Spring Cleaning

Spring has sprung around here. With a vengence, if my sinuses and bronchials are correct. Just looking around at all the blossoms on the trees, and the pollen on the cars, is enough to induce an allergy headache. And we hit 90F last week. Ah, the joys of California weather.

With my mind on shorts and short sleeves, I’ve decided to sort through all the WIPs. I finished off 2 small projects.

The first is a pair of socks in Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock (pictured left above). This is the first time I’ve decided to be super anal and see how well I can create perfect mates. I think I did pretty well, don’t you think? What I did differently than my typical socks:

• ktbl for the ribbing to keep it neat
• started my cast on, short row heel (*), and short row toe at the exact start of a color repeat

The second is Lucy Neatby’s Equilateral Triangle Hat (pictured on the right). I love this hat. It’s intended for my Mom, but I have enough yarn leftover to make another one for myself. So, guess what? Yup, it’s on the needles as we speak. I’m using it as my on-the-go knitting, rather than socks. After all, I’m heading into barefoot season. (Yes, I know, that also equates into non-hat wearing season. But I really want this hat. It’s really cute and it doesn’t mush down my bangs too much.)

On to spring cleaning. Rather than starting another project, I started to work through some of my WIPs. Unfortunately, once I got going, I figured out why they stagnated in my piles. One was a EZ rib warmer in a beautify silk/wool single yarn. And it’s just plain inappropriate use of this beautiful yarn. I can see lots and lots of pills after one wear. Riiip! The second is a short sleeved raglan with my handspun. I tried the combined eastern uncross method, and I’m just not happy with the tension. That added to the slight miscount on the increases made me decide to rip it too.

So, that’s 4 WIPs out of the way (grin).

This project isn’t on the needles yet, but it’s a swatch of a gansey that I want to make for Martin with my handspun. It’s the moorit merino, approximately fingering weight. I started with 3.25mm needles, and finally settled for 2.5mm needles. The fabric is still soft (not stiff), but shows off the stitch definition well. And it didn’t bias as much from my inconsistent spinning.

That was something interesting that I learned from Judith MacKenzie. If your knitting is biasing a little, change to a smaller needle. It will bias less. You know what? It’s true. As long as you didn’t way overspin your yarn, that is. There’s no hope there. If that happens, you might want to look up some of Kathryn Alexander’s works.

* I used Lucy Neatby’s method of doing heels: drop the working end of the yarn, and use the opposite end of the yarn to work the short row heel. Once the heel is done, break the yarn end for the heel, and start again with the main working yarn. This way, I can control the color patterning on the heels. For self-patterning yarn, this method is much like the afterthough heel in that you can preserve the pattern repeats on the sock.