2011′s Last Socks
27 January 2012 | 
Author
Pattern: Twist (Ravelry link), from the Spring/Summer 2010 Knitty
Yarn: Southwest Trading Company Tofutsies, in the engagingly named colorway 784
Needle Size/Gauge: I used US size Os (2mm) for these bad boys. I’d started out knitting on US 1 (2.5 mm) needles, but the fabric was sloppy-looking, and too loose, so I went down 2 sizes.
Notes: These socks have been in my queue forever. I loved the clever heel decreases, and swooping lines from instep to toe. I loved the clever-boots reversibility (even though I was pretty sure I’d only ever wear them, um, right side out? With the twisted rib lines out. Finally, I decided, after smugly finishing my Christmas presents 10 days early, to cast them on. With my usual 64 stitches on size 1 needles, the fabric was… sloppy. So I ripped back (almost the length of the leg) and recast on the larger size on smaller needles. Bingo.
I actually made a mistake in them, though. Where the ‘swoops’ stay, on the heel pickup, I accidentally did 4 sections of purl stitches, instead of three. However, it didn’t mess me up too much on the rest of the sock, and since I cleverly repeated the process on the second of the pair, it went from a ‘mistake’ to a ‘design feature.’
I liked the heel, which was basically a reverse eye-of-partridge heel, with the yarn being held in the front of the slipped stitches instead of the back, but if I’d been paying attention to the reverse side, I’d have done it inside out; I liked the purl side better. Small gripe, though.
I do have something to go back and fix, however. When I was decreasing for the right sock’s toe, I was a little careless in the gauge of my edge stitches, and now it looks like I’ve got a ladder down the inside of it. It’s not, though, just some loose stitches. I haven’t decided whether to go back and fiddle with the stitch tension, redistributing the loose bit over the neighboring stitches, or to load up a tapestry needle with some waste yarn and basically sew it closed. I’m leaning toward the second solution; it’s much less work.
Would I knit the pattern again? No. For all that I liked the design, the pattern was messy and confusing. There were, I think, six sizes given, and each of them had separate instructions for the heel, which took up a page. There was a full page of pattern notes, some of which had notes of their own. There were additional notes within the pattern. There was an unnecessary abundance of sock pictures. And a couple of the things which could have used more clarification were sorely lacking. The sock itself was pretty simple, especially if the knitter has an understanding of sock mechanics. But the pattern was an exercise in befuudlement.
Still. I like the socks.
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Christmas 2011
We celebrated Christmas in a very lovely, low-key kind of way at Nick’s parents’ house in Oklahoma (his mom got us for Thanksgiving). While both holidays were awesome, I think two OK trips in a month is too much for me. Next year, we’re going to go up for a longer stay over Thanksgiving (ten days or so) so we can divide the stay between ‘rent houses, and celebrate Christmas down here with Vickie, John, and whomever wants to trek down here for it.
That said, we had an adorable photoshoot with Kitten, wherein she wore her Christmas dress that almost fit her.
Thanksgiving in Pictures
Instead of making a wordy post about Thanksgiving, I thought I’d just go ahead and post some pictures from the holiday. It was a blast.
tea review: Steeping Room English Breakfast
So, I know it’s been a minute since I updated. I have Thanksgiving pictures, and Christmas pictures to spam you with. No New Year’s pics, though, that was just a quiet night at home. But it’s also been a while since I posted a tea review, and since my friends Cynthia and Marc gave me a very generous gift certificate to our local tea house, I thought I’d start it up again.
The Steeping Room: Organic English Breakfast Tea
Rating: 5/5
Price: $3.50/oz
Origin: Sri Lanka, China, Tanzania
Form: Loose tea
Brewed: 3 minutes, boiling water.
Review: This tea is delicious. It’s not going to replace the Grey genre as my favorite teas ever, but it’s become my go-to tea for the morning. In its looseleaf form, it smells wonderfully clean and earthy, like a field after ploughing. Not a lot of green or flowery scents in there. Brewed, it smells like… well, like tea. That quintessential tea smell. Lovely. It tastes like it, too. Honestly, it reminds me of my mom’s tea, from when I was little, but better. No weakness, or bitterness, or sour taste, just robust, delicious tea-ness. No delicacy, either; it can totally stand up to my preferred breakfast of peanut butter and cinnamon sugar toast.
Last Day
So, it’s the last day in November, and I feel like I’ve done a fairly decent job blogging (nearly) every day this month. I missed a couple of days over the holiday weekend, since we were in Oklahoma. I’m okay with that, though. One of the reasons I’d been able to keep up the blogging as well as I did this month was that I wrote drafts. Normally, I blog whatever’s on my mind or relevant to my life at the moment. Which is great, if you have time for that on a regular basis, but being the mom of a nine-month-old and manager of a family often means that I rarely get time to sit down for that long.
On the other hand, I can, less regularly, manage to wrangle a larger block of time to play around on the computer. And instead of checking my Google+ and Facebook accounts for the frazillionth time, I put some of that time into writing out posts that are non-time specific. Pictures of the baby (I’m starting to get sick of calling her the Tadpole, but I’m not sure I want her real name up here in public, either. It’s a quandary.), knitting projects, cat photos. As long as I don’t take too long to post them, they keep really well, and are easily integrated into more time-sensitive posts, such as holiday picture posts.
Speak of, I have some lovely pictures of out Thanksgiving holiday that I plan to post here in the next couple of days. Until then, though, I’ll leave you all with yet another adorable picture of the baby (Kitten? I tend to call her that in real life…) and her Grandma.
Red Birds
Half the fun of having a baby, especially a girl, is making clothes for her. At my baby shower, I got a terribly ugly nightgown (I don’t even wear nightgowns!) made of terribly cute fabric. I meant to make a shirt for myself out of it, but mistakenly cut it too small. Solution? Cut it down even further, and make a shirt for the bebe!
I used a pattern from Voor Nop, an amazing site with free baby clothes patterns. Before this, I’d always been rather afraid to sew knits, but I think I’ve finally nailed it. The secret? Sew the seams with the serger, and sew the binding using the satin stitch foot. My machine, much though I love it, doesn’t have an adjustable pressure sewing foot. So using the satin stitch foot means that there’s not as much pressure between the foot and the plate, allowing the knit to glide through without stretching as it’s sewn. Amazing!
I loved the outfit so much I had to put it on the Tadpole today. I’m glad I happened to have a pair of red pants that went with it, even if I DID have to take in the side with a well-placed tack. She’s just so long and skinny! Also, it appears that the new favorite toy is mama’s bendy ruler.
Infinite Library
I admit it. I’m a bibliophile. And up until recently, I was very against they idea of of an e-reader. I love the physicality of books, the smell of paper. I love the act of turning pages and watching the story unfold in front of me. I was against the very idea of e-readers; I figured they’d be the death of paper.
Then my cousin got a Kindle. It wasn’t my first experience with an e-reader; my mom-in-law has a Nook, and I saw how much she (another bibliophile) loves it. But when Vickie got hers, it was like a light switch flipped in my head. I read an article or two on there, and I really liked it. It was easier than I thought, and the interface wasn’t clunky enough to take me out of the reading experience.
I’d mentioned to Vickie how much I liked reading on it, and she decided to buy me one for my birthday. And Christmas. And St Swithin’s Day. Amazon brought out a whole new line of Kindles recently. When I saw the Kindle Touch, I knew that was the one I wanted. I ordered it at the beginning of November.
It didn’t come out until the twenty-first. Turns out I pre-ordered it, and I guess they shipped out the pre-orders first, because I received it a couple of days ago.
I also got a leather cover, the one put out by Amazon to fit the Touch. I’d thought about getting one of the third party covers, but I was a little skeptical about that, considering that the Touch hadn’t even come out yet. I’m okay with the (more expensive) Amazon cover, though, since it’s really nice. It’s got a holder and a pocket in the front, which I’m not sure what to do with, but the front cover folds back and can be held in place with the elastic. Which I really like, cause one of the selling point of the Touch was the small size.
The display is really beautiful. It’s black and white, because of the e-ink display, but it’s really high resolution. The touch-screen is pretty sensitive, even though it sometimes takes a second to turn the page. There’s also an afterimage sometimes, especially when there was a large block of black on the previous page. Still, it’s only enough to notice, not to bother me.
I have a ton of books on there so far, and I plan on raiding Project Gutenburg for more. One of my friends suggested putting my knitting PDFs on there, too, and I have to say I think that’s brilliant. I’m glad I got it in time for our Thanksgiving trip up to Oklahoma.
Baby in Blue
Grandma Lorrie brought some new clothes down when she visited. I love that she picks out jewel tones instead of more pastels. Don’t get me wrong, I love pink, and I even love it on baby girls, but not to the exclusion of all else. So today it’s teal and turquoise.
Pink and Lavender
It’s been chilly enough to warrant a sweater in the mornings. This one, while obviously hand knit, wasn’t made by me. Rather, my Grandma sent it by way of my aunt. But I’m not sure that she made it either. It’s possible. But equally possible that one of them found it at a garage sale and bought it for an astonishingly minuscule amount of money. Either way, someone spent a lot of time making it, and it was sent along for the Tadpole with love. And it’s machine washable, which counts for a lot on a baby who’s learning to feed herself.
And just to prove that not all photoshoots end well or with dozens of pictures, this was the only other one I managed to get before a full-on meltdown of Chernobyl proportions: