Monkey Socks on the Road

Monkey Socks on the Road
Originally uploaded by sunasak

Yay, I finished another pair of socks. That is pretty quick for me. It helps that I have been on so many car trips in the past few weeks. I finished the Monkey Socks in a mobile home near Ponder, Texas, visiting my partner's neice. We went up to pick up my oldest son from three endless weeks of debate camp. Sure is good to all be home!

As for the socks, as you can see, they are pretty. The yarn is quite thick, Socks That Rock. Color is Fire on the Mountain. The pattern is Monkey Socks from knitty.com, and I don't think I modified it much at all from the original, other than the weird bind-off (note, not in the picture, but really, it looks fine and you can see it in the other shots I have in the Flickr feed at left.

So, I do love them, and will wear them a lot in the fall with Birks, as well as at home with no shoes.

On the trip back to Austin I started a toe up sock with a pattern I am making up out of the Glacier Lake sock yarn pictured in the previous post (it is now wound into a yarn cake, of course). My hands were hurting, plus I started it FOUR times (trying different cast-ons). I settled on the cast on where you use the backward loop and then pick up the bottom of the loops. That looks just as nice as the magic cast on, and is helpful when you can't remember exactly how to do the magic cast on (no Internet in the darned car). I'll take a picture of that sock in progress tomorrow when I have more done. So far, so soft and pretty.

Now I must knit something other than socks. My other projects are languishing.

I love socks.

One Monkey Down...

I finished the first Monkey sock last night. In finishing off the toe, I decided to try something new, so I found instructions for the "Russian graft" because I could not remember how my Ukrainian friend showed me to do it.

I did this because my regular grafting does not ever come out right. But next time, I promise, I will use the clear instructions I found on someone's lovely site (where was that again?) and graft. I need to learn, and finally realize what I was doing wrong (so many instructions do not tell you where to hold the yarn as you are "inserting as if to purl" or whatever).

Anyway, I tried to follow the instructions. I put the tail at the end. I lined up my stitches. I started inserting needles as if to purl and as if to knit (hard on a sock). The stitches definitely got cast off, all right, but I ended up with a purl bump, not smooth knitting! Ay, what DID I do wrong? On the other hand, on the inside, it is beautiful, solid reverse stockinette, so it sure won't bother my toes like doing a 3-needle bind off from the inside sometimes does.

Maybe next time I will do it from the inside. That might be my issue. Or, gee, practice on a swatch, what a concept. In any case, the toe does not look "bad," so I'll do the other sock to match and pretend I did it on purpose. And then learn properly for next time!

See, even we "advanced" knitters have our areas for growth!

Monkey Sock in Progress

Monkey Sock in Progress
Originally uploaded by sunasak

It was another home improvement weekend, so knitting took a back burner once I left the shop on Saturday. Still, I am this far on my latest socks, Monkey, the extremely popular Cookie A sock from Knitty.com. I can see why people like it--the pattern is a lot of fun and it does neat things with hand-dyed yarn, like this very, very bright Socks That Rock colorway that I got as a gift (thank you, lovely gift giver). I am enjoying the way the colors are lining up (I am one of those knitters who likes pooling--it's an individual thing!).

The STR yarn is thicker than a lot of sock yarn, so these will be mostly for wearing with Birks, but that's fine. I would not want to cover up these festive wonders!

The Coupling socks went over well in the yarn shop, and I enjoyed wearing them for the first time (hot weather? who cares, I have new socks!). I was glad to be back "home" on Saturday, and enjoyed teaching 7 students, from 3 families. Mothers, daughters, daughters-in-law...what a fun group it was! I did feel a bit bad about leaving the family at home while I chatted with my old friends, but, hey, we had to catch up! And when I got home, not much had happened, so I didn't "miss" any house work.

It is Juliet's first day at work. She is doing her job and fighting off the killer air conditioning. And, my break is over, so I will go work!