Reincarnation Sock Pattern

After a lapse of, well, way too long, I'm back in the pattern-writing saddle again!  First up:  Reincarnation Socks, the socks with a (replaceable) sole!

I got sick of having to throw out my handknit socks when I wore holes under the balls of my feet - it just didn't make sense to try to repair something that badly damaged.  But with this new construction technique, I can easily replace the toes, soles, and heels of any socks, with any yarn.  Sweet!

Plus, the pattern is in worsted weight wool on size 5 needles, so it goes zippy-quick.  And the Liberty Wool I used for the sample pair looks sooo cool when this technique is used - definitely an eye-catcher!

If you're interested in purchasing a pattern, you have three choices:
 - visit River Colors Studio, either online or in person, and pick up a copy there.
 - order one from my etsy shop.
 - in a hurry?  Download one NOW from my Ravelry page.

As always, I am available for moral and technical support while you're working on your project.  Just contact me through the blog, etsy, or Ravelry and let me know what's on your mind!

Free Pattern: Mario's Brother's Scarf

It all started when I tried making the Biryani Shawl, designed by MMario (Ravelry link).  I liked how the stacked yarnovers made an interesting design, but doing that in an ever-increasing triangle required too much pattern-reading for it to be an easy project.  After fiddling around with different yarns and gauges, I found a combination I really liked.  Erika at River Colors Studio donated the yarn to make the prototype, I knit like a maniac for a few days, and voila! A scarf!

(before and after blocking)

This is a great pattern to show off a yarn with long color changes - and it's an almost totally mindless project that's easy to memorize and easy to accomplish.  It's a win-win-win situation!  So, without further ado, I give you ...

Mario's Brother's Shawl
a free pattern by Lazy Mama Designs

Supplies:

• 4.5 mm needles (straight or circular)
• about 400 yards laceweight yarn (I used half a ball of Schoppel Wolle Lace Ball, in color Fuchsianbeet)
• stitch marker

Instructions:

LOOSELY cast on 37 stitches - you may want to go up several needle sizes in order to get the cast on loose enough to block properly.

Note: You may find it's easiest to keep track of where you are in the pattern if you place a stitch marker near the beginning of Row 1, so that every time you start a row with the marker you know you're on the row where you do the [K2 together through back loop].

Row 1: Slip 1 as if to purl, K1, (K2, YO, [K2 together through back loop]) across to last three stitches, K3
Row 2: Slip 1 as if to purl, K2, (K1, YO, [K2 together], K1) across to last two stitches, K2

Repeat rows 1 and 2 until scarf is desired length.  I made mine about 60" long (unblocked).

Bind off LOOSELY, treating each YO stitch as follows: [K the YO stitch, bind it off loosely, move the loop from the right needle to the left needle, K1 through the back loop loosely].

Wet block severely to open the stitches.  Depending on whether you stretch it width-wise or length-wise, you can end up with a longer or wider scarf.  I blocked mine mainly for length, and ended up with a scarf that was 65"x10" after blocking.

***

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have another half of that skein left to play with for another pattern I dreamed up ...

Damn, she photographs nicely

And for once, I'm not talking about the kid.

Shawls are usually so jammed up on the needles that it's next to impossible to see the pattern develop as I'm knitting, so blocking a shawl is almost always a delightful surprise. This was even better than most. Half an hour ago it looked like a big purple snotrag, but a quick soak and a bit of tugging revealed this beauty - behold, my Morpork Pi shawl designed by MMario:

Wow.

Now that's a rather impressive use of 3 1/2 skeins of sock yarn, wouldn't you say?

Closeup of the pattern near the edge:

Closeup of the center section:

Well, that wasn't nearly as scary as I'd hoped

Yesterday was a momentous occasion for me - I cut my first steek! And, since I'm always driven to do things farther, faster, and longer than anyone else thinks is reasonable, it was 6 feet long.

I've been knitting a fair isle afghan in the round, and once all the main knitting was done, the big long tube of awesomeness had to be cut open so it would be less of a muumuu and more of a blanket. Now, I've heard all sorts of people talk about how scary it is to cut steeks, and how they held their breath and prayed the whole time, and how some people are too scared to even attempt one. There are a multitude of methods for stabilizing the knitting before cutting so that the whole thing doesn't unravel if you look at it sideways. But when the steek is 6' long, hand sewing down both sides of the area to be cut just isn't going to happen, and shoving the thing through the sewing machine isn't a good idea, either. So, no stabilization for me, just a pair of scissors and a blanket I've been knitting (intermittently) since October of 2008...

...And all of my sock club friends from River Colors Studio, who I drafted to help me. We were all new to cutting steeks, and everyone seemed to have some insane idea that I was either super-brave, super-dumb, or super-well-informed-about-this-whole-thing. In order to dissuade them of all of these notions, I figured I'd involve them in the process. So I brought all my cutting materials in to the studio yesterday, and everyone got a chance to cut about 10" of my steek. We are steek virgins no more!

For future reference, what I did was this:

Lay the blanket flat with the steek area centered on the top. Slide a long rotary cutting ruler in between the top layer and the bottom layer of the blanket, making sure it covers all of the area under the steek. Use sharp scissors to cut through the center of the steek section, about 10" at a time. After every 10", stop and stabilize the edges by wrapping a strip of packing tape along each edge lengthwise. This will keep it relatively unfrayed while you cut the rest of the steek open. When you're done cutting the steek open, open out the blanket and admire your handiwork - then whisk the blanket to a sewing machine and machine-stitch down each side of the steek to stabilize the remaining threads. Make sure to sew in the area that will still remain once the excess steek area is trimmed off later in the finishing, if that's what your directions tell you to do.

Since then I've been picking up the stitches along each side of the steek to make a binding to cover up the cut edges, and let me tell you, picking up like 300 stitches SIDEWAYS down a blanket is all sorts of fun. Really. But it's looking awesome, and the end is in sight. Whew!

******

Pictures? You want pictures in the post? Nope, sorry, that's going to have to wait for a while. There are secret things afoot around here ...

Free pattern - Circle towel

I picked up some inexpensive linen yarn while I was on vacation earlier this summer, and I had grand visions of making it into some sort of hand towel.  All of the patterns I could find seemed to involve rather a lot of mindnumbingly boring stockinette stitch, so I decided to modify a cool sock pattern to see if I could make a towel that had a nice texture and a pattern that was fairly easy to memorize.  

The modification was a little challenging since the sock is worked in the round and the towel is back-and-forth, but I managed to get my head around it all right. As a bonus, the back side is nice and uniform and looks presentable enough that it won't be horrible when it's seen during use.

Don't be freaked out by the 20-row pattern repeat ... it's actually just 10 rows with a slight jog over to make the second 10 rows, and there's a lot of "do the same thing, only K instead of P" in there, too.  Trust me - once you've gone through it once or twice, you won't need to look at the instructions for the rest of the towel.

So, without further ado, here's how to duplicate my Circle Towel:

Lazy Mama's Circle Towel:

Finished size - 17" wide x 12" tall before washing and blocking; size after blocking will be added once this makes it through the wash :)

Yarn - light worsted weight or DK weight linen or cotton yarn.  I used every bit of 100 grams of Euroflax Athens by Louet Sales, which is approximately 200 yards.

Needle - whatever gives you a nice medium-firm fabric in stockinette stitch.  You need it to be a bit loose to comfortably carry the slipped stitches up seven rows in the pattern.  I used a US 2.

Gauge - not important.  Just make sure you're not making a super-lacy cloth, or it won't hold up to actually drying your hands.

Pattern stitch (multiple of 8 stitches):

Row 1 - Purl across

Row 2 - Knit across

Row 3 - Purl across

Row 4 - (P3, sl 2 st with yarn at front, P3) across

Row 5-  (K3, sl 2 st with yarn at back, K3) across

Row 6 -(P3, sl 2 st with yarn at front, P3) across

Row 7 - (K3, sl 2 st with yarn at back, K3) across

Row 8 - (P3, sl 2 st with yarn at front, P3) across

Row 9 - (K3, sl 2 st with yarn at back, K3) across

Row 10 - (P3, sl 2 st with yarn at front, P3) across

Row 11 - Purl across

Row 12 - Knit across

Row 13 - Purl across

Row 14 - (sl 1 st with yarn at front, P6, sl 1 st with yarn at front) across

Row 15 - (sl 1 st with yarn at back, K6, sl 1 st with yarn at back) across

Row 16 - (sl 1 st with yarn at front, P6, sl 1 st with yarn at front) across

Row 17 - (sl 1 st with yarn at back, K6, sl 1 st with yarn at back) across

Row 18 - (sl 1 st with yarn at front, P6, sl 1 st with yarn at front) across

Row 19 - (sl 1 st with yarn at back, K6, sl 1 st with yarn at back) across

Row 20 - (sl 1 st with yarn at front, P6, sl 1 st with yarn at front) across

Note: after your first pattern repeat, the first row of circles may look a bit flat on the cast-on side.  This is normal, and will not occur in any of the subsequent repeats of the pattern.

Actual instructions:

• Cast on 80 stitches.
  
• Knit two rows of garter stitch (knit each row).
  
• Begin pattern instructions, KNITTING FOUR EXTRA STITCHES AT THE BEGINNING AND END OF EACH ROW TO MAKE A GARTER STITCH BORDER.
  
• Repeat pattern instructions a total of five times (100 rows in pattern).  If you are using a larger skein of yarn than I did, you may wish to keep repeating until you're almost out of yarn.  Just make sure you end on row 10 or 20 before you finish the rest of the towel.
  
• Knit two rows of garter stitch (knit each row).
  
• Cast off all stitches.
  

If you decide to make one of these, please share it with me on Ravelry!  Thanks!

Yeah, that was a disaster. Look! Pretty scarf!

Okay, so apparently ugly + ugly = "oh my god, it burns!  it burns!" ugly.  The socks have been frogged, the yarn thrown out, and then the whole mess set fire to, for good measure.  I am done wasting time on that.

But let's not dwell on failures, shall we?  Especially when I have such pretty pretties to show!

Yep, I've jumped on the Noro Striped Scarf bandwagon, this time with Taiyo, a cotton/silk blend from Noro that's ohh soooooo soffffffffft and smooooooooooooooooshy.  And did I mention the colors?

Oh Taiyo, I am so glad I have enough of you left over to make a matching hat ...  which I will not allow anywhere near any washing machine that is set to "hot," I swear!

ugly + ugly = ?

No photos yet, but I wanted to let everyone know what I was doing with the Fugly Yarn of Doom.  Various swatches with it proved that while the dye improved the look of the resulting fabric, it's still no beauty queen.  With that in mind, I searched Ravelry for a pattern that might either disguise or highlight the peculiar fug I've got.

That's when I found Bellatrix (Rav link).  It's got a pattern of deliberately "dropped" stitches, which make an allover design of really gnarly holes.  And so far, I'm liking it.  I mean, boy, is the combination of this yarn and that pattern a LOT of fug, but I'm hoping that it will somehow balance out and become magically infused with some awesomeness.  Barring that, at least I'll have used the yarn up, and I'll have socks to wear when cleaning up cat puke.

What happens when you forget about the load of felting in the washer?

This used to be about 10" tall.  It was supposed to felt and get smaller, but I wasn't aiming for something that's too small to hold my cell phone.
This used to be a hat.  A very, very big hat.  Now it's a bowl.  A relatively small, very attractive bowl.

And the fuzzy red slippers that I had previously felted to be slightly too big for my feet, which I was trying to refelt to be a little more snug?  They're about 3/4" too long ... for my four-year-old.  Oops.

Oh, hai! Guess I should post once in a while, huh?

The solution to the yarn issue from my previous post? Find a pattern that only needed the original number of skeins of yarn, and use a completely different color to finish it. Thank goodness for Dahlia!

Now, I just need to find a use for the extra five skeins of yarn in the powder blue lot ...

So very, very disappointing

After scoring a good deal on some Rowan Summer Tweed yarn at the local yarn store, I realized that they didn't have enough of the purpley-blue color for the sweater I wanted to make. I hopped on Ravelry and found a couple people who had the same colorway in their stashes, and I arranged to buy them for even less than I paid the local yarn store. Double score!

The additional skeins are different lot numbers than the original purpose, which usually means you're in for some minor variation in color. So you can imagine my surprise when the first of the additional skeins showed up and looked nothing like the color with which I had already started the sweater:

Yes, they are the same colorway (at least according to the labels). No, the lighting isn't a factor - they look this different no matter what lighting I use. This is just the worst dye lot variation I've ever seen.

I'm hoping that the other four skeins that are coming from Scotland will be somewhere in between these two colors, so that I can fade gradually from the purpley into the powder blue. Or that they're powder blue and I'll have enough to make the top part of the sweater without the three skeins of the purpley yarn I originally bought.

Or that I get up the nerve to just knit with it no matter what color it is, then overdye the whole thing black or really, really dark purple or something.

Crud.

Fun with drink mixes

So I had this really fugly yarn that looked awful no matter what I did with it, and a couple people on Ravelry suggested I overdye it. The easiest overdye for wool is - get this - Kool-Aid drink mix. I had bought some intending to use it to dye some cotton for my etsy shop, but since Kool-Aid doesn't actually work on cotton, I decided this was a much better use for my $0.20 of food coloring and citric acid.

Before:

After one packet each of Cherry and Grape, plus about 6 ounces of vinegar to help it set, and about 8 minutes in the microwave:

Still damp, you can see the variation in the top and bottom halves of the hank. And you can see how cute my cat is.

I'm hoping it will be dry tomorrow so that I can use the ball-winder that has finally come in for my at my local yarn store. I've got a swatch left over in the "before" colors, so it will be neat to see them side-by-side.

And if it's still fugly, it's hitting the trash.

But the overdyeing was fun ... definitely will have to try that again in the future.

Look how pretty!

My Leyburn socks, which I'm knitting from the same yarn as the emergency wedding shawl (and the socks I made for my sister-in-law). Look how pretty!

And the scarf I made for Lazy Kid, which was a really fun short-row knitting project that used Soy Wool Stripes from Paton.

She wears it tied around her waist like a cummerbund. At least that way the static electricity it generates doesn't mess up her hair :)

Some projects that aren't socks

This past summer I made a cotton skirt for Lazy Kid, who managed to outgrow it before she tired of wearing it. After a couple of months of her showing everyone her undies unintentionally, I finally got around to adding a couple of inches to the hem. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out:

The hem is a mixture of a lace pattern from a pair of socks I made ages ago, and part of a lace edge on a collar in a recent issue of Knitty, so basically it's a one-off that's never going to happen again. Shame, because the ruffle effect is pretty cute. Might have to practice that on another skirt to see if I can get the ruffle again. In the meantime, since she's been the same waist size forever and her legs are growing like weeds, I'm saving the rest of the lace pattern for later. I figure I can pull the cast-off edge and just keep going when I need to make it longer again :)

And, once the socks were all done - ALL DONE! - I knit myself a hat and a pair of mittens to celebrate. It goes nicely with the scarf I made earlier this ... er, last year.

Awww, aren't I cute? Also cute - the hat, and the button on the brim that I found in the button box. The mittens are only felted because they turned out freakishly large - they didn't fit Lazy Husband, and he's got giant hands - and I still need to add some elastic to help cinch in the cuffs. But they're close enough to finished for a photo, right? I had so much fun felting the mittens that I've already cast on for a pair of Fuzzy Feet, which I hope to have finished by the end of the weekend.

Custom order - finished!

What happens when someone wants to cross the Irish Hiking Hat with an Andean earflap hat? You get this ...

All details (tassels on braids, pointy top, color scheme) dictated by the customer, so I mainly get credit for figuring out how to combine three or four separate patterns and get one hat. Plus, I learned how to make a fleece lining for the hat, so between that and the really thick wool of the hat itself, the wind and snow don't stand a chance against this sucker.

Hah! One more pair to go!

Socks for my mother-in-law.

More socks

WIP: For my newest brother-in-law, knit with tiny sock yarn on size 1 needles, so it's going to take forever, but at least the pattern is cool:

Finished remarkably quickly: socks for my father-in-law, knit from Wool-Ease worsted weight on size 5 needles, so it took less than a day of knitting to finish each one (huzzah!)

Not a sock, but it's made of sock yarn: a sweater that I've decided I dislike enough to frog it before I get farther than the 6" of the body that I've already done. Darn, I like the stitch, I like the yarn ... I just don't like them together. Oh, well - I guess I can make a boatload of socks with the five skeins of this that I now have without a project in mind ;)

Work and play

Yeah, so my mother's socks are in the can.

Pattern: Jaywalker, by Grumperina - sort of. I did plain feet, then jaywalkered the legs.

Yarn: Cascade Fixation Spray Dyed/Effects (a cotton sock yarn) in Colorway 9939.

Needles: US 2 dpns

It's a fun, easy pattern that yields a nice firm sock. I'm not sure how well it would work for the whole sock for those of us with giant ankles, but the leg-only approach seems to fit well.

Now, about work. I've been making little diaper bags using panels from the "Peek A Boo" line by Amy Bradley for Moda fabrics. They're super-cute, but I don't have any photos yet. Hopefully tomorrow, if LazyKid will cooperate and watch some Sesame Street for an hour or so :)

Seriously

1. I decided to make people socks for Christmas presents. Wait - actually, I decided to make EVERYONE socks for Christmas presents. Each pair takes at least 16 hours of knitting time. If I make one for every person with whom we normally exchange gifts, that's 15 pairs of socks. WTH was I thinking? I'm going to be knitting like a maniac from now until 12:01am December 25th. On the positive side, at least I have an excuse to try out some of the 14,000 sock patterns I've favorited on ravelry.

2. When did it become impossible to find the end inside the ball of yarn? I like to pull from the center so the ball doesn't roll all over the floor gathering cat hair, but I'm on my second completely disasterous skein situation. Usually you can reach a finger inside the ball, pull out a small chunk at the end of the skein, and find the end. But recently when I reach inside I end up pulling out a tangled mass of spaghetti that's the size of a lemon, and I still can't find the end. So I either have to reroll the whole skein, or just pull from the outside. Until I get my ball winder, I'm letting that puppy roll around on the floor. Friends don't mind a little cat hair in their socks, right? It just adds extra insulation ...

Cowl-ly goodness

Okay, here's the cowl I finished while we were on vacation:

And here's a closeup of the stitch pattern, since nobody seems to have included that anywhere with the directions. It looks pretty cool, but since it gets all bunched up when you wear it, I'm not sure it's worth the effort.
Again, that's "Abby," by Amy R. Singer, found via Ravelry on knitty.com, made using some laceweight blue alpaca that I got for free (thanks, petite!).

Also, compare the first photo background with the previous photo backgrounds, such as you'd find here ... we painted our bathroom teal! Yay! I love it, but it does make for a somewhat more cave-like photo.

Success!

I looked down last night, and LazyHusband, LazyKid and I were all wearing socks I had knit.

Score!

This winter I'm going to try for an extended family portrait with all of us - including grandparents - swathed in toasty handknit socks.

LazyFamily, you've been warned!