Finding the Yellow Brick Road

I started this socks at the beginning of September, back in 2018. They've been on my needles and in my project tracker ever since. Now and then I'd pick them up and struggle through another few rounds and remember how tedious they were, then I'd shove them back into their projects bag.

As of last night, they are DONE! And they fit, which is an extra bonus. (There's no reason they shouldn't have fit, but with as much trouble as these gave me I didn't have high hopes.)

The problem wasn't with the pattern, which is clear and well written enough. It wasn't with the techniques (although that decreasing five stitches into one at the base of each cable was fiddly and hard until something finally clicked for me halfway through the second sock and it made sense.) It might have been the yarn which, although it was a perfect colorway for this project, wasn't the highest quality stuff.

Most of it was my state of mind. I couldn't tell you exactly what made me avoid these socks.  Somewhere things went from pleasantly fiddly to downright hard.

I can't tell you how glad I am to have these finally done! There's another pair on my needles that have been just as obnoxious, but these were the more intimidating ones.

{On My Needles} The Logic of Cables

These socks are one of the oldest WIPs in my project tracker. The cables are fiddly and the yarn is just thin enough to make it an extra challenge. I'm also not good at decreasing five stitches down to one to close each cabled loop, but something finally clicked and I'm seeing what the chart wants me to do without checking the symbol key each time. 

There's a logic to how cables twist and turn and in theory I sort of get how it works, but in practice I've always been a bit hesitant. Maybe the stars are aligned just right, but suddenly this feels easy.

Please don't let me have jinxed myself by just typing that....

Something Clicked With The Cabled Socks

I'm not going to pretend to understand why, but when I picked up the Finding the Yellow Brick Road socks yesterday afternoon, the cables weren't nearly as fussy as I remembered them being. You can see a hole where one cable ends and one where the next cable begins but those are just from yarn overs. I'll be happy to have the first sock done even if it's not perfect and no one is going to look at the  cable just above my toes.

Let's hope they're as cooperative tonight!

The Worst Pair of Socks Ever

I cast on for this pair of socks FIVE MONTHS AGO and I've been working on them fairly steadily the entire time. A normal pair of stockinette socks takes me two weeks or so if I do most of the  knitting at night while we watch television. 

What went so wrong with these? 

Part of it was my own schedule. I was doing more stitching than knitting in the  evenings. I also spent a lot of evenings actively avoiding these socks because the yarn, a skein of Mary Maxim Tropical Breeze in the Toes in the Sand colorway, was absolutely awful. Craft Warehouse had it on clearance a few years back and I picked up three skeins because cheap sock yarn is one of my weaknesses.

The first skein knit up into what I think of as the Hawaii Socks without much drama. The yarn tended to shred it I wasn't careful, but slowing down and watching my stitches just a bit took care of that problem.

This skein had loosely spun stretches and completely unspun stretches and stretches that were spun so tightly I might as well have been knitting with embroidery floss. Cutting the yarn would have messed up the gradient colors which are the only redeeming feature of this stuff.

You can see how uneven my stitches are....

A more reasonable knitter would have frogged the project and thrown away the yarn, but I'd spent money on it and time on the project and even though I have no moral problem with quitting something as not important as a pair of socks, I insisted on plowing through to the bitter end.

They may or may not fit. I don't know or care. What's important is that they are DONE and now I can move onto the other two pairs of socks that are antagonizing me.

Finally Casting On

A year ago, or maybe it was two years ago, I bought yarn to knit a striped shawl. A couple of days ago, I finally picked a pattern and cast on. 

If all goes well, this will become Jette, a free download from DROPS designs.

Slow, Slower, Slowest Socks

I have three pairs of socks on my needles and they're all taking absolutely FOREVER. 

From left to right, Smock Madness is slow for no reason. The smocked bits are fiddly, but there's a lot of ribbing between them. Finding the Yellow Brick Road is allowed to take so much time  because of those pretty circular cables -- but I think it's been the fastest knit of the bunch. And Toes in the Sand is k2p2 ribbing that I think is slow just to spite  me.

I thought I'd cast on a shawl last night to give myself some happy mindless knitting, but so far it's not an improvement.

Yan at the Dollar Tree?

The two Dollar Trees in my area with Crafter's Square aisles have both been stocking worsted weight acrylic. I was curious enough to buy a skein to knit up. I'm not sure why, because I have worsted weight acrylic for  small projects already, but new yarn is a tempting thing. 

It's not bad! One 130 yard skein was enough to knit myself a pair of pocketbook slippers. Its texture is  comparable to the softer skeins of Red Heart Super Saver. For big projects, it would make more sense to buy your acrylic at Michaels or Joanns or Walmart, especially with a coupon. But for a little project or a craft for the kids, this stuff could make sense.

Restful Rainbow Shawl

Lion Brand's Shawl in a Ball is exactly the kind of yarn that appeals to me when I'm standing there in the craft store. The promise that I can make a  whole shawl with one skein of yarn? Yes, please!  

When Hobby Lobby had it on clearance, I grabbed all of the different colorways. This one is Restful Rainbow and it's the least subdued of my choices. 

Whether or not you can get a full shawl out of one five hundred yard skein is open to interpretation. This is definitely a shawl and if I'd used a lacy stitch pattern it would have come out bigger. Two skeins would open up a lot more options.

I like the effect of gradient yarn but if there's been knots in the skein (there weren't!) this could have ended completely differently. 

Procrastiknitting

The plan was to knit a couple of ballband dishcloths for my sister's new kitchen. Three seemed like a good number, but they were quick and fun and it made sense to make a fourth one so that there was one of each color combination. 

I also wanted to add something to make it more obvious that it was for the kitchen. That was going to be a little bottle of dish soap or a store bought scrubbie, then I remembered the little rounds ones I'd knitted back when I was making ballband dishcloths a few years ago. It took some searching because I couldn't remember the name of the  pattern  and there wasn't a trace of it in my blog posts from back then. (It's like this Welted Spiral Scrubbie but I was using a different pattern when I made the first ones.)

I can't believe that it was way back in 2006 when I first made some of these from the pattern in Mason Dixon Knitting. How does time pass so quickly?

On My Needles in Mid-December

2019 is coming to a close and I'm thinking/hoping that I might be able to get all of these projects finished and bound off before the new year. There's also the pair of Finding the Yellow Brick Road socks, which are buried in a project bag. 

The shawl should be easy enough and so should the Toes in the Sand Socks. The second Smock Madness sock....Let's just say that this is the third time I've cast on for that one. If I make the first, I should be able to do it again, right?

Things to Love About a Troublesome Shawl

There are things to like about this shawl. I love the colors and the combination of stockinette and garter stitch ridges, which are the same thing I did on the previous Wildstreak Shawl but look better on this one.

I absolutely love the combination of k2p2 ribbing and garter stitch ridges that keep it from flipping up at the bottom like the last one did.

What I don't love is that there were so many knots in the skeins that I now have eighteen ends to weave in. I also don't love that the loosely spun yarn was looking worn while I was still knitting.

I will not buy more loosely spun yarn no matter how cheap it is.

Look Before You Leap...Or Cast On

I wanted another easy shawl on my needles so I dug into the bin of Hobby Lobby clearance yarn and cast on with this stuff. The colors are gorgeous, bit it's full of knots and so loosely spun that it catches on every tiny hangnail or bit of rough skin. At least it was cheap. 

I didn't realize that I'd used a different colorway earlier this year and complained about the exact same qualities. Oops! I'd completely forgotten about that shawl and that yarn.

This is the last of my Yarn Bee Wildstreak and I definitely don't plan on adding any more of it to my stash. But I'm also apparently more forgetful than I realized.

Fall Knitting

I've talked in the past about coordinating my yarn with the season. This time it was accidental -- I grabbed the skein of yarn to cast on a late night project and realized later that the shading is perfect for fall. I can still claim credit for that, right? 

Honestly, this colorway doesn't look like much inside and under artificial light. It was only when I was knitting in front of the windows at the convention center last week that I realized how pretty it really is.

Why do we fuss so much about Ott lights and perfect color choices if they lighting isn't that great where they'll be seen? Or on socks that are going to be hidden inside a pair of shoes?

Knitting in Portland

Did I mention that I have a new shawl on my needles? It's a garter stitch triangle, using a skein of Shawl in a Ball that I picked up at the 2017 Hobby Lobby yarn clearance and it's a pretty decent project as far as mindless knitting goes. 

My oldest son and I spent the entire day Saturday at the Retro Gaming Expo in Portland. Early that morning, I knew I was over packing my project bag with knitting and stitching and books. Odds were that I'd spend most of my time reading on my phone's Kindle app or playing Clockmaker.

That was before I shattered my phone in the parking lot as we were getting out of the car. I spent ten hours knitting and stitching and people watching and read both books I'd brought from cover to cover...and I'm not complaining one bit about the long day. Hours of uninterrupted time to work on what I want to work on is not a bad thing at all.

I do wish I'd had my phone because I could've taken a  picture of my sock in progress with the Unipiper riding by in the background. 

Slow Blue Lace Socks

It took me almost two months to slog my way through this pair of socks, despite the fact that I was actively knitting on them. I'd understand if I'd shoved them into a project bag while I was working on something else, but I was actually trying - and failing - to get these done.

I can't explain how or why they were such a hassle. I had good needles. I've knit probably a dozen pairs in this same super easy lace pattern. I've used this brand of yarn before and even though I don't like the placement of those dark stripes, that ugly detail shouldn't have messed with the physical act of knitting them.

I made mistakes. I dropped stitches. My hands got tired more quickly than they should have (a problem that I didn't have once I switched to that garter stitch shawl I posted last week.)

I think I'll tuck these into a drawer until I forget how much I dislike them. 

Caramel Me Away Shawl

I needed something mindless on my needles so a few days ago I cast on with a cake of self striping acrylic from my Hobby Lobby clearance stash. The plan was to knit a garter stitch triangle until I ran out of yarn and just look at how well that plan worked out for me!

I like this one a lot more than I thought I would. It took the tiniest bit of fiddling to keep the stripe pattern consistent because when I bought the yarn I didn't know there was a trick to selecting the cakes to ensure that the colors would end at the same point. To fix my mistake, I wound up using yarn from the outside of  the second skein to make the narrow reddish band wide enough, then going back to the inside of the skein to continue with the dark brown.

This was just what I needed as an antidote to those blue lace socks.

I used two skeins of Yarn Bee Sugarwheel in the "caramel me away" colorway, not quite 700 yards of worsted weight acrylic. Now I'm torn between using my other two cakes to make the exact same shawl in a different colorway or doing something different, like basketweave.

Garter Stitch...

It turns out that what I needed to get myself out of this knitting slump was an easy garter stitch triangle. I'm working from a cake of Yarn Bee Sugarwheel in "caramel me away" and yes I absolutely did buy it because of the color name...and also because it was $1.74 at the Hobby Lobby yarn clearance sale.

What I didn't know at the time was how to compare the cakes to make sure the colors flow when you move from one to the next. I haven't compared them yet to see if I accidentally got it right.

September Sock Knitting?

I couldn't tell you why, but the blue lace socks are not going well. I pick them up and work on them every time we sit down to watch TV as a family, which is just about every night. Somehow I've fallen into that special type of knitting black hole that I've heard other knitters talk about, the one where it doesn't matter how many stitches you put in or how many hours you spend, you don't get any farther along.

It's not the yarn. It's not the needles. It's not the pattern....although at this point I'm thoroughly sick of all three.

I don't think casting on a new project is the answer, not when I've got thee pairs of socks that are stalled. One for no reason and the others because they're kind of a little bit hard and I don't feel like knitting something hard right now.

So I'm challenging myself to finish one of these pairs by the end of the month. Smock Madness looks the most likely, because wraps are a little less daunting than circular cables.

How's your knitting going? Better than mine, I hope!

I Have to Knit Cables Today?

This was probably the worst "have to" of last week's Arbitrary August choices, which turned out to be no big deal at all. I'm still not excited about those fussy circular cables, but it turned out that I had marked my place on the chart before putting it away months ago and I made my way through another circle without too much stress.  

There's a lot I still do like about my Finding the Yellow Brick Road Socks -- the subtly striping green yarn, the way those cabled look if I don't look too closely at the points where all of the stitches join to complete the circle... but I'm slogging through them. And slogging through the blue lace pair that I'm also working on.

Maybe I need to cast on something new.

Borealis Socks

My sock blockers are hiding from me today and that might not be a bad thing. I didn't care for this combination of stripes while the socks were on the needles but on my feet it's much less obvious. 

The yarn is Deborah Norville Serenity Sock in the Borealis colorway. 

They kept my hands busy and  now they'll keep my toes warm.