H is for....

Help with Heels! I'm doing my first toe-up sock. In my "red" Koigu I bought online a little while back. I'm not really using a pattern. I started with the "Magic Cast-on for Toe Up Socks" in the latest Knitty - I highly recommend it, its easy-peasy and no fuss.
I'm continuing on in plain stockinette. I much prefer a gusset heel for my foot over a short row, and would love any pointers to good links explaining how to do it, either that or a good way to make a deeper than usual short row heel. I'm really liking how the Koigu is knitting up on size 1s - dense and firm and oh so comfy. There will certainly be more Koigu for my feet in the future.

SockapalOOOza!

Yay! Finished my sockpal socks this weekend. I'm very pleased with them

Project Specs:
Pattern: Mermaid Socks, from Cool Socks Warm Feet by Lucy Neatby
Yarn: Knit Picks Color Your Own sock yarn, dyed by me (my 1st self-striping)
Needles: Brittany Birch #2 DPNs
Notes: A lovely pattern, with great attention to detail. Very dense looking instructions (5+ pages long) but don't let that stop you, its a very simple repeat, and a garter stitch short-row heel, that means you don't even have to wrap your turns. A good pattern for making for others, as the spiraling "ribs" have a ton of flex and is very forgiving. Would happily knit again.

That leaves me with just the Super Secret Baby Project for my bro and sis-in-law on the needles. I have no idea what I'll do next. I have the yarn from more than a year ago for a Ribby Cardi, that might be a nice quick-ish knit. I will also start a new pair of socks (for me this time) - can't decide between some Regia Cotton (summer is coming) or Koigu. I'll probably do the Koigu, as I've never knit with it before.

G is for...

Glorious color.

Ok, so I'm cheating and getting a 2-for-1 post. I had the great pleasure of attending a dyeing workshop with Linda Whiting of Pinestar Studio yesterday. It was a fabulous workshop - we each made a color wheel using different base primaries, then we did various excercises exploring complementary and analagous color mixing, gradations of the same color, and the coolest was something I'd not really heard of before, using a color triangle to blend varying amounts of primaries to get 63 different colors that all blend together. This was JUST the dyeing workshop I needed - an excuse to sit down and be methodical and purposeful in what I do. I am all fired up to do all these same excersises using my own dyes, in hopes that I can recreate what you see below:


Each of us got a color card with everyone else's samples (we were all using different primary bases, remember). Isn't that just beautiful? I still have it out on my kitchen counter, just to keep flipping through and marvelling at all the colors.

We were a small group - just seven of us, including Cheryl, Julia, Alpaca Kathy, Vicki of the insanely decadent brownies and Germaine who makes me want to move so that I can send my son to her school, and of course, color genius Linda . This group is (part of) the base of our newly formed spinning group, and I am so pleased to have a continued excuse to hang out with them. They are all friendly and down-to-earth and just plain easy to like.

Hi, I Suck.

Um, yeah. Just wanted to pop in and let you know I'm not dead. I've been knitting very little, a row or two on my SockPal sock a day, I've done very little spinning, and that was only thanks to spin-night this week. I did get to let a wheel-newbie sit at my wheel for a while, which was very cool - I can't teach for shit, but the lovely Julia stepped in and helped her out and she was able to produce some yarn. I felt like chanting "one of us! one of us!"

Instead of any knitting/spinning last Sunday, I spent some time making this:

A decapitated Pointy Kitty. I must have managed to contract a 24-hour sewing bug somehow. I whipped out the long-ignored machine and went to town. The hand-sewing of the red stripes and eyes quickly became tedious and I cannot bear the thought of more hand sewing to attach a little nose and make this little critter whole. My prediciton is that it will sit, cluttering my nest in the fiber dining room and eventually get stuffed in box in a fit of cleaning.

Coming next - whatever the hell I can come up with for a G post for the ABC-Along. Thinking....thinking....thinking.......