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?

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:

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.

Orts

I've been especially unfocused in my knitting lately - and for me, that's really saying something. I have no pictures because I keep ripping everything out! I started the Cabaret Raglan from IK Spring 2004, but Stockinette Tension Weirdness quickly set in. My purl stitches generally tend to be larger than my knit stitches, but on this project the opposite is true. Whassup with that? Maybe it's something about the cotton knitted tube structure of the Reynolds Cabaret. But then the Manos Cotton Stria arrived for my Perfect Tee class sample, so I put the Cabaret Raglan aside. This yarn is a lot like knitting with chenille because of its bumpy structure. I had to use needles two sizes smaller than I customarily would to get gauge. Then, halfway up the back, my tension changed. So this had to be ripped and reknit.

As a result of all this stockinette, I got it in my head to try controlling the tension for purl rows with my thumb. I'm pretty infatuated, but I've got to swatch properly, and then I'll report.

I had to start a new sock project because I was going to a classical music concert and needed something on wooden needles (no clinking). So I cast on Cookie A's new Stricken socks, but I've ripped them out at least twice now. First I misread the chart; the second time, I decided I really needed to make the calf more shapely, since the biasing and the twisted stitches interfere with its stretch. And I only got a couple of inches into her Mingus socks before bailing on that too. I'm going to start over and convert this to toe-up so I can control the fit more easily.

There are a couple of bits of good knit-news: mercifully, whatever was ailing the gauge of the Sea of Despair Socks seems to have straightened itself out, so the second one has a heel now. And I got my own copy of Principles of Knitting! I swapped my spare copy of Alice Starmore's Stillwater for it. Hurray, Ravelry!

Oh, and I cast on Nancy Bush's Estonian Socks yesterday for No Good Reason At All.