Monday 18 December 2017

Fascinating

I set up my tree this weekend.  I wasn't sure I was going to do one at all, but I am glad I did.  


I am debating setting up my slim pencil tree too but I am not quite sure where to put it.  I had it in my study when I bought it and loved having it there.  I sat in my study in winter more than my living room because it had a ceiling light.  My living room is well lit now, so I tend not to sit here in my study, but for when I am sewing or playing in yarn. I have listened to audio books here, but not lately.  I need to restart this because I have some great books downloaded that I can't wait to read.  I have to make a decision today so I can get all the storage boxes away.

The hard work was being done on all the Christmas stuff so this week is going to be filled with soft dollhouse and Batcave furnishings.  There will also be painting of the streets on duplo tables too.  It is going to be good healthy silly fun. But in between decorating trees and sorting out Christmas, I knit.  

I have pretty much finished the little red sweater, but that will get it's own post tomorrow.  Today I want to talk about other knitting.

As you all well know by now, I love socks and there are always socks on the go.  Earlier this year, I seemed to be getting really into patterns.  Once I finished the plain socks last week, I took out some of the others I had on the go to give some knitting love.

I knit a lot on this sock.  I've used the Broken Seed Stitch Sock by Hana Levaniemi.  And it is fascinating. I've made these before but with different colours and discovered something new to learn making these.


This is my sock, rife with errors, but it is a sock so no one is going to notice but me.  You can one place where something weird happened and part of a needle turned to be a funny rib (traced to a dropped stitch so the pattern was out of sequence), but you can also see some other weirdness, a distinct difference in a section that will be the foot.

When I first started knitting the sock, I was using the Phildar sock lavender as the row where the knits and purls happened, and the multi coloured Austermann Step for the row I knit plain. Technically, this was not what the pattern asked for.  I should have been doing it the other way round, 

but  I loved how the lavender softened the colours and made the whole thing look icy cool wonderful. I still do. 


There was a period where I took this sock along knitting and that knitting was usually during the chasing of small children and often was under low light conditions.  Somewhere along the lines, the rows switched colours.  Lavender was suddenly knitting plain rows and multi was doing knits and purls.  



That funny or different looking section, shows off the darker colours of the Austermann, and the lavender becomes the element that defines rather than softens.  It has the look of what the dark lead lines in a stained glass window do.  It is much more true to the spirit of the pattern and is really quite lovely.

I debated staying with the more defined look.  The bit on the bottom of the foot wouldn't show up at all unless I was wearing sandals (Yes I do wear socks in sandals.  It's Canada.  It's what we do.) but I still do love the soft icy sort of look.  I went back to using the knits and purls for the lavender.  

The Austermann is a rather large ball of yarn.  It will easily make another pair of socks if I used another colour with it.  I do have a few single balls of plain colours around here somewhere that might work nicely with this, to make another pair where the Austermann colours will carry the show.  Not lavender, though.  Only 1 ball of that. There is a yellow somewhere, and a bright strong clear blue too, both of which would give smashing results.

Anyway, it has been so interesting to see what the stitch pattern does in this play in colours.  Helps me see how such a small thing can make such a huge difference.  

Knitting.  Never boring.  Certainly not on socks.

No comments: