Then there is this weird heel...

As stated in my last post, the socklet heel got ripped out but only on one repeat of the short rows (the pattern had five repeats of random short rows, something about making them fit the heel better) and when I got that last repeat ripped out, the heel began to look more normal and actually came up to where it should. In the picture that came with the kit, the heel does look ruffly, like they squished too much heel into the space. With four repeats of short rows, it fits much better--or it would if I could get it on my feet but having size 10 feet and a size 8 sock creates incompatability. They were intended for youngest g'daughter but I was so disappointed in their outcome, I decided to bag them and put them away till later. They are finished but I'm not sure I really want to give them to anybody.
I still have six skeins of the yarn left, so rather than redo the same disaster (they all have the same heel), I decided to use two of the colors together to make a regular pair of socks for warm weather wear. The current pair is maroon and grey and is done loosely in a fair isle/fibonacci sequence type of pattern. Much better than the socklets.
BTW, I do all my socks toe up, magic loop. I can't bear the thought of starting a second sock after finishing the first one.

Weird heels!

The socklets are done and they are quite horrible! Not due to my knitting but because the pattern is wonky. What is supposed to be a round heel approximately 1/4 of a circle, turned into a round heel that does a 180 and brings the back of the sock around to meet the instep. That sure isn't right. Blocking won't help (this is a cotton blend yarn). The whole heel is just plain odd. And it is going to get frogged and reknit into a regular short row heel and short top, because the kit only alloted one skein per pair. You can bet the next pair will not be knit with the round heel!
Also finished the socks with Jenny Staimen's (find her on Youtube) very stretchy bind off. It works great. And I plan to use it again when I reknit the socks into something wearable.

What's done is done...

And what is finished is the blue/turquoise/lavender socks. Like EZ instructs us to do, I knit the tops until I couldn't stand to knit any more and (mistakenly) did a reverse knit so the top would curl over, which it does, but it also spreads out the ribbing so it is seriously flared at the top of the socks, so much so that I plan to redo the top again and just cast the darn things off! I will need to look for a cast off that has some elasticity to it, because I've been there, done that with regard to tight top cast offs. I couldn't even get one pair of socks over my heel.
Probably this can be resolved most easily if I were the kind of person who reads the instructions first instead of after everything else fails. I tried one cast off that has a YO between every cast off stitch but it seems to create its own ruffle so that won't do.
Unfortunately that seems to be the one big drawback to toe-up socks...trying to get the top loose enough to fit over the foot and tight enough not to ruffle. I'm still trying. But with what I estimate to be about 85 pairs worth of sock yarn, I may get it figured out by the time I run out of sock yarn (presuming I don't keep adding to my stash--hah!)
At the moment, my new sock project is from a Knitpicks kit. Six pairs of socks, each pair from one ball of cotton/microfiber yarn. They are actually anklets or lower: as soon as the heel is done, you cast off so they are a sort of slipper. They're designed for summer wear. The yarn is soft and lovely to work with, but it has cotton's drawback in that it is difficult to do k2tog and when my hands are more painful than usual it is more difficult.
That is one reason why I keep more than one project going at a time. When my hands are too painful for one, I knit on one that doesn't require a lot of fiddling with. The other projects are the wedding shawl mentioned in an earlier post, and a cotton shell which has been on the back burner for an awful long time, not because I don't care for it (I think it will be quite nice when finished) but because other projects have taken precedence and it is not actually one I can work on when my hands hurt because it is also a lace pattern with lots of k2tog and ssk requirements.

Remiss me?

I have been remiss...didja miss me?
Life has been crazy, too crazy to think about posting to this blog. But I have been keeping up with knitting--how could I not knit? The daily yarn fix is vital to my well being and is greatly missed when I miss it.
I finished one of my projects, knit with Mary Maxim Sparkle mohair. I made it with one skein just to see how far one skein would go. It made a smallish triangle but large enough to cover the shoulders on a cold morning. I have one skein of that same yarn for each color they make except the brown range--I just can't get into knitting brown.
But almost all my other projects have been put on hold so I could finish a scarf for a friend I had to leave when my job ended. It is Araucania Lonco (cotton, sock weight) in green/brownish/gold shades which is her color palette. I knitted it in garter stitch with a rather random yarn-over pattern. It is almost done--I had hoped to get it done before leaving--,within a week if I keep at it. I did show it to her before leaving and said I would be sending it. It is looking quite nice and if it performs like one I have knitted in red shades, she will love it. The scarf seems to hug your shoulders and doesn't even need fastening--it will stay where it is put.
I have some of the same yarn in green/blue/purple and another skein of red/heliotrope/orange. What I want to make of them will come to me someday.
Next project: another wedding shawl because I have three g-daughters who will marry some day more than likely. The one pictured with this blog was given to my new g-daughter in NZ for her wedding to g-son, with mitts to match. She told me she had no grannys to knit her something like that and was quite overcome with the gift. She wore it at the reception, which, BTW, I didn't see because I figured if I tried a 14 hour trip to NZ, they would have had to haul me off the plane on a gurney.
Also, continuing a pair of socks whenever the mood strikes. And planning to start a mobius scarf with a beautiful, soft mohair I found on sale. Only one skein but enough for a mobius.

If I had the capability to do so, I'd show a picture of the latest shawl. It is Elizabeth Zimmerman's Pi pattern (Vernal Equinox) in half ( a half circle shawl). By the last row, there were more than 600 stitches on the needle! Took a really long time to get those stitches worked off in crochet.
Since the yarn was mostly acrylc with some mohair, I decided to block it with the steam iron and it worked beautifully. No way could I do it with my lace wires. There are only two flexible wires in the kit and this shawl was way longer than what those two wires could span (it is a half circle, which means it needs to be blocked in a half circle). Besides, even my double bed wasn't big enough to spread it out and the weather was too bad to try it on the lawn. Besides, again, the edge was ruffly, so I'm not sure the wires would have even worked.
I was surprised at how quickly the shawl worked up (relatively speaking, of course) but I was using quite large needles - 10.5 - and the yarn was about sock weight. I had doubts about the yarn; normally I prefer not to use something with that high an acrylic content (okay, call me a yarn snob, I just like natural fibers more) but it handled quite nicely, definitely easy to rip out when mistakes were made, fortunately few. The yarn came into my place of work as a donation and I claimed it for a future give-away project, which this will be as soon as I find someone needy, but I wasn't sure I wanted to use it for a shawl. I did need to do something with it and I needed to start another shawl (I try to keep one going all the time)so this yarn was it. My efforts weren't wasted.
The wedding shawl and mitts were delivered and worn at grandsons/new granddaughters wedding in New Zealand. They were much appreciated and looked lovely on the bride.
I finally got a copy of Nancy Bush's Estonian Lace book. The shawls are so beautiful and I plan to start one as a next project, but first I am doing another wedding shawl in the Valentine pattern, this time with a lace border. The yarn is the same one I knit the mitts out of, an 80% goat hair/mohair, 15% mohair, 5% lurex mix (it sparkles). I bought this yarn for $1.98 on clearance and thought at that price it wouldn't be much, but it is great! Over 400 yards per ball and knits up very nicely. Can't wait to see how the shawl turns out.

Wedding mitts

I finished the wedding mitts which is a good thing because their method of travel to New Zealand leaves on Monday next week and they have to be on board along with the shawl pictured.
The knitting of the gloves went well with no more than the usual tinks when a pattern didn't turn out right, usually from a lack of a yo in the previous row. This pattern was so much better than the mess I originally started with, I will undoubtedly use it again when anothr g-daughter gets married.
And speaking of patterns: the shawl in the picture is knitted with a pattern called "Valentine" and is one I've had for years. I managed to lose the pattern somewhere but fortunately, I had knitted a sampler with the pattern in it and I was able to recreate the pattern, and have since knitted several shawls with that pattern. And wouldn't you know, after the first or second shawl using that pattern, I lost the instructions again! (It is somewhere around the house somewhere, in my knitting stuff. It will turn up someday) but in the meantime, I had to re-recreate the pattern again. You'd think I'd know it by heart by now!
Also progressing on the Vernal Equinox shawl, to the last set in the pattern series. It is a very large shawl! Making progress also on the scarf/small shawl knitted with Mary Paton's Sparkle Mohair--I love knitting with this yarn! So much so, that I ordered a skein of every color they make minus the brown...just can't get into brown, although I have brown mohair spiderweb yarn I plan to knit into a shawl/scarf one of these days. And one of these yarns is destined to be a Mobius scarf. I knitted one far enough to get the gist of how it's done and realized that one simply does not keep knitting around and around. Midway through a row, one has to change to purling or it comes out with half of it knit and half purl, from the middle outwards. Don't ask me where the change occurs--after all, this thing has only one side and one edge yet it has two sides of a pattern. Go figure.

Whew...my last blog was in November and here it is April already! Here is an original question: where does the time go? Nevermind, it just goes.
Knitting wise, I finished a yellow shawl and gave it to a friend whose husband passed away this last December. Not unexpected, but still hard to see him go. They had been married just over 60 years and she is at peace with his passing because she knows she will see him again. The shawl was a lovely, soft yellow, about five feet long, 2.5 feet wide, just enough to wrap around and feel the love knitted into it.
My newest project is the Vernal Equinox shawl from Ravelry, although in quite a larger gauge than shown on that site. It is in a white wool/acrylic blend which I "received" as part of a donation where I work. It will be finished shortly (assuming I work on it regularly. Taking time off to knit a deconstructed crocheted string bag cuts into the shawl knit time)
And speaking of deconstructing a project: I desperately tried to find a wedding glove pattern on the web and on the way to finding Nancy Bush's pattern, I happened upon one from the UK that became more of a mess the longer I knitted it! It was Madeira-type knitting (both sides are patterned)and even though I pretty much dislike Madeira-style knitting, I decided to give it a try because that is all I had. In addition to the body of the glove being that style of knitting, it also had a wristband feature that was extremely convoluted. After a few false starts, I ended up graphing the pattern which was not much help but was instructive in making me believe that the pattern originally had a return purl row between pattern rows because when I knitted it that way, the pattern suddenly looked like what one would expect and not a mushed together mess. However at that point, I gave up on it. I wasn't at all happy with the results and when my sister sent me Nancy Bush's pattern from Patternworks, I started that and am now at the thumb divide on the first glove. It looks so much better!