WIPs, KAL Qs and don't forget the sale!

How are you? I feel like I've been a bit quiet recently between a shoulder injury, which made knitting rather painful (I'm on the mend, I just have to take things slowly), and commission WIPs that I haven't been able to share, but I am still here! Even though knitting is my job, it's also my hobby, and I've been knitting lots of gift socks recently, which has been a lot of fun - my sock drawer is overflowing, so I've decided that this is the year of gift-socks! Here's the latest pair, knitted in Felici and destined to be dropped off with my friend very soon.

While I can't share my work WIPs yet, I can give you a little hint: there are a lot of ends! The final piece will be in Knit Now later this year, and I'm really pleased with how it's working up.

I am planning a KAL for later in the year, and would love your input: I've put together a few questions so that I can create a KAL that works for as many people as possible, so would be grateful if you could fill out this survey. I'll leave it open until the end of the month a should only take you a few minutes to complete.

While I'm here, don't forget that I have put together a selection of 8 sock patterns that are perfect for Spring for you to check out. As an extra incentive, they have 15% off until the end of the month with the code SPRING. You have until 11.59pm BST, May 31st 2022. You can find the patterns here.

 

FO Friday: Sock amnesty

You may recall that I am currently running a Marathon Sock KAL over in my Ravelry group (you can find out about it here). Well, when the KAL started, a few people asked whether WIPs (works-in-progress) were allowed. While I decided that they wouldn't be allowed for the main KAL, I did decide that they would be allowed for a separate warm-up thread to encourage people to get some socks finished before casting on their marathon socks. Handily this also acted as an encouragement for me to get some socks finished.

Starlight Express socks

First I decided to finish my 'Starlight Express' socks. I started these socks somewhere near the start of the year, and nicknamed them Starlight Express after the very sparkly, very 80s appropriate stripey yarn (which I bought at the British Wool Show last year). I had planned to knit these using the Vanilla is the New Black pattern, but I reached the heel section while I was on the train to Edinburgh Yarn Festival in March, and working a new heel is not conducive to relaxed train or sociable knitting, so I carried on knitting a tube ready to add afterthought heels at the end.

I simultaneously enjoyed and didn't enjoy knitting these socks. The knitting itself was fine - I always find knitting stripes motivational, but the stripes are quite wide, and somewhat muddy (there is no clear distinction between the end of one stripe and the start of the next), all of which slowed me down a bit. Matching the tubes was easy enough - I somehow managed to find the same point in the stripe sequence twice (this was quite possibly luck rather than judgement), but matching the heels proved much harder - I ended up knitting the second heel twice to improve the match and they still aren't perfect...

Afterthought heels - a small leap of faith...

The finished socks are lovely to wear though. Having knitted a lot of socks I now know that I like my sock yarn to be that bit grippier, so this commercial Opal sock yarn is perfect. I also think this may be the first pair of sparkly socks I have kept for myself! Every other pair has been gifted to someone else.

Pattern: Afterthought heel socks - improvised, so no pattern
Yarn: Zwerger Garn Opal Funny mit Silbereffekt, colourway 9332 Heiter
Ravelry project page

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Festive sockalong socks

The second pair of socks I finished for the warm-up portion of the Marathon sock KAL is the socks I cast on in November for the Festive Socklong that was being run by Amy from the Stranded Podcast. When I went to hunt these out I wasn't sure how much I had knitted, and was pleasantly surprised to find that I had knitted the whole of the first sock, so just needed to knit the second to match. 

Having looked through my notes on Ravelry and in my phone (the two default places for writing notes about how I knitted socks) and coming up with nothing helpful, I had to examine the first sock carefully to establish how I knitted it. It turns out I had knitted the sock from the toe-up, with a Fish Lips Kiss heel, which was easy enough to replicate. I did fail on getting the socks to match fully as I didn't take into account that the yarn had two sections in the same colour on each colour repeat, oops. Not that it matters - the two socks have come out remarkably similar! One small thing I did on these socks that I do quite a lot with yarn that has pooled into stripes is to work the heel from the opposite end of the ball of yarn. This means you can work the heel without disrupting the striping, and I find it a pleasing fix.

While I could put these socks into a box and save them for Christmas-time, I've put them in my regular sock drawer as I think they're pretty subtly festive. I'm looking forward to wearing these ones.

Pattern: Fish Lips Kiss Heel by Sox Therapist

Yarn: Unbelievawool Merino Nylon 75/25 in the colourway Jolly Holiday (a club colourway from December 2016)

Ravelry project page

WIP or RIP?

Over the late-May Bank Holiday weekend, I had an urge to do a bit of tidying. That weekend, we tidied our dining room, and I was surprised at just how much yarn there was lying about (I knew there was some - the yarn for upcoming magazine projects lives there, so there is always at least a small pile). One of the larger boxes of yarn contained the Dance on the Beach CAL that I started in 2016. The pattern consists of crocheted squares that are all joined together at the end, and while I had enjoyed the first few weeks of the CAL, I did start to get behind and lose interest. After about six weeks of the CAL, I put everything in the box and apparently hid it from sight and mind.

As soon as I opened the box I knew that I was never going to finish the project. We already own quite a lot of blankets, and I don’t love the pattern enough to really want the finished object. There were 28 completed squares, as well as 8 un-started balls of yarn. So I asked a few friends for places I could donate 8 inch squares to, and one suggested a charity called Sent with Love, which donates hand-made blankets to cancer patients in the U.K. The best bit is that if you don’t have enough squares for a blanket, you can send them individual squares and they collect them together to make into blankets. They also take yarn, so I donated the partial balls to them as well. The rest of the yarn has gone to a new home via eBay, as there’s still enough to make a sizeable project, and the colours coordinate beautifully.

Leftovers...

I’m sure that if I rummage through a few more cupboards I’ll find some other long-abandoned projects that could do with either finishing or being donated elsewhere... but for now I’m claiming this as an excellent piece of spring cleaning. Life is to short to finish a project that you don’t love.

Do you have any projects that you know you’re never going to go back to? What do you do with them?

Half term hiatus

This week is half term (mid-term break), so knitting has taken a bit of back seat as I am distracted by other things. I do have two projects on the go though, both straightforward stocking stitch that can be done while entertaining children/being driven to events/whilst shattered and winding down in the evening.

The first project is a cardigan for me that I cast on last weekend, the Antler cardigan by Tin Can Knits. The cardigan is knitted bottom up, so I have a lot of stocking stitch to do before I get onto the cables. I've almost got to the end of the first sleeve, and once I've measured my arm and worked out how long I want the sleeve to be, I'll cast on the second as a few days of portable knitting.

 

The second project is, somewhat predictably, a pair of socks. I always have a pair of vanilla (non-patterned) socks with me that can be worked on whenever I am held up somewhere or have a few spare minutes. The current pair are knitted in Halloween striped yarn that I bought from Rosie's Moments at Yarndale. Purple is my favourite colour (you couldn't have guessed from the colour of the cardigan), and while I don't generally do anything Halloween-related, I couldn't resist these stripes when I saw them (going against my policy of looking at everything available at a big event, then making a decision). The yarn is lovely to work with, and I've used a Fish Lips Kiss heel (which I recommend, it's nice and easy to memorise) to avoid disrupting the stripes with a gusset. I'm at the very end of the first sock, and am about to cast on the second, so I doubt these will be done in time for Halloween, but really don't mind as these will get a lot of wear as soon as they're off the needles.

Do you also find that knitting with children around requires simpler projects? Let me see your current projects.