Finished heel!

I haven't done much knitting since I got back from holiday, so it's taken until today to finish the heel:


All is not going smoothly, however - I twisted some stitches when starting the leg, and now have to do some complicated untangling. Writing this blog post is useful procrastination ;-)

I've also been doing some weaving on the red leaf wrap (no photos, cos they wouldn't look any different from the last time I photographed it), after showing the loom off to my parents yesterday re-enthused me about the project :-)

Holiday knitting

I've just come back from a week roleplaying in Lincolnshire, during which I did quite a lot of knitting - my second pair of push-me-pull-you socks, for R this time (on the equivalent roleplaying holiday last year, I also made socks for him). I took this photo as I was just about to turn the heel:



The heel is progressing slowly so far, because I got my yarns mixed up and had to tink about three rows, but I think I've got it fixed now.

Finished grey cable socks

Neither of these photos is very good, sadly, but the socks themselves are lovely :-)





The cable panel is much more visible in the flesh than in photos, the yarn is soft and fuzzy, and the colour is a bit more muted than it looks above.

And having finished knitting these, and now having nothing actively OTN, I need to quickly decide what I'm doing next, because I'm going on holiday tomorrow. Yay!

I am slow on the uptake

Towards the end of the first cable sock, I started having problems with a sore spot on my right index finger where the working yarn was wrapped around it. Now I've started the second sock, and have been grumbling to myself about the sore finger, when I suddenly remembered that, thanks to the push-me-pull-you socks, my continental knitting is now almost as good as my english, and there is no corresponding sore spot on my left index finger, so I've switched hands. Hey presto, no soreness. Wish I'd thought of it earlier ;-)

One finished sock!

First sock completed less than a week after beginning, which is probably a record for an adult sock :-) Second sock to be begun tomorrow, and I might make an attempt at writing up the pattern (although with adjustments, since I used Cat Bordhi's ridgeline master pattern.

This was my first attempt at EZ's sewn bind off, on Frax's recommendation, and it is just as stretchy as the underlying knitting. I'm a convert! And I really like the cable as an inset panel, rather than continuing onto the cuff, and the plain rolled edge instead of ribbing, which seems to suit the soft, slightly fuzzy yarn. Impatient now to start the second, but that will wait until tomorrow.

The magazine formerly known as Vogue Knitting

I've been subscribed to Vogue Knitting for a few years. I'm not sure I've ever knit anything from it, but the best of the issues I've got are full of wonderfully inspirational patterns with all kinds of interesting twists, and of fascinating and useful articles about knitting techniques and culture. It was in a completely different universe from the British knitting magazines I've occasionally bought (and almost always regretted).

Recent issues have been less full of the good stuff, smaller overall, and with a higher proportion of patterns I really don't like. Then they announced a name change to VK International, which I barely noticed. Then a mysterious magazine called Designer Knitting, with a naff-looking cover, arrived through my letterbox about the time I was expecting VK. I wondered if it was some kind of freebie, launching a new magazine on the readers of an existing one, but the familiar typography and design, and the absence of the real VK eventually forced me to conclude that the name had changed again, but this time with no announcement at all. The DK website referenced in the magazine wasn't online, there was nothing on the VK website about the new name, and only a handful of puzzled and inconclusive posts on Ravelry (there are more now, although they don't seem to be much more conclusive).

The second issue of DK arrived yesterday. It's short, there are hardly any articles, and I'm not especially interested in most of what there is. And although some of the patterns are quite interesting, lots of them are boring or nasty, and there's nothing in there that grabs me like some things in Twist (coughsylviecough). And the editor's letter hasn't been changed to reflect the different cover image. For some reason, that bugs me most of all.

So I'm trying to cancel my subscription. This has already taken more time than I expected, with the DK website (now finally online, but not yet featuring the current issue) giving me no unsubscription information, and only an email address to contact. After exchanging several messages, the guy on the end of the email and I conclude that my subscription must be with VK themselves (not that I can tell, since I've had no communication from them at all, including when they were planning to auto-charge my credit card). So the current state of play is that I've sent them an email (since their website also lacks any mechanism for unsubscribing), and await their reply. I feel sure that it shouldn't be this hard.

Cables!

I think the Cardigan of Doooom, for which I designed this pattern, put me off cables for a while. OK, I made Clessidra, but the bit that I stopped to admire wasn't the cables, but the seed stitch. But at my knitting weekend with Frax and Kauket, I admired Frax's Absinthe socks, but said that I preferred the cable section of the pattern to the lace. Frax laughed at me for being predictable, but it actually reminded me of my love of cables; I came home and immediately cast on this sock. Of course, all that talk of self-sufficiency and knitting from stash probably had something to do with it as well :-)