Monday, May 19, 2008

Seeds of May

Afghan Sunday was early this month to avoid Memorial Day (a.k.a. "Race Day" in Indiana). Most of the local knitters are behind (except for one who is well ahead of me), so I didn't feature any new blocks this month, but I'll go ahead and share a couple here anyway.

Isn't the seed stitch pretty on the Ann Strong square?
Ann Strong square
This is supposed to be one of the five easiest squares. I kept forgetting to purl through the back loop on the wrong side for the two columns of twisted stitches. I also made a lot of knit vs. purl mistakes on the wrong side rows because of the seed stitch, but they were easy to see and fix on the following row.

Fidgety business:To feed the consistency hobgoblin, I worked the upper and lower borders on 54 stitches like my other squares worked on #7 needles; I ended the border on a RS row and worked a WS foundation row (last row of each chart). The large side cables ended up due for a twist on the first row of the top border, so I worked some of the decreases as cable decreases. But if I were knitting this square a second time, I would center the side cables vertically instead by working the twists on rows 7 and 17 instead of 5 and 15. It doesn't keep me awake at night the way it is, so I left it. (You think I'm joking? Sadly, I have in fact had knitting-induced sleepless nights.)

By the way, wrapping up the Sea of Despair socks (literally and figuratively; I gave them to my Mom for Mother's Day) sent me off on a sock-finishing bender. I knit a complete pair of DK-weight Opal stockinette men's socks in four days, finished a toe-up variation of CookieA's Mingus for myself (more on those later), and pulled a pair of diamond-brocaded socks based on a Nancy Bush pattern out of hibernation to finish for my husband:
Diamond Brocade
I promise there are two of them, but he was leaving for a business trip just as they finished drying after blocking, so I let him take them before I could get a photo of the pair. He finished teaching his spring semester classes and immediately skipped the country. Maybe he'll model the new socks when he gets back.

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