until it’s DRY to know for SURE!

Ok. I’m going to bed now.

So, ok. If you’ve been reading this blog for a few years, you know that I tend to have waves of obsession. I mean, I get reeeeeally into something for a while, get all the gear, figure out how to dissect it and remake it from every possible angle.

And, fair readers, I think we have another obsession in the making. I really thought I’d been there and back already, didn’t need to Do Socks any more, but there’s just something about teeny tiny needles, teeny tiny yarn, and then all of the leeeetle accessories, small batches of hand-dyed yarns, and the rabid sock-knitting communities. It’s all so perfectly set up for people with even the slightest tendency to obsess.

I know I’m a good 2 years late for the real bandwagon here. I’m like the guy who comes along after the parade, cleaning up after the bandwagon. So, you’ll have seen all of my oohs and aahs before, many many times, I’m sure.

HowEVer…I’m going to write about it like you haven’t. Otherwise, every sentence will start with, “Ok, you guys probably already KNOW this, BUT…” or, “Somebody stop me if you’ve heard about this…” And that kind of self-depreciating attitude is just too hard to keep up. So I’m just going to pretend this is all new…to everyone.

In response to the TWO people who asked for a pattern for the socks I made last time, I’ve written a pattern and am just waiting on the digitized cable charts. So that’ll be up soon. (BTW: the Cleo pattern is with the graphic designer whose laptop had to be rushed to the apple store for emergency surgery) I don’t know if that Glampyre sock yarn is available any more, but any sock yarn will work (you probably already KNOW that…) < -- see? Annoying.

OK, so here I start talking about stuff that people have already figured out many many times…

I’m going crazy with lust for self-striping sock yarn.
I mean, I am really losing sleep over it.
I think I’ve read all of the blog posts, googled all the images and how-tos, and I’m almost ready to try it for myself.

I’ve got a GORGEOUS hank of Morehouse Merino Laceweight (8 sts / inch) that their GORGEOUS rep gave me at the last TNNA. (She’s a redhead, and we think we may actually know each other from our past lives in NYC in the mid-late 90s…but that’s another story…) At ANY rate…There’s 880 yards, which will make TWO pair of big-footed socks.

(OH! Another aside: when you see the INSOMNIA sock pattern, you’re going to laugh because I wrote it for my big feet. The short-row heel starts at 8.5 inches and the foot length…10 inches. BUT…as you know…you just plug in your own measurements. I just thought it’d be fun to have my own size 11 foot be the ‘model’ for that one.)

So, what I’m gonna do is wind the gorgeous merino hank into a ball or 2, wind THAT around my two metal patio chairs, mark off my stripes, and then just try dyeing it. I’ll let you know what happens.

Oh yeah, I’m past the heel on my first “Jaded” sock:

Do you ever, while you knit socks, notice that your yarn stops flowing over the needle as smoothly? My metal needles (and this happens when I knit big, too) seem to get sort of dirty and sticky…not like glue sticky, but just that the yarn seems to stop flowing across them as nicely. I’m pretty sure it’s not that my hands are filthy…I wash my hands 100s of times a day with a new baby in the house.

I keep a jeweler’s cloth in my sewing bag, and use that to periodically wipe off my needles. Something about it is a lot better than just plain flannel or t-shirt. Whatever they put on it to clean jewelry works great for cleaning Addis, too.

I’ve been through a sock phase once already in my life. Around my 2nd year of grad school, I stumbled on an eBay deal too good to pass up. It was a baker’s dozen weird colors of opal sock yarn. You know those auctions…the ones where, yes, you CAN buy 13 sleins of sock yarn for an unbeatable price…but they’re all strange in some way. These were all different speckled ones. Here’s a pic of one pair of socks from that batch.

I started with the more normal skeins first. Gradually, I’ve traded most of them away.

Recently, through the influence of Jo and Jo’s toe-up sock class at KITH, I’ve started thinking about socks again.

I have a lot of sock yarn around. That just happens when you blog and knit and shop on Etsy…you end up with loads and loads of yarn of all flavors. One day I’ll show you my yarn stash…but this is about my SOCKS.

Here are the finished Happy Feet (yarn purchased at MisKnits.)

Just very simple toe-ups, short row (holey) heel.

And HERE I present the reason I’ve been so haggard the last two days:

(mama e ceyeber fiber…custom glampyre colorway)
I obsessively knit this pair of socks in two evenings. One Wednesday night and the other on Thursday. I just made them up as I went along. I love toe-ups, because you can just PLAY and it’s not over till you run out of yarn.

This is going to be my next pair (toe-up or course!):
(dome hill jaded)

This sock-knitting thing has the potential to get really out of hand!

This was the first time ever ever ever that Mazie hasn’t woken up at 3:30 am for food!

I don’t want to jinx anything…but what if she starts sleeping through the night more and more often?

What if I get more than 3 hours’ sleep in a row on a regular basis?!
Can you imagine the productivity?
Can you imagine how much nicer I’ll be to my friends and family?!
It’s almost scary to even talk about it!

WOW.

The alarm went off at 6:30 and we were like, wait, did we set it wrong? Because Mazie’s tummy is like a clock…right at 3:30 every night, she wakes up. Once in the night, Nate woke up and checked to see if she was breathing, she was so quiet. (She was.) I’m trying to remember my yesterday and what all I did differently…and I think she may just be growing up!

Aw. My Big Girl!!

So the first piece of mail is from my friend Cindy. She’s a technical illustrator / knitter, and has made some really pretty notecards:

They come in a pack of 4 and each one has a knit swatch on the front, with the stitch pattern on the back. Neat idea!

The next cool thing from this week’s mail is a hank of sari silk from Darn Good Yarn. This isn’t the thick, ropy stuff that we saw when this kind of yarn first came out. THIS sari silk is soft, and a nice weight for a scarf or jacket. I haven’t had a chance to swatch it yet, but when I do, I’ll show you how it knits up.

It’s fun to get to see new and different yarny things…I’m sort of isolated out here in the desert.

SO…let’s see, what’s going on….

Today was a day off from teaching (I teach MWF) so I hung around the house with Mazie garding homeworks and quizzes, working on my lecture for tomorrow. Also trying to get some knitting in…

I finished the taxes!

I had all the receipts spread out around me, two laptops going, kitties helping, Mom holding Mazie…and Nate outside smoking cigarettes. But we did it!