I made a rather timid attempt at a second pair of socks using my leftover yarn…

A baby sock! So far i only have 1.5 baby socks finished, so maybe I will get the rest done at knitting tonight. to reiterate some of my knitting philosophy for any new readers

Babies: Not so much.
Knitting for Babies: awesome.

Baby projects are tiny and always cute (well, almost always) and usually pretty quick. I am a huge fan of baby socks because it lets you try out different sock knitting techniques (toes, heels, bind-offs) rather quickly since they are pretty small. I am writing up this pattern as I go and hopefully people will be able to use it to try out knitting a toe-up sock. stay tuned.

Here are a couple of socktober highlights that I want to link to for future reference.

• Stretchy Bind-off by Grumperina – This is fantastic for toe-up socks. It is by far the best thing i have found so far. and easy to memorize. B- you have to try it.
• Short row heels with wrapped stitches – Buried in this tutorial is the reason why the left and right side sides of short row heels with wrapped stitches look different. and how to fix it. when i understand, you’ll see it in action here
• Picot Edging for toe-up socks – Completely tested and verified with math, the best way to put a picot edging on a pair of toe up socks.

i am off to spend the last hours of Socktober in a bar with my knitting friends and others. I might get that second baby sock done, but probably I will just ruin it while knitting under the influence. Happy Halloween!

photo courtesy of teapotgirl

he is a little amigurumi droplet. we thought he looked like melted mochi so we put him in the mochi tray. I am also working on crocheting some bacon – you can see it in the foreground.

I also whipped up a prototype baby beanie that is supposed to look like a buckeye. The pattern needs some improving, so i will probably give it another try.

i will be sending it off to my cousin for his new baby that is due in a few weeks.

I have also made some progress on the the only big knitting project that I am working on right now, the clapotis. I have 3 dropped rows!

and finally, the results of my solar dyeing adventure

whew! That is some bright green.

Pattern: from 50 Baby Bootees to Knit
Yarn: Schachenmayer Micro that i bought from Elann a long time ago.

But wait, it gets cuter….

Pattern: I didn’t use a pattern, but I was inspired by the bibs from Mason-Dixon Knitting that i have seen everyone making, so i just made up something similar. I made the strap button on the front so that it is a feature of the bib. i also tried my first crochet picot edging. i just made it up as I went along.
Yarn: Mission Falls 1824 Cotton in color 105

I got the buttons at the thrift store for 5 cents each. I will miss them when they are gone.

You might notice that the sock is sitting atop some delicious looking brown yarn. I made it! I think it is my best spinning yet. The roving was merino wool – mohair blend and the color was
called Kona. I got it at Carolina Homespun when i got my wheel. I have a selection of pretty rovings (I think 4 oz each) and i just don’t know what to make out of that much yarn. I spin too thick for socks, and i don’t want to make a hat…. maybe i
will put them all together in a scarf.

And finally, the top-down raglan is progressing nicely. I have already start to think seriously about something cool to do for the ribbing.

Saturday, Gen and Cheryl
came over to do a little spinning. Ingrid was hanging out for a while and sneakily took some action photos of me and Gen spinning away on our matching Lendrums.

We took a break and headed over to solano to check outstash, the new yarn store (where we ran into b!). I visited once already, but was pretty depressed about how i could never afford anything there. The girls really started investigating the yarn selection, and I saw some stuff i liked, so I can maybe imagine buying some thing there. I also saw an Anny Blatt angora scarf kit. Damn. That was some soft, warm stuff. I can’t consciously spend $40 on a scarf that I only kinda liked… I was just totally in love with the fiber.
Some internet research leads me to believe that the ball of angora/wool blend weighs something like 2 ounces and is ~100 yards (or meters – i forget). Can i spin that thinly? Let’s find out!! I think I might order 3 oz of angora, and the
fast flyer for my spinning wheel and see what happens.

You can kinda see an ‘O’ and half of an ‘X’. The best part about these patterns is that 2 of the 5 are available for free
from interweave (pdf download link). So get knitting!

So my roommate started searching high and low for an affordable, feltable yarn in good colors. She decided on some reynolds Lopi bulky in green and yellow and ordered it from Yarn Forward. It arrived, and to our disappointment the yellow was a oldy-greeny-yellowed tarnished kind of color. So she traded that away to a friend and ordered some bright yellow. The colors looked good.

For the next several months it was her only knitting project*. She brought it to knitting circle, worked on it in front of the TV, and plowed ahead even though she was really really sick of seed stitch. It was really a lot of knitting. Finally, she had all the pieces made to the dimensions required in the pattern. she sewed it up and was ready to felt. Amazingly, she took before and after photos. Now i know this is something i would have done, and i probably urged her to do so, but i don’t remember, i think she might have just done it. and lucky for us, too because now we can witness the tragedy.

Before: Notice how the bag covers the entire chair, and is approximately
square.

so she threw it in the washing machine a few times, added a ton of detergent, put it on hot. all the things you are
supposed to do (and all the things you need to do to felt in our friend’s machine). but nothing was happening. “Oh, just throw it back in,” I told her. “My booga bag took forever to felt.” (because it did ). then, it finally felted a little bit, but it seemed uneven. “Throw it in again!” I told her. It came out looking a little weird, but was still definitely too big. so… that’s right… she threw it back in. After an unknown number of iterations, the bag looked hideous. “Should I just felt it some more?” she asked me. At this point I was thinking that the felting was really just making everything worse. And though i never
told her this, at this point i thought that maybe i shouldn’t have been so zealously telling her to keep felting it over and over. But that’s what I do – make myself part of the problem.

After:

The bag did most of its shrinking in the vertical direction. It did almost no shrinking around the top, so that the idea of actually containing something in it is almost laughable. even the handles felted unevenly. they twist up, and are no longer the same length as each other.

my roommate never sent the bag to her friend. i think she just didn’t have time to write the accompanying
letter explaining what it was supposed to be, and how it got the way it is. I am all for sending the thing as far away from our house as we can get it. When we bring it out to gawk at with our knitting friends, the conversation usually goes
something like this:

knitter: What kind of bag is it supposed to be?
roommate: A diaper bag for my friend who is having a baby.
knitter: well you could certainly carry babies in it, but i don’t know about
diapers.< here it is "in action" ( the action would refer to the only thing it does: sit around and be really disproportionate):

It is hard for us to look at this bag, because it just reminds us of the other unholy baby gifts we have knit (for
example the horrific baby booties).

I know there there are other knitters with felting horror stories…. If you want to read/see another one, I found this yesterday. AND…. i have one more felted
bag tale of horror, but you will have to wait for another day.

*I don’t know how she does it, butI have never seen my roommate have more than 1 knitting project at a time.
weird.

you might remember that a little while ago sarah and i knit some really awful booties (you can refresh your memory here). During the baby shower we pulled them out to try and give them to the parents-to-be. everyone got to play the game of figuring out what to do with hideously over- and under-sized baby booties. the best suggestion for the large bootie was to use it as a washcloth-mitt for
washing the babies. My favorite suggestion is this:

A mitten for a hitch hiker. Too perfect.

It was a close one, I wasn’t sure we would get it finished, but here it is:

That’s the mom-to-be, Emily. I hope she forgives me for the picture of her with her eyes closed, but it is only one i have! The second blanket is practically finished as well.

A few weeks ago, Sarah started knitting a pair of baby booties from the Knitting for baby book. Here she is then, happily working away

I also have been working on a pair of booties from the same book, but mine were the “stay on booties” and was very proud that i managed to finish them. During knitting circle i decided to start making another pair. I noticed right away that the yarn was not knitting up to the same gauge as my previous yarn, so i was going to have to not knit as many stitches. Both were 100% cotton baby yarn, and looked the same, but the “Cottontots” was much fatter. We noticed that was what sarah was using also, and might be the reason her bootie was looking a little on the big size.
Long story short: I left out too many stitches and my bootie came out too small – as in too small for a teddy bear. sarah’s bootie came out much too large – as in a slipper for a
schoolchild.
Here is a picture of them with the correctly sized
booties and a dpn for scale.

We had
to come up with what to do with the booties that we had since neither of us
wanted to knit a mate for our horrible creations. Here are a few ideas for what
to do with the large one:

• A slipper for a small child
• Baby’s first christmas stocking
• A bag to hold all of the other booties
• a bag to hold knitting notions

My favorite idea is to use
the two of them together as matching purse + changepurse pair.

Here
is a picture of the big one holding the normal sized booties and the little one
holding knitting notions

Any
ideas?