Loki Socks

Pattern: Wyvern Socks by Marnie MacLean Designs

Needles: US 2 - 2.75 mm

Yarn: Loki from Gnome Acres, which is a brilliant indie dyer who specializes in nerdy yarn colorways. Loki was actually the first yarn I ever purchased from them, but you've seen me knit socks in Robot Patina and Mustache Manifesto before.




I finally got around to my Loki socks! I've had these planned for a couple of years now, which is terrible, isn't it? There are too many things to make, I swear.

Anyway, I saw some interesting patterns online for socks with a sort of scalloped scale looking pattern on them, which reminded me of Loki's armor. I ended up choosing Wyvern Socks for its scalloped shapes. This is a toe-up sock pattern. I'm not terribly used to those yet, as the majority of my socks have been top-downs, but I'm already noticing a pattern in my toe-up socks. I have a terrible time gauging how long the foot needs to be before starting the heel. I see to do pretty well judging the leg length of a sock before starting the heel going top down, but my toe-up socks have all come out too long in the foot. Not long enough to really be considered a problem that needs ripping and redo-ing, of course; just long enough to be noticeable and a little annoying.

I also think the stitch pattern gets lost in the colors of the yarn. That was also my mistake. I didn't anticipate how often the colors changed and how much of a contrast there was when knit up. Because I don't swatch. I know, I know, but I still like them! I'll just have to try out this pattern with a solid color or a more muted variation.




Overall, this is a great pattern. It was easy to follow and the pattern repeats were really easy to get down in my brain. I found it easy and comfortable to knit multiple rows without consulting the chart for the pattern. I definitely look forward to trying this pattern again.

And even though the colors drowned out the pattern, I can't help by love this colorway. The colors all look great knit up and I'm really happy that I have my pair of Loki socks now.




(Photo shoot note: I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome a blast from the past to my photos - a pair of legs from an old unitard! I was in dance classes all through school until college, so I have a lot of weird costume pieces you wouldn't expect a guy like me to have floating around his closet. I mean, I'm pretty much a ratty jeans and T-shirt guy most of the time.

This unitard was from a dance costume in middle school that I quickly outgrew, but I cut the legs off and saved them. This came in handy in high school when I did my first Captain Jack Sparrow costume and didn't yet earn enough cash for pirate boots. I wore these legging with black work boots and sewed black flappy boot tops to pin around my legs, so it looked like I had fancy pirate boots until you got close.

So I found these while pulling out props for knitting photo shoots and they looked perfect next to my socks. Movie!Loki does wear some tight black pants and kid!Loki from the comics has some black legging type pants and yellow against my skin isn't a great combo, so I wore them for the shoot.

It was actually really nice not to have to worry about how my skin was going to show up on camera, so I might break them out again for other sock shoots.)



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Varsity Stripe Socks and Other Stuff

1. Varsity Stripe Socks


Pattern: Varisty from the book 2-at-a-Time Socks by Melissa Morgan-Oakes

Needles: US 3 - 3.25 mm

Yarn: Grab bag yarn from the Holiday Yarns booth at Stitches East 2013. As much yarn as I could fit in my hand for $20. Yep.


This was my first time doing socks on a really long circular needle and socks done 2-at-a-time. It was interesting. I purposefully staggered the stripe progressing so that I was working with two different colored yarns at a time to keep straight which sock was which. I like how the socks turned out, but I'm not entirely thrilled with the stretch to the stitches while the socks were on the needles. I don't know if my needles just weren't pliable enough yet, but the cord kind of stretched out the socks around the halfway loop. If you know what that means. Yikes.

(Sometimes I forget how ridiculous talking about knitting can be until I write it down.)

Anyway, it was slow going because I was still learning and I still favour DPNs for my socks, but I wouldn't be averse to using this method again and I have some other patterns from that book marked for future projects.



Also, thanks to @clamhoppers for the photos of my actual feet! I was trying to take these photos with the 10 second timer, but the surface in the photo is actually a trailer that I had to climb onto, so without help all I was getting were photos of picking the grass out of my socks:




2. Other Stuff

Speaking of @clamhoppers...

(Who is my youngest brother Pickleface, if you didn't know)

He's off to college! He's completed one whole week so far!

And that's partially why the blog hasn't been updated. There's been too much going on. There was some drama at work going down that led to a lot of anxiety on my part. Both brothers were moving to college for the fall semester (Stovetop for his senior year and Pickleface for his freshman), which meant a lot of house and car wrangling for a while. The Gabbers' boyfriend has been up in our neck of the woods for work training, so she's been coming up pretty often to hang out at the house to kill time or keep herself from murdering her landlord or make tomato sauce. My mom's van tried to die, so there's been a lot of vehicle wrangling at home as well.

With everyone out of the house but myself and my parents, there's been this a drive to get stuff sorted while no one else needs the space. There was some furniture gymnastics involving a very large chaise and some stairs and there has been a lot of organizing neglected spaces.

And I've got more craft things started now than I did last time I posted! I'm trying to get things together for a fall/holiday shop update with new Christmas things AND a few scarves which are time consuming. I started a large-ish Halloween cross stitch pattern. I've started a new quilt.

And I'm fretting about my Halloween costume which will be very easy and not so costly with the exception of one thing and I have to get that one thing right. If I get it right, it will be bad ass. If I get it wrong, I'll be very sad about it.

But things are improving. I'm trying to get to work earlier so that I don't have to make up so much time at night/will only be working overtime at night. I'm working on balancing out all the craft stuff into manageable chunks. I'm looking forward to the madness of my upcoming yarn event schedule:

• September 9th - Coventry Farmer's Market Fiber Fest
  
• September 26th & 28th - Western Connecticut Yarn Crawl (Mom's working on the 27th so we're skipping that day)
  
• October 10th - Stitches East (actually 9th - 12th, but we need to limit ourselves here)
  
• November 1st or 2nd - New England Fiber Festival (which I might be going to alone, depending on Mom's work schedule)
  

So excited about it. And worried. But it's the natural progression into the crisp goal-oriented worry of the end-of-year months, which can be mitigated by copious lists, tea, and spontaneous baking.

Now if only summer would just leave and let fall settle in.



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Thermal Textured Socks

Pattern: Thermal Textured Socks by Kelly Patla

Needle: US 4 - 3.5 mm

Yarn: Patons Stretch Socks Yarn - Olive






These socks took me forever. Ultimately, I'm pleased with them and I'm glad I pushed myself through, but I don't think I liked using this yarn. It's a stretchy yarn, which made keeping tension even-ish difficult. I'm not sure if you can tell from the photos, but one of the socks is a size smaller than the other and didn't really even out to something closer until I washed them both a couple of times. Also, I think the elastic muted the colors and they didn't turn out quite the way I expected them to once they were all knit up.

I really like this pattern, though. It's a pretty simple repeat, but it looks a lot more complicated. I want to try it again in a yarn with less color variation so that the texture really pops out.


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Java Socks and Rudy Got Sole

Alright, folks.Time to post the things that I made for people for Christmas. Nearly everything was sock-themed, so here's the first two pairs.


Pattern: Java Socks
Needles: US 0 - 2.0 mm
Yarn: Patons Kroy Socks FX - Clover Colors

This is the pair of socks that I dragged down to Florida on the Disney world trip. I think I knit a whole 10 rows on one sock the whole time, even travelling, but it made me feel like I had a head start on Christmas present making. That was a lie.




Pattern: Rudy Got Sole
Needles: US 0 - 2.0 mm
Yarn: Premier Yarns Serenity Garden Twilight

I might be the luckiest knitter in the world when it comes to sibling gifts. We're all within the same 4 inches in height, we're all within one shoe size of the others, and we're paired off in terms of hand sized (Pickleface and The Gabbers have the same sized hands, and Stovetop and I have the same sized hands). We're probably paired off-ish in terms of sweater sizes, too, if I was willing to make sweaters for my family members. If you've read the blog for a while, you'll notice that I have made both of these sock patterns before. Definitely planned because socks for my feet would fit all of my siblings. 

Works in Progress! Handspun, scarf, and socks!

Fair warning, folks. I'm posting this from my Kindle fire to see how difficult to successfully put together a photo post in the blogs. Forgive any weird formatting errors or autocorrected words.

So let's get this party started and have a look at the stuff I've been working on since my last shop update/blog post.

1. Doctor Who scarf


It's been a while since I've had a full sized Doctor Who scarf in the shop, so I'm crawling my way through this one. It'd be easier if we weren't in a heatwave, but that's life.


2. Handspun






I think I mentioned somewhere that summer is for spinning and apparently it's true. I find myself working on handspun when it's too hot to knit, which lately has been most of the time.

Also, I learned how to Navajo ply singles the other night when I couldn't sleep. Because I'm ridiculous.


They're not that impressive, but that's what I had lying around. I'll probably have a bunch of the blue roving from the handspun above to ply with new plying.


3. New sock!

I started a new sock and started playing with a new iOS app (A Beautiful Mess) when I posted these on Instagram.

Java Socks

Pattern : Java Socks
Needles: US 1 - 2.25 mm
Yarn: Red Heart Heart & Sole Blue/Brown, used 80 grams / 340.8 yards
Started: May 27, 2013
Finished: June 22, 2013

Steampunk Club - Robot Patina - Finished Things!

Pattern : Oddity (Ravelry)
Needles: US 1 - 2.25 mm
Yarn: Robot Patina Steampunk Club Special Edition from GnomeAcres, used 38 grams / 166.4 yards
Started: March 10, 2013
Finished: March 19, 2013




Pattern: Soldier's Socks
Needles: US 1 - 2.25 mm
Yarn: Robot Patina Steampunk Club Special Edition from GnomeAcres, used 32 grams / 140.2 yards
Shibu Staccato Sock Brick from New England Yarn & Spindle, used 29 grams / 110.8 yards
Started: March 19, 2013
Finished: April 11, 2013




:D

Rudy Got Sole

Rudy Got Sole
Premier Deborah Norville Lavender Topaz
US 1 double pointed needles








There's nothing like finishing a pair of socks. Putting them on for the first time and just reveling in how well they fit might very well be the best thing on earth. It's really hard to have a bad day when you wear them properly for the first time.

I hope I'm always this amazed by the feeling.

Craft Snapshot

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Black Traveler Socks

Traveler - PDF Ravelry

Works In Progress

Mismatched Socks

Needles: Size 1 (2 1/4 mm) double pointed needles
Yarn: Patons Kroy Socks FX (Color 57210)
Pattern: The trusty Soldier's Socks pattern








Yes, I know they don't match. They're the same colors but they're probably from different batches of dye, so the amounts of each color varies.

Grey Socks

Since my first knitting lesson at the hands of my younger sister, most of my projects have been really simple. To be honest, it's been scarves up until last year when I decided that I was going to buckle down and learn how to knit other things. I was just sick of making scarves. I couldn't give them away fast enough and I'm not a big scarf wearer.

So I started knitting berets for said younger sister and fingerless gloves, which are a bit tricky when you are first starting out. Then I moved on to learning to cable which I had heard was difficult, but my mother had managed to learn it, so I figured it wasn't all that bad.

Guess what I made with that new skill? More scarves.





'Okay,' I thought to myself this year at the Connecticut Renaissance Faire as I stood in my favourite booth ever (The Merry Little Lamb). 'I am going to make a pair of socks.'

Well, I was actually going to try and make a pair of kilt hose to wear under my pirate boots for Halloween, but I didn't have enough yarn and I wouldn't have finished them in time anyway. But I was determined to make something to wear on my feet.

So I found this Soldier's Sock pattern on the Free Knitting Pattern Directory. It looked simple and adaptable and, if I was going to be making more socks after this first pair, I needed an easy, basic pattern.

I feel like I've hit a milestone. I've made a pair of socks. It's like I'm really a knitter now.