Socks!

I've finally finished the knitting of the red cardigan, and will blog it as soon as I've sorted out the fastenings. In the meantime, I've started my next pair of socks!



This is a whirlpool toe using the fibre I blended specially for socks: 40% natural grey shetland, 25% dyed grey merino, 25% variegated-mauve mohair and 10% bright pink silk. If I've succeeded in combining the best of all of these, the socks will be warm, soft, tough, and a bit shimmery. The yarn's a bit hard in the ball, but is knitting up to be beautifully soft, with a slight halo from the mohair.

The socks are going to be the ridgeline sockitecture from New Pathways, with the cable pattern from the doomed purple cardigan along the ridge. I seem to be developing a habit of designing complex cables for doomed large projects, and then repurposing them for socks ;-)

Let's pretend this cardigan is a film...

I finished principal photography last night, although I think I'm going to have to go back and re-do the last shot. So now it's on to the editing. I did a bit last night, re-editing some of it into a slightly different story, but there's more to do: there's a bit near the beginning where the plot needs tightening up, so the middle act makes more sense, and I think I'm going to have to shoot some new footage, although annoyingly it will also mean re-shooting some scenes I'm happy with, but I think it's worth it for the new structure. And a bit of editing in of stock footage I have lying around should tie the whole thing together nicely. This won't be quite the film I thought it was when I began, but I like this one better :-)

(Decrypting and photos to come when it's finished.)

A weekend of socks

In between watching the Watchmen, eating sushi, shopping, hanging out with frineds and watching a lot of console gaming, I spent this weekend knitting these:

I need to weigh a finished sock to see if there's enough yarn left to make three complete pairs - it looks promising :-)

What a nice package to come home to!

Research on Rav suggests that this yarn - Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in 'jungle stripe' - will make fairly broad actual stripes. I'm quite pleased that I remembered to check, since I've been disappointed with the way space-dyed yarn has knit up in the past, and stripes was definitely what I wanted. This will probably be Coriolis, with no further calculation required since I store master numbers for all my New Pathways socks in my clever calculatey spreadsheet, and can just look up what I did last time. Hoorah for Cat Bordhi!

The non-yarn in the package is extras for my Harmony interchangeable needles: two new cables (one short and one long), three new pairs of needles (two large and one small), and the cable connectors that I've been mourning the lack of; these needles can now do everything my Denises can!

Finally some redleaf weaving action!

Setting up the loom to weave this took all day on Saturday. Several hours in the morning for measuring the warp threads, several more hours for threading alternate warp threads through the holes on the heddle at a crafting date with Sadie, B and G in the afternoon, and another hour or so in the evening tying on the warp. It wasn't until Sunday that I finally got to start weaving, and it almost feels like an anticlimax after spending so much time in planning and preparation :-)

The fabric looks puckered because I'm deliberately making each row of weft slightly longer than the width of the warp, so that when it's finished and washed the extra length of the weft will, I hope, even out and partly cover the warp, making weft-dominant fabric.

New blog

This blog continues from the old one at http://trisknits.vox.com.