Sock Fever

I did it. I've finally decided to dive into the elusive world of sock knitting. I honestly never understood the obsession. I mean, I get the knitting obsession, but specifically socks? Why do I want to spend all that time and energy on an item that will be worn on my feet to take the brunt of abuse? Socks get the raw end of the deal. They get shoved into smelly shoes and slothed across dirty floors. So why then am I spending $14 on sock yarn that will take me hours of my life loop into a pair of socks that I can purchase 5 for half the price? Because I'm a knitter, and I NEED to! Have you ever seen sock yarn? Whenever I peruse my favorite yarn shop, I stare lovingly at the beautiful sock yarn and it's rainbow of colors. So desperate to actually knit with the stuff, I bought a few hanks of sock yarn and stuffed them in my stash for "some day." Not to mention sock knitters have some of the most beautiful patterns!

Well, today is "some day." I officially dug out the colorful sock yarn and those itty, bitty skewers they call size 2 DPNs and cast on. I have to admit that knitting with toothpicks is a bit awkward. I fear snapping them if my attention drifts for even a second.

I am absolutely fascinated by the self-striping sock yarn. Glee saturates my body as a new color creeps up and a new stripe begins. It's like Christmas! Though, I admit I've been knitting the same shade of blue for a long time now and am quite ready to see a different color!

The cuff is near done. It looks a little small to me, but I reassure myself that it's a 2x2 rib and it will stretch. I will keep you posted on my progress as I migrate towards the oh-so-fun turning of the heel!

Ciao!

Little Cotton Bag

The little cotton bag, how I love thee. It's summer, and right now I'm obsessed with plant fibers. It's such a nice change from the heaviness of wool. I found this great mercerized cotton yarn at my favorite yarn shop, Loop. Clip by On Line felt so good in my hands. It started out rather stiff, but after knitting with it for a while, it turned out a lush drape.

I worked the body first, vertically, using short rows to make it wider at the center. I alternated colors to make thick stripes. With the body complete, I picked up the side stitches on one end and worked the flap in stockinette with a seed stitch border. I increased every few rows to shape it to size with the body. I folded the body in half, seamed up the sides and lined it with a maroon brocade fabric. I finished it off with a great button and the Jute Wrapped Handle from M&J Trimmings.

Fatal Attraction

I've been knitting for nearly 4 years now. In that time, I have finagled my way through countless scarves and half-knit afghans and experimented with my own handbag designs. I continually ignored that pesky gauge thing every pattern and site wants to remind me of. Until now, I had found little need to worry about gauge.

I had been wanting to tackle garment knitting for some time, but was too intimidated by them to try. I attempted to knit a raglan dog sweater, but found beating my head mercilessly against a wall would have been more fun than seeming up the sleeves and getting them to line up. I sort of put the idea of sweater making in the back of my head and focused on learning new stitches instead. But the idea of making something wearable, and not to mention beautiful, nagged at me.

When I discovered my favorite LYS (local yarn shop), Loop, in Philadelphia, I promptly enrolled in their top-down baby raglan class. Wow, an opportunity to crawl out of my secluded yarn stash and go out into the world to meet other obsessively nutty knitters AND be taught how to knit a baby sweater WITH NO SEAMS was too good to pass up!

The class was great. I started the collar, joined in the round and after a while started to see the formation of the sleeves and body magically appear beneath my fingers. How exciting! Gauge wasn't terribly important in the baby sweater world since babies grow so fast, the idea is that some baby will fit into it at some point. So even though I had done a gauge swatch to make sure I was right on, gauge wasn't really a focus here.

I left the first class with instructions to knit until it's time to break for the sleeves and then come in to the next class ready to learn how to do this. I was so excited about my baby sweater that I was to the sleeves the very next day. What to do? The next class was in 2 weeks and there was certainly no way I could idly wait around not knitting this adorable baby sweater for 2 more weeks! The light bulb went on and off I went to pick up a second pair of circular needles for which I cast on a second baby sweater. Surely this would keep me busy until the next class where I'd walk in with 2 baby sweaters ready to break for the sleeves. Yes, this was a perfect idea. But only a few days later, I was back to where I had started. At this point, I could wait no longer and so I dove head first into the pattern and moved on. I could not stop myself, on and on I went until I had one sweater completely done! I was SO excited! My first baby sweater! It's beautiful!



But now what? Class is still a week away and I have to at least show up ready to go forward with everyone else?

I cast on a third sweater.
Yes. A third.

By the time my second class rolled around, I had one complete sweater and two bodies complete. I was high in production mode and proud of it!


I CAN KNIT A SWEATER! YES I CAN!



By the third and final class, 2 sweaters were complete, one was still in body form, a matching hat had completed one ensemble and a fourth sweater had been started. The last sweater is what threw me over the edge. I thought myself clever when I decided to adapt the pattern to handle a thinner cotton yarn instead of the heavier worsted wool I had used in the last 3 sweaters. I wasn't afraid of a little math, and so I calculated and cast on. How clever am I?



When my fourth sweater (err, t-shirt) was complete, I was so proud of myself (and so full of myself), that I was ready to tackle anything! I had eagerly purchased a bit more of this wonderful superwash wool that I had knit one of the baby sweaters out of and decided to try my hand at a tank for myself.



This tank was from the bottom up. I had it all planned out. I had measured myself, drew the tank and calculated my stitches based on my gauge from the baby sweater and eagerly cast on. Every decrease row made me smile as I quietly patted myself on the back for figuring out how many stitches to decrease over x rows to shape the waist. I was knitting feverishly as I anxiously awaited this beautiful tank to materialize under my hands. I was knitting faster than I'd knitted before and when I finished the last decrease a warm and fuzzy feeling came over me when I measured my length and found I'd accomplished all my decreases in exactly 10 inches, just as planned.

At this point, I was eager to see how it would lay on me as I got closer to knitting my bust, so I slipped all my stitches onto waste yarn so I could try it on.

*GASP!*

This thing was huge! I was swimming in it. This can't possibly be... I did everything right! I laid the half knit tank out on the ground and measured it.

IT'S TOO WIDE!

After my heart stopped pounding, I realized that in my haste to knit, my tension must have been off as I was knitting 3.5 stitches to the inch, not 4 as I had done on the baby sweater. A measly 1/2 a stitch difference in gauge has caused me to knit a LOT of extra inches. I was sick over it.


I took a quick photo of my blob of knitted fabric with my cell phone before dishearteningly ripping my work all the way back. It's not the best quality photo, but it's better that you don't clearly see my HUGE mistake. Yes, one side is as wide as the arm of a chair. Don't even go there... My head has been deflated. Perhaps that's a good thing.

Defininition of a Problem

I have become an obsessive knitter, not surprising really, as all my endeavors in life are obsessive to a fault. No other hobby of mine, however, has struck such a long-term cord within me. I am a woman of many hobbies, and passionate for each in the moment. I love the act of creating and am in love with the idea of turning nothing into something. Blank pages of paper lure me with a world of stories yet to be told and pens, with their magical ink, are the keys to unlocking them. My camera holds within it the ability to freeze moments in time in a way that only I can see it. Canvas colors my soul with the endless possibilities of what beauty can be. And yarn, my precious balls of colored fiber, tug at my heart to be twisted into wearable works of art, expressions of creativity bound in faithful servitude. This yarn, this string, has grounded my chaotic obsessions some, leaving little time for anything else. No other hobby of mine, no matter how passionately I feel for it, has endured my creative compulsive need to move on to something new having scarcely finished the project at hand. No, knitting has managed to prevail... but my knitting projects, however, I fear have not been as fortunate.

I barely begin one knitting project when my brain conjures up yet another that excites and moves me so much that I am rarely able to finish a project at all. This is evident by the mounds of beautiful yarn (which routinely inspires me yet remains too special to decide on a proper project worthy of it) and countless projects at various stages of completion, their needles hanging off of them like little arms outreached and begging me to pick them up, all stuffed into tote after tote and slowly taking over my tiny living room in a sea of woolen fiber.

My toy poodle, Holly, is often jealous of my attention to yarn and needles, my wide-eyes and racing mind going through the limitless possibilities before me, sitting prudently perched in my arm chair swallowed by pattern books, supplies and yarn. She will purposefully insert herself into the epicenter of my chaos, planting on my lap and entangling herself in my precious yarn. I can only assume she does this intentionally to disrupt my flow and kindly remind me to pay attention to her at some point. She rarely scoffs at my aggravated growls to get away and leave me alone. She instead looks at me with that cute, straggly face and sad eyes that momentarily wrack me with guilt. I make myself feel better by gently telling her I'm busy and I'll cuddle with her later, though she and I both know that later rarely comes anytime soon.

Holly is not generally a vengeful dog, but there was one incident when she took her disapproval of my all-consuming hobby out on an innocent bamboo knitting needle. Chewed it right in half and smugly stuck her nose in the air when caught.

I have found that not many people understand my disorder, not even my faithful dog. Not many people understand the way hanks of silk merino yarn melts my heart let alone how I can spend hours in a yarn shop molesting their stash. Few get the compulsive need to stay up all night to finish a project while on a roll because you are so anxious to see the final product, and few understand that some things must be sacrificed to the Black Hole of Unfinished Projects in order to satiate the creative compulsion to begin anew. I stand relatively alone, running with my needles through a life I refer to as a creative disorder.