Bright bright socks

Generally speaking, bright sunlight is terrible for photography. It’s harsh and washy-outy, it makes for evil shadows, it makes people squint. A light cloud cover is almost always more flattering and forgiving.

These socks, however, pretty much had to be photographed in bright light. Even so, it’s not entirely obvious how obnoxious they are. I love it. (Should have wet and re-dried them to get rid of the creasing, but eh. I’m actually considering getting some sock blockers, but it hasn’t really felt like a necessity yet.)

Hopefully, you can tell how almost-perfectly matched they are. I’m pretty proud of myself.

(And yes, it’s still raining. Took a while to get around to blogging this. Last night I found myself in no less than three different warm hand knits — cardigan, socks, and the hat from yesterday which I finished and immediately put on. I came close to throwing on a shawl as well.)

Yarn is Zauberball, in what I believe is Fuchsia, and Drops Fabel for the black. Basic toe-up pattern with an afterthought heel. The plan was to weigh the yarn along the way and stop when I was nearing half — fortunately I weighed the ball first and discovered that I’d been cheated out of four whole grams. Gasp! I stopped well before the halfway point so I could make them match, but still. The nerve! Also, both yarns were kind of bleedy — my fingers were gray from the black, and when I soaked the finished socks the water turned interesting shades of dirty purple.

Hats and random nudity

I cast on for this hat a few days ago, when it was still sunny and fairly hot out. I laughed to P that it was really kind of ridiculous to knit a warm hat in this weather — but it turns out that maybe my subconscious knew better. The reality of Swedish summer caught up with us and the past couple of days have been pretty nasty. Cold and rainy and windy and the hat wouldn’t be entirely out of place. I’ve actually pondered reorganizing my mental queue of things to knit and making some wrist warmers, or even mittens, because my hands went numb just holding an umbrella on a short walk. Yay, June!

(This picture is from the lobby of a playhouse; I knit while waiting to be let into a play where P did tech.)

The yarn is Manos de Uruguay Silk Blend. In a previous life, it was two different hats — one that was meant to come out slouchy and came out more like some weird sort of rasta hat, and a snug hat that I made to wear under a ski helmet and realized I probably wouldn’t wear again after that trip. I frogged them both a few weeks ago. The hat’s a  pattern I’ve used and liked a couple of times before. It’s technically the wrong yarn (too thin) and the wrong needle (up one millimeter) for the pattern, so I’m thinking it’ll be a nice early-fall hat; soft and not too warm.

I love this yarn so much. I have some Manos Maxima that I made into a neckwarmer for that same ski trip, and I sort of want to get a whole bunch of it and lie down naked on it. (I got both yarns at a discount at a yarn store opening, and that was a very smart move on the yarn store’s part because I came back and got another skein of each kind to finish projects; also I want to buy the aforementioned whole bunch for naked-lying-on.) They’re so squishy and soft and wonderful to work with and produce lovely items. If I win the lottery some day, I’m totally making myself a sweater out of Maxima.

Falling on (not so) hard times

I lost my job on Wednesday. Downsizing, nothing to do with me or my performance, yada yada. It sucks, obviously, even if it wasn’t entirely unexpected — and I can’t even joke that at least it means more knitting time, because I’m there for two more months and I really hope to have found something else by then.

It did, however, make me think about the stash insurance issue, which pops up for discussion now and again. Some people mean that it’s good to buy little continuous streams of yarn when you have the money, so that when leaner times arrive — job loss, illness, retirement, whatever — you’ll have a good-sized stash to knit from either for the foreseeable future, or for the for ever future, depending on the situation and stash size. Others disagree and mean that if you’d saved that yarn money then, you’d have it to buy yarn with now.

I don’t know that I fall on either side, though I will say that I think that any money saved would probably not be spent on yarn when you find yourself with less or little money — if you even saved it, because usually money finds holes to go in along the way. (Um. That sounds dirty.)

Mind, I have a decent enough stash that should get me through more than two months, even though I can obviously knit more when I have more “free” time for knitting. But it’s not like it was a plan. Some of it was in fact poor planning, because yarn turned out to not be what I was hoping for a certain project, or I didn’t want to start that project, or whatever. I just… like yarn.

I don’t know that my wrists would appreciate me knitting for eight or ten hours a day, so maybe it’s just as well.

Orange sophistication

You’d think I would have figured out by now that baby clothes go way faster than people-sized clothes and as such are a great instant-gratification knit. But this is in fact my first baby sweater. Made for a friend whose kid was in the hospital — I had this urge to do something, anything, and handknits are kind of like a hug, right? Hopefully it’ll be the right size at some point in the year when little S needs something warm.

This took one day to knit. No lie. One. I blocked it overnight and sewed on the buttons and then shipped it out right away. She posted on Facebook when it arrived and seemed very happy.

Baby Sophisticate, in Wendy Aran with Wool. I made the sleeves a bit shorter than the pattern suggested.

Color infection

Obviously the reason I was talking about the Color Affection in Loop was because I was looking for yarn to make another one. I really liked the feel of it in Wollmeise, and figured that since I was near a big pile of it I should see if I could find some purples I liked that would work well together.

I decided to use a trick that I don’t remember where I saw first, and snuck a picture to use black and white to see how they would contrast.

The idea is that if they look to be sort of all the same shade, they won’t stand out that well against each other, even if they’re different colors. Pretty clever.  It’s Twin in Ballerina, Tutu Dark — hey, that’s almost a theme! didn’t realize that — and Magnolie Medium. As I’ve said, those last rows of garter stitch made me a tad wary to start another one, but I wonder if it’s a little bit like childbirth because I’m starting to forget how long they were and just remember how fun it was to knit. Never given birth, mind you, but that’s what they tell me.

(Using Wollmeise makes this kind of an expensive shawl — until you realize that it takes on average about half of each skein, leaving quite a bit for other projects. Still not cheap, but not quite as hiccupy.)

England, right-o!

One of the things we did in London this week was a visit to Loop, which was pretty awesome. P said afterwards that I just got sort of quiet. “You were like a kid who’s been looking forward to Disneyland for ages and then they get there and they don’t know where to start.” It was a bit overloady; so many lovely yarns — including a big pile of Wollmeise, which I poked around in a bit. And maybe snuck a picture of. Shhh.

(I also accidentally pulled out the bottom fluffy skein in another cube without thinking, and stuff started tumbling out. Then more tumbled as we were trying to put them back, and it continued on like that exponentially for a while. Very tribbly.)

It was probably a good thing that we came there fairly close to closing time, because the time constraint made me get myself together and actually make some decisions. And P is a good mix of enabler and conscience. I’d been hoping to get some TARDIS-blue yarn to make Bigger on the inside — both P and I had for some reason fixated on the awesomeness of getting the yarn for a Doctor Who shawl in London –  but I couldn’t find any I liked. Even so, I came away with a satisfying haul in a cute little bag.

(Note the bars on the windows. We closed the place.)

Then we spent a couple of days at museums (with cool ceramics, interesting design, creepy mummies, what have you), the Tower, navigating stuffy subway lines, and rounding up with a performance of Matilda, which was an amazing show. (On the way back to Cambridge, we sleepily left my backpack on the train, and my first thought was crap, my YARN. I realized in time, though, and we got it back. Sweaty couple of minutes.)

The next morning, I googled out a yarn store in Cambridge, hoping to maybe get myself some blue yarn, but mom issued a veto because of complicated traffic. Our original plans to watch birds of prey do their thing was cancelled because, well, the birds were cancelled. (They don’t do well in the heat, apparently.) We decided to hit up our beloved antiques haunts in Ely, instead, and it turns out they have not one but two yarn stores there! (And a funny little yarn kiosk, to boot.) One of them was around the corner from where P was getting coffee — because, uh, “turns out” means I did a quick iPad search when we stopped for refreshments — and with ten minutes until it closed I ran around like a dummy looking for it. Turns out Yarn on the Square was hiding behind some market stalls, and the doors were still open. I got help finding some yarn, mom fell in love with some Noro and will probably go back to buy it, and I got a loyalty card because I figure I’ll be back now that I know that it’s there. Whoops. Not entirely sure about the sort of sun-bleached TARDIS shade I wound up getting, but worst case scenario, I use the yarn for something else.

It was funny, though — one of the women in Loop overheard me talking about Color Affection (we were speaking Swedish, and she said “that’s something I recognize”) and then I got to tell the owner of Yarn on the Square about it, too, because we were talking about Bigger on the inside and she said she was looking for fun new shawl patterns, because they were very popular.

I also got to show my mom a bit of Ravelry, and we talked a lot about her days of knitting, in the Soviet Union and for us when we were kids.

And with that, I really have to get to bed. I realized on the airport shuttle home that, uh, it’s kind of Monday tomorrow. I think my brain ignored that fact as long as possible.

Socks finished!

Green socks — complete!

Took a bit over two skeins. I’m going to give the recipient the remaining yarn for darning, I think. I’m hoping he likes them, and if he does I’m pretty sure he’ll wear them until they start disintegrating.

It’s a shame I’m not that big on making socks, because they’re a satisfying quick-ish knit. I haven’t made any fancy socks yet, though, so that’s the plan for this summer — possibly the Ravelympics. Something a bit more challenging with patterning and lace and whatnot. And then, as with most things, I’ll find that it’s not actually that hard, just a bit more time consuming.

That could also be a case of famous last words. We’ll see.