Sock Foot 9 and 1/4

It's Pi Day! I didn't have time to bake a pie, so sent DH to The Pie Store, where the line was out the door and the bakers were baking furiously. He duly returned with a steak and ale pie for our supper.



Meanwhile, here's more photographic evidence my Round 1 Sock Madness socks, Alohomora by Malena Andersen, now a pair, were knit to specs: >9 inch (>22.8 cm) foot, five boxes on leg, six boxes on foot, star toe. I couldn't figure out how to keep the measuring tape flat whilst I took a picture, but when pulled flat, the sock foot measures 9 and 1/4 inches (23.5 cm). The flowerhead pins indicate the pattern repeats.



The regulations observed, let me further note that pattern was delightful to knit, with just the right amount of texture to enhance solid, self-striping, or variegated yarns. I enjoyed the yarn, Pagewood Farms Yukon colorway Rainbow, more than expected. To me YUKON suggests a certain fiber content – this yarn is 70/20/10 Superwash Merino, Bamboo, and Nylon. Huh? I sometimes haven't liked the combination, which can be slick and limp, but this yarn and the pattern resulted in a nicely springy fabric both to the eye and to the hand.

Equally delightful, this year I had enough knitting time to finish two socks and even blog before the deadline, thus earning a place in the competition. That hasn't happened since March 2010. Yikes. Suffice to say lack of knitting time = a difficult slog that's not over yet. It's nice to have more knitting time.

Alas, a star toe is very uncomfortable on my Frankenfeet. My feet do not taper evenly to a sharp point like a pencil, they're shaped more like wedges. So I left long tails on the toes and plan to frog the toes and re-knit comfy wedge toes sometime soon.

Counting

Yarn's dry! In total there's 607 yards of two-ply fingering, plus the felted ball. The hot water bath re-activated the latent twist in the yarn, which turned out to be somewhat overspun. In this case, that's a good thing, as I hope the high twist will discourage felting and partially compensate for the non-Superwash fiber. So Plan A is a go: to knit Lotus Heart Socks by Gina House for Summer of Socks and also for the Ravellenic Games.



The two big hanks are 253 and 250 yds (231 and 228 m). Pretty good spin control, if I do say so myself, and ample for the task. I love the extra sproing of the yarn, although I do wonder if it will distort the fabric – and if something strange will happen when the socks are wet. The sock pattern stitch is balanced, which I think will help stabilize the fabric. Well, we'll see.



As a spinning experiment, I divided a small amount of the roving into dark and light bits, then spun them up separately. The finished yarn is 21 yds (19 m) dark, 13 and 7 yds (11 and 6 m) light, also decent spin control. I'm surprised that the difference in color saturation seems greater in the finished yarn than in the bits of roving.

 

Initially I thought a contrast cuff might look well on the socks. To make certain I have Enough Yarn for that, I did a bit of Ravellenic Games training and knit up two repeats of the cuff motif. Along the way, I started liking how the non-contrast yarn looked and began thinking maybe contrast cuffs aren't all that after all. Perhaps that beauteous BFL sheen is ornament enough.



Even so, I went ahead and frogged the leaves and measured the yarn used. Each leaf takes just under 3 yds (2.7 m) of yarn.



So there is Enough Yarn for contrast cuffs, but only for fraternal cuffs – one light, one dark – not for identical ones. Gentle readers will hardly be surprised that for me that seals it: non-contrast cuffs it is.

One Guess

As part of my never-ending quest for not-plastic project bags, I started a bottom-up Jamaica Pouch by Sandra Clockedile in Sugar 'n Cream Stripes, #21223 Mod Stripes. All was progressing nicely – tralala – until the turning round. See the problem? No? The purl bumps on the turning round are three-quarters white, one-quarter blue. I tried to ignore it, I knit for an inch beyond it, but it started bugging me. ::sigh::



The pouch has different stitch patterns on its bottom and sides. The bottom pattern repeats six times and the side pattern is a multiple of six, which are not the same thing. The maths work out so it's possible to frog the bottom back one round to have enough white to work a uniform turning round except that throws off the elegant correspondence the designer made in the pattern between six reps and m6. That bugs me too. ::sigh::

Hm, what to do?

DK and Handsome

After a bit of swatching and a bit of math, I started A Handsome Triangle in Victorian Lace Today (p. 32, original 1840s pattern by Jane Gaugain). Here it is sketchily pinned out at Row 74, the end of the first section.



It's about 10 inches (25 cm) along the center back. I love the embossed texture and gracefully scalloped lower edge; the faggoting bands need blocking for best effect.

Other participants of the KAL have noted the bland names of the designs; to me, A Handsome Triangle reeks of scandalous assignations and colonial oppression. In that Victorian laissez-faire spirit I blithely substituted yarns and modified the pattern. The yarn is Rowan Rowanspun DK, colorway 747 Catkin. Despite its crunchy look, it's actually very soft (a tad too soft for my druthers). The pattern calls for 950 yards (868 m) of laceweight; I have three skeins or 657 yards (600 m) of Rowanspun or about 69% of the pattern yardage. Uh-oh. Having a modern sense of anxiety, I started worrying about Not Enough Yarn.

When in doubt, I knit gauge swatches. The stitch pattern is fun to work and easily memorized, yet it's true lace knitting, with pattern rows on both the right and wrong sides of the fabric. To enhance the yarn's tweedy texture, I worked paired right- and left-leaning decreases rather than go with all right-leaning decreases as given in the pattern. In very fine yarn, the slant of decreases often is hardly noticeable, but it's more obvious in heavier weight yarns. Plus I'm fussy about such things and disliked the look of the swatch (the bottom half is worked as per pattern, the top half the way I prefer) – for that matter, the close-up in the book drives me nuts. I also worked the center panel of the shawl in garter stitch rather than stockinette stitch – I think it's attractive in its own right and also complements the garter stitch neck edge.

Some quick back-of-the-envelope scratches allayed the concern about Not Enough Yarn. (Gentle reader: if MEGO sets in, just skip to the bottom line.) I figured yardage roughly translates into shawl area. For a triangle shawl,

Area = ½ (base x altitude)

where the base is the length of the neck edge and the altitude is the length of the center back. Additionally, for a half-square triangle shawl such as Handsome, b = 2a and therefore A = a², in theory, anyway. So... [waves hands over more math involving square roots]... if three skeins are used, the center back length when the first skein is finished is about 57% of the completed length before blocking. Put another way, the center back length of the unblocked completed shawl should be about 1.7 times the center back length of the WIP when the first skein is finished.

Non math geeks still reading may be wondering why I didn't just estimate that I have 69% of the yardage called for in the pattern, so my shawl should have 69% of the linear dimensions of the pattern. Well, that would be OK for a shawl that has a more or less constant row stitch count, but this shawl is worked from the center neck outwards and the row stitch count increases at a constant number of stitches but a decreasing rate. (Unlike a pi shawl, which increases at an increasing number of stitches but a constant rate.) Attentive readers will have noticed I'm finessing the effect of the heavier weight yarn, because yarn weight is usually secondary to yardage when worrying about Not Enough Yarn.

Bottom line, my Handsome should be a reasonable-sized shawl. [g]