Finished this pair of socks last night:
I liked the colour combination as soon as I had completed the first repeat on the first sock! The light turquoise contrast works beautifully to brighten the whole sock.
These have gone in my sock drawer!
Finished this pair of socks on Friday and began a new pair that I think I might keep. The stash keeps growing – I will definitely have plenty of socks to share for Christmas. Last week I contacted the gal who wanted 4 pairs of socks from me two weeks before last Christmas – I told her this was the time to place her order. She said no socks this year. Do I really believe her? When she asked last year I just squeezed her order through – I had to take one pair, remove the toes, lengthen the foot by an inch, reknit the toes – she was lucky I had enough time to do that. I’ve already put aside a couple of pairs with someone’s name on them. I’ll just keep knitting as usual.
I finally made a decision regarding the 6″x6″ blocks – to use the textured raw silk for the background, to fuse batik circles of various sizes to the background to simulate “modern flowers”. I cut out ten 10″ blocks from the raw silk I have on hand, backed it with sewer’s dream to stabilize it, marked 6″ squares in the middle (using a heat erasable pen). Next, I added fusible web to a pile of batik scraps and cut out a lot of circles. I have started arranging and fusing circles to the raw silk.
Because all ten blocks will be shown next to one another, I’ve worked to vary placement, even cropping some of the flowers so the appearance of the blocks is different. I have to edge stitch the cropped edge so there are no raw edges at the edge of a piece.
I’ve completed one of the blocks
The slight wobble at the bottom of the block will be eased out when I mount the fabric over the stretched canvas.
Looks like each block will take me between 2 and 3 hours to embellish. It doesn’t look like a humungous amount of stitching but it takes more time than you think to edge stitch each bit of batik, then to add stems and leaves, and signature. The stems are free motion. The leaves are decorative stitches each requiring careful placement. The flower centres are embroideries which want precise positioning and often involve thread changes. It all takes time.
I’ve got another block sitting on my machine waiting to worked on tomorrow.
I also finished the latest pair of socks (added to the give-away stash) and the pull-on shirt I made using the heirloom panel I created a couple of weeks ago. I’ve since added five small mother of pearl buttons to the centre of the heirloom embroidery to draw attention to the stitching. It’s a light, loose hot summer day shirt. The only problem – the fabric I used for the heirloom panel is a slightly yellower colour than the rest of the shirt. Nobody will notice it. And I’m hoping a washing or two with oxyclean will whiten so the panel will blend with the rest of the shirt!
I like how this pair of socks turned out. The dark grey goes well with the bronze and tan colours. This was an Opal yarn I picked up here in town several months ago. The bits of white in the variegation make the other colours sing. I enjoyed working on them.
The new pair I started next uses yarn from KnitPix – it came wound as a skein (rather than as a ball) but it may have an actual repeating pattern, I haven’t got far enough along to be able to tell.
Finally finished this pair of socks – not sure why it was slow going but it was. I knew before I started I wasn’t going to have enough turquoise to finish the toes – dug out the purple variegated to finish the toes. So on to another pair.
This was a ball of yarn I bought from Hobbii in Denmark during the early summer. I couldn’t tell from the image of the ball of yarn what it would turn out like – what caught my eye was the glint of a “metallic” fibre – which I know from experience is some kind of “mylar” strip. You can’t see it in this photo, but if you click on the image, you can see in the enlargement a slight bronze glint which adds an interesting element to the sock.
The only problem is that there were constant breaks in the mylar which meant there were metallic thread ends sticking out both inside and out. I kept trimming them as I went along.
And then on the first sock I encountered a knot – always a sign to watch out for a pattern disruption! Turns out the second yellow stripe beyond the heel was missing – that’s on the first sock on the bottom. I made a mental note to remove the second yellow stripe when I knit the second sock but forgot about it until I was knitting the turquoise stripes and at that point I wasn’t going to unravel what I’d done, I was too far along, so I just kept knitting.
At a cursory glance the socks look like a pair – but just not quite. Fortunately, the mismatch is in the foot and therefore not visible when wearing the socks.
So into the give-away pile, they’ve gone.
I just keep knitting. I CANNOT sit in front of a TV without something in my hands that doesn’t require my full attention but lets me feel productive. Finished this pair of socks a week ago. They’re not as drab as they look, there are hints of magenta and navy blue in the variegated yarn. They weren’t too boring to knit as some socks are from time to time.
This pair finished, I started on the next. I’m ready to turn the heel on the first sock, this evening.
Colourful. Cheerful. I’ve stuck them in the stash for now. I don’t really need another pair of socks although I love the colours. For no explicable reason I decided to continue the pattern into the toe instead of changing to the contrast colour I used for the cuff and heel.
I finished these socks last evening:
A bit more bland than usual – I had turned the heel on the first sock before I realized I’d forgotten to change the yarn to the solid! No point in taking out the heel so I carried on. I decided to just continue with the toe as well.
I actually prefer the contrasting heel/toe sock. I’ll try to remember on the new pair I started last evening.
This pair has been added to the stash to give away.
I have one friend who can’t wear wool so I bought a ball of synthetic yarn at Michael’s to make her a pair of socks.
Socks From Synthetic YarnThe socks turned out an interesting pattern. However, they took longer than usual to knit because I didn’t like the feel of the yarn in my hands, on the needles!
I discovered that wool has a resistance on the needles that keeps the yarn from slipping – it’s not that the yarn doesn’t slide on the needles, it does, but there’s a drag that I find makes knitting easier. The synthetic yarn was quite slippery – the wooden needles don’t fall out, but my hands tired as I knit with this yarn, having something to do with having to fight the slipperiness of the yarn.
Having knit exclusively with wool these past 18 years, my hands have become accustomed to that subtle drag the yarn has on the wooden needles.
I finally finished this pair of socks. It’s back to wool.
jmn 