1/14/2006

Little Needles, Little Yarn

In four days of knitting I've gotten 1/2" done on the Peaks and Valleys socks. Freakin' little needles, and freakin' skinny yarn. My fingers are achey tonight after about an hour of knitting. I've had to rip it out and start over three times, and now I'm counting the stitches every time I finish a needle - that's four times per round. It's because I'm making mistakes (ever rarer, but still it happens) and I have a really hard time fixing them if they're too far back. The yarn is so small and the stitches so fussy to my lace-novice needles that I end up making a bigger mess. If I catch it while I'm on the same needle it's semi-doable. This is not going to be a perfect pair of socks, though.

I can't quite tell whether I'm going to like them. I feel as though the colors are so beautiful but also a little busy that you can't see the stitch pattern very well. It all blurs into a hodgepodge of pretty colors. Which may be enough. I haven't given up. For one thing I haven't accomplished enough to really decide whether I like how it looks.

1/10/2006

New Year Knitting

I'm in a state of manic excitement over the freedom to knit without deadline and without pressure. Which is making me knit more and more enthusiastically than before Christmas. Life is full of irony. I'm working on two pairs of socks, each of which has a story.

The first started as a pair for either my daughter (2 yrs. old) or my nephew (just 1), depending on who they ended up fitting. They're Peaks and Valleys from
.

The pattern calls for fingering weight on size 1s in the infant size. I was raring to go, but I didn't have any fingering weight yarn, so I started it on 3s in Debbie Bliss cashmerino aran to see what would happen. They're clearly too big for socks for either M.M. or Mr. W.. But… I think they're going to be perfect as legwarmers for M.M. if I just make tubes. The pattern is easy and fun, and I like how it looks, particularly in the heavier yarn. So that's one.

The second pair is in a beautiful yarn I got the other day at my LYS, but it was without a label of any kind. The clerks said it's "Anna", whatever that means, but googling Anna yarn yields nothing helpful, so I'm flying blind here. It's very lightweight and handpainted (seems to be, anyway) in lovely blue, green, and purple. I'm starting a real pair of Peaks and Valleys that I'm planning to give a cousin when I'm done. I'm using number 1 needles, and boy is it all tiny and fussy. The drama about this yarn is that I got it home from the store and I was so excited about it that I started winding it up willy nilly and somehow created the Mother of All Tangles. It took me hours – like, double digit hours, I'm saying – to untangle the whole thing. I stayed up to the wee hours of the morning three nights in a row working on it. My back ached, my eyes crossed, my feet fell asleep as I obsessively unraveled the knots. I finished triumphantly at 1am yesterday, and cast on for the socks this morning. It's a damn good thing the stuff is so gorgeous or I never would have been able to do it.

The camera charger is on its way back to me in the mail so maybe I'll have images soon.