Today was a very good day:

A sure sign of Spring - my Carolina Jessamine is getting ready for the party, along with the early blooming trees budding all over the place:

A near-completed project at work (or at least the light at the end of the tunnel for phase 1, each phase is so time consuming, it’s like it’s own project!)

A long awaited announcement from my father that he will be officially retiring on April 1, although there’s a possibility that he may stay on part time for awhile. I couldn’t be more pleased for this man that has worked so hard for so long, has given so much to me and to our family, and is so deserving of the freedom that it will bring him. He’s a do-er, and I wasn’t sure he would actually be able to stop working (even though he’ll have no shortage of things to keep him busy)! Go Dad!!

A lunch date with a dear friend, and a decent possibility that I have pressured cajoled convinced said friend to embark on a pretty difficult training schedule for an event that’s very near to my and Tad’s hearts (which you’ll certainly be hearing about here in the near future). Just the thought that she MIGHT do it with us is so exciting to me - she’s one of those lifelong friends, very dear to me, and it would just be something to share it with her and to see her experience it and all the positive take-aways.

And finally, another WIP - I had to take a break from the Chuck’s Socks and get a little instant, well, almost instant gratification. While searching for picture material for my banner amongst my stash and FO’s a couple of weeks ago, I found this forgotten little project in the corner of a drawer. When I needed a pick-me-up after my latest sizing debacle, it’s colors called to me. I was surprised to find that I had left it (in December, ‘05, after an ill-fated and half-hearted attempt to make a couple Christmas gifts) a little over halfway complete, and put it on the list to pick up sometime in the near future. Sometime is now! There is an FO in my future, quite possibly in the next couple of days. Any idea what it is? Hint - it’s size-less!  I can’t mess this one up

First of all, thank you all so much for the kind comments about my Chuck’s Cabled Sock, you gave me such a nice boost! A couple of folks have asked about the yarn I’m using - It is Lang Jawoll Superwash in 8395 Light Brown and 8305 Light Grey (which is actually a powdery blue-grey). They are both heathery with nice depth. I spent a couple days on the couch this week with some nastiness that’s been going around, sleeping, reading knit blogs and randomly clicking on all sorts of links and blogrolls - I found some really cool people in the process, but spent way more time online than is normal for me. I knitted quite a bit too, but due to brain fog I think I picked up stitches for the heel gussets at least 3 times. I finally had to give up after a bit and wait until the fog at least partially cleared.

So, finally I made some progress today - I am just so pleased with how this little sock is coming out. I love the design (that Eunny, she is something), I love how the cable splits at the heel with the thinner version trailing down the foot. I love the little line of blue stiches outlining the gusset. I love my heel mod. But, despite my best efforts, a lot of stretching, a little (ok, a lot) of cursing…. The damn thing will not fit over my GD heel. I was convinced, convinced it would fit! Love is blind, I tell you. It seems that my blindness pertains not only to things that are too big, but now also, to things that are too small. And yes, I checked gauge, though I may have been a little lenient. That’ll teach me. To be lenient, and to postpone trying on the damn thing until I’m more than halfway through the thing. So, anyone have size 6-ish (or maybe 4-ish) feet?

Say hello to the Little Man. He’s not trying to eat the sock (Sweeter would be the sock eater), he’s trying to make me smile - what a big sweetie.

Remarkably, I’m not really that upset. Every time I make a big knitting mistake, I get something out of it. In another life I was a sewer - this type of sewing failure would have brought me to tears, or at least caused me to throw the project on the floor in frustration and stomp around a bit (which might have been because I found sewing so frustrating and it might also have had something to do with being a temperamental teenager). But even though I dress it up for the sake of the story, I don’t think my knitting has ever reduced me to tears. Not yet anyway. I have a feeling I’d better go knock on some wood now.

I should be halfway through the foot of my Chuck’s Cabled Sock by now, but I took a small timeout to give some extra attention to the heel. As written, the heel flap is in a bi-color diamond pattern, but the instructions indicate that the background color should be broken at the start of the short rows and the turn knit entirely in the contrast color. I wasn’t thrilled with the look of it once I saw it and I wondered if there was another option. The pictures of the sock in the pattern don’t really show the heel very well, so it’s hard for me to get a sense of how the blue heel would look as part of the completed sock.

I thought that I would like it better if the pattern carried on through the heel turn, so I took a whack at it! I’m really pleased with how it turned out, particularly the way that the little brown diamond carries right through the center of the turn. I stopped here to take pictures (you can tell I was excited by the number of pictures I took, please bear with me!), so I’ll have to let you know if there are any issues with this as I pick up the stitches for the gussets and carry on. (click for big versions of the pics!)

I also did my own little study in yarn dominance with the heel flap. In the first shot below you can see (maybe!) a subtle line of demarcation, a difference that you can see even more clearly on the wrong side of the work. I knit the first half of the heel with the brown yarn in my left hand on both the right side and wrong side of the work and noticed a difference between the knit and purl rows. I realized that this was my first practice in knitting fair-isle back & forth instead of in the round, I had just assumed that it would be the same and I would continue to keep the same yarn in the same hand whether working on the right or wrong side. For the second half of the heel I switched hands for the right and wrong side (brown in left and blue in right for the wrong side and blue in left and brown in right for the right side). The third shot shows the heel re-worked switching hands the entire way. The difference is pretty subtle, but I can see it, so I’m glad that I went back and fixed it. This was great practice too - I’m a real learn-by-doing (and making mistakes so that I have to fix them!) type of person. I won’t elaborate too much on yarn dominance, others (like the awesome Nona) have written about it at length and there are some great resources out there.

I can’t wait to finish this sock!!

Welcome to my powder room - Pardon the toilet paper!

This was my very first sweater with set-in sleeves. It took me quite a while to get through it because of this, but now I feel much more confident. My stitch gauge was right on, but my row gauge was off and I had a mental block when I got the armholes. The fix was really easy (subtracting rows evenly between the decreases), but for whatever reason I thought it must be more complicated and so it took awhile to wrap my brain around it. I have to laugh at myself, sometimes it takes me forever to get a fairly basic knitting concept! In the meantime, I worked the back and both fronts up to the armholes, and then it sat for a month or two. Once I finally did get it, I flew through the rest (and another sweater which had also been knit up to the armholes with the same problem – the Sandra Sweater). There are some themes here, both this sweater and Sandra were knit using Knitpicks Shine Worsted. Based on my experience with these two projects, this yarn grows, potentially a lot, from the gauge swatch, I had this problem with both sweaters, and had to take drastic measures with Sandra to make it fit. This one didn’t grow quite for whatever reason but it was still a little big and I did take it in an inch or two in the body. I also modified the fit by adding a few short rows in the bust in an attempt to accommodate the girls without any gapping or riding up (ideally I would have added a few more, but I was afraid that they would interfere with the cable pattern).

Once the knitting was complete and the seams sewn, I had a problem finding buttons that I really liked. Jo-Ann Fabrics seems to be the best button source around this area, but they didn’t have enough in stock of any of the ones that I really liked and I fell victim to instant gratification – these buttons are beautiful, but not necessarily suited for this project. They are a bit too big and too heavy. Once I start moving around, they droop. I have yet to wear this sweater aside from the day I finished it and taking these pictures. I don’t think it’s “done” yet. It makes me look thick in the middle (a constant battle with my big girls and short waist) I think it could be a little more fitted, however with it being so low cut I’m afraid to take it in any more; I want to look classy, not tart-ish. I am contemplating losing the buttons and the ribbing and adding hooks and eyes (like another recent project, Coop Cables) or maybe a picot edge and little buttons? I really do love the pattern. I know some folks have an aversion to bobbles, but for whatever reason I am drawn to projects with them, even though they may not look good on me – this sweater in the new Vogue Knitting?

Love it. It’s got to be a texture thing. I loved knitting this sweater, I like the way it turned out, I just don’t love the way it looks on me. I hesitate to frog it - I have concerns about how this yarn will hold up. And I would like to think that the project can be saved. Any thoughts/comments/suggestions on how to make this little sweater wearable?

Here I am at the fifth repeat on the first Chuck’s Cabled Sock. Upon reaching needle #4, I realized that one row back, on the last cable crossing row, I had missed each crossing, on this needle only. I couldn’t bring myself to tink back and re-cross the row. I know, I know, it’s just one row. But I have a strong aversion to tinking cables, even using the cabling without a cable needle method and just working backward. I have fixed cables in the past by dropping the stitches and using a crochet hook to pick them back up in the correct order, and I’ll do it, but I’m not a big fan of this either. I know what you are thinking. It’s ONE row. Stop whining and tink the damn row already. Apparently, since I’ve become such a big fan of cabling without a cable needle, I have a problem with using needles, hooks or other implements other than the ones already in my hands. Here is a tutorial on the quick and dirty method that I used to fix the offending cables – not including the stoppage for picture taking, it took just a few short minutes (as opposed to the 10 it would have taken me to tink back – not a huge time savings, but the psychological benefits of not having to undo my work or use an extra needle were most definitely worth it in my book.) Disclaimer - You can see that I do use another needle to hold stitches for me while I worked, since this is working needle of the DPN set, I didn’t mind using it

Ok, here we are. Needle number 4 is on the left, needle 3 is on the right. I’ve already moved the one of the stitches to test my process and moved this portion of the cable to needle 3.

The goal here is to move that first brown stitch on needle 4 in the center of the picture to the left by 2 stitches, crossing in back of the blue stitches. Ultimately those 4 blue stitches on needle 4 should be divided in the middle by two brown ones, one from the right side and one from the left.

Move that first brown stitch from needle 4 to needle 3. We are going to sneak up under that blue strand in back of it to grab the stitch:

With the extra DPN, pick upthe two blue stitches and hold them in front of the work (this is a C2F):

With needle 4, sneak up under the blue strand in back of the brown stitch that we are going to move:

Grab the brown stitch:

Now both the brown stitch and the blue strand are on needle 4:
Using needle 3, pick up the blue strand from in back of the brown stitch:
Bring the blue strand up and over the brown stitch and….
Off the needle (drop the strand from needle 3 also in the process). The blue strand is now in front of the brown stitch and the brown stitch is on needle 4:
Move the two blue stitches from the extra needle to needle 4:
The brown stitch has been moved to it’s proper location after the two blue stitches:
Here’s the cable with both brown stitches moved to the correct location:
And the whole row after fixing all the cable crossings:

It all worked out very nicely, and really, I was quite pleased with myself. Until I realized that the missed cross was actually TWO rows back, not one. ***Blush*** Oh well, maybe someone else will find this helpful! Now I have to figure out how to fix it for real!

By the way – this was clearly a minor mishap; if you have had the same problem multiple rows back or (take a deep breath) on a finished or nearly finished project, my sincere sympathies and here are some sites to check out for help:

Yarn Harlot

Yarnpath

January One, who cites some other great references as well

I Need Orange

CastOff.net

Ok, so this entire post is ganked directly from a promo email that I got from the Avett Brothers list, but although it’s a promo, it’s so well written and hits home with me (It doesn’t hurt that I LOVE their music, and am so looking forward to this new album!) Check them out. They are great (and their live shows make their albums pale in comparison). BTW, speaking of shows, we’ve got some good ones coming up in March - woo-hoo!! And one from last week that I need to update you on. Stay Tuned.

Now for the copyrighted section of this post (complete credit goes to the Avetts for the image and the words):

“This is a time where playing it cool is the way to be. It is a time where people are taught to hold back, to keep their best tricks up their tightly-buttoned sleeves, to guard their love. The days of sonnets spoken to girls in unreachable balconies are behind us, replaced with the new coldness; maybe I’ll call you, maybe I won’t. In a modern setting where even the satire is satirized, love becomes weakness, tears become a punch line, real laughter a vulnerability, marriage a surrender.

The Avett Brothers introduce ‘Emotionalism’ today in this very time; a record that marks their position in a livid stance against such mentality. It is a first step in an effort to name and strengthen a procession already in motion; one that wants to write a sonnet, wants to truly laugh, one that says so when it hurts, one that wants to fall in love and above all, wants to admit it with the true excitement that only such a state of heart and mind can create. This spirit rises up against the coldness, against the sarcasm, against the detachment.

The American Heritage Dictionary describes emotionalism as “an inclination to rely on or place too much value on emotion/(or an) undue display of emotion”. The structure of the word itself echoes the excessive nature of other terms: alcoholism, narcissism, etc. These words too, offer the image of one that has gone too far. To this end, the terms are the same. Here however, going too far is purposefully done-for a common balance, for something good. The Avett Brothers present the idea that in this era, such display of emotion is entirely due. This is said with an album of songs that mirror the thought. They truly laugh, they love, they say so when it hurts. They stand beneath the balcony and say the best poem they can think of, in hopes that whoever is up there will care to hear.

Emotionalism is a weakness. It is a presentation of a heart-lucid reality to those who do not seek it. It can be mocked. It can be ignored. This record and the group that executed it take part in a voice, singing to the guarded, the scared, the damaged, the emotionless. They will choose whether or not to listen.

The Avett Brothers introduce Emotionalism — New Album in Stores May 15, 2007 ”

I will listen!!!

I’ve spent some time this weekend playing with my knitting pictures and uploading them to the site, the result of which is the new Knitting Gallery, which can be seen on the gallery page. I had fun going through the old photos and watching myself take on more challenging projects (and my hair grow longer & longer!) Tad helped me capture a couple projects that I hadn’t had shots of before, so those have been documented as well. Check it out, let me know what you think!

Despite the discouragement of the eaten sock and the lost Anemoi Mittens, I got up the gumption to start Chuck’s Cabled Socks!  I’m participating in  the Chuck’s Cabled Sock KAL hosted by Bettina, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how they come out and seeing what some other folks do with them.  I’m 2 repeats into the sock, so I have quite a ways to go, but it is moving alonger faster as I go.  I’m finding that cabling without a cable needle is pretty handy for this project, and actually works out really well with the stranding.  I’m really liking the way the heathered colors work together and I’d love to try this combo for another pair of Anemoi Mittens (which I will be much more careful with!!).

Welcome to Pipe Dreams and Purling Plans! If you are a frequenter of tadandmel.com, you may have noticed our “downtime” this week. It seems that due to a freak issue with joomla, our previous content management system, we lost our entire site - all the postings, tad’s reviews, my knitting pictures and documentation - everything. We had put quite a bit of work into it and were pretty discouraged. But Tad persevered and we are now rebuilding out of wordpress. So far it seems pretty easy to use! Unfortunately, we cannot get back the postings that we had done previously (unless, like my smart IT husband, we had saved them separately as a document. I, not too surprisingly, had no such brilliant precautionary measures.) But, we now have some new and easy to use tools at our disposal, so I will put my projects into galleries, and will start with new postings. I wasn’t so sure earlier this week that I wanted to continue after having lost all that work, but this does seem to be a pretty simple and seamless way to document our lives and projects - so there you have it!