Knitting FO: Darjeeling Socks

A large portion of the sock yarn I own was collected between 2007-2009, or as I'm going to call them, "The Variegated Years".  This was a time when I was fresh out of grad school, dizzy with the prospect of a real honest-to-goodness paycheck coming in every month.  It was during this time period that my stash size exploded, and one very big enabler instigator assistant in this process was The Loopy Ewe.  Now, don't get me wrong, I love Sheri over at Loopy.  She helped me build a very nice sock yarn stash that is a beautiful (if a bit worryingly large) source of inspiration. 

This yarn, Numma Numma Toasty in the colorway "Apple Butter" was no exception.  And plus, it's mostly browns and tans!  They're neutrals, so they'll go with anything, right? Right, except we have to actually KNIT the socks before we can dash around in their delicious golden-hued warmth, pretending we live somewhere the leaves on trees change color in the fall.  I actually went back to my order history and saw that this yarn was purchased in January 2008, which means I've had this yarn sitting around in my stash for more than four years.

I bet if, back in 2002 you'd asked my husband-now-but-boyfriend-at-the-time if this knitting thing would go this far, he would not have ever suspected that I could be the type of person capable of purchasing yarn and then hanging onto it for more than 4 years because it was just too pretty to let go.  What can I say?  Must be the wool fumes.

If I love the yarn so much, how come it's taken this long?  Well, I went off sock knitting for a while, and then just when I started to get back on the wagon, something had shifted subtly in sock knitting.  Before, everyone was looking at color combos and coming up with hilariously funny (and sometimes punny) names for their colorways.  Now, it was all about solids and semi-solids and shaded solids.  Or self-striping, but in the very meticulous way that means you probably just want to knit a plain old pair of stockinette socks and not put any kind of stitch pattern on there to muss up the colors.  It was just that much more difficult to find a pattern that I could really visualize in a variegated yarn.

The Darjeeling Sock from Knitter's Book of Socks though, had all the hallmarks of being a good pattern for a very colorful yarn.  Purl-stitch rows, broken ribbing, and on top of that it has interesting arch shaping in an unexpected place!  I was flipping through the book trying to decide which pattern to knit after finishing my pajama socks, and knew this would be next.  And I was right, it's great for variegated yarn.

I've since finished these socks, and they're very nice.  I've learned to make my socks a tiny bit longer in the feet, since the soles of my socks tend to felt a tiny bit and shrink up after many wearings, and I think this will help them hold up a little better.  I did the surprisingly stretchy bind-off at the top of these socks, which was a new technique for me.  I knit these until I practically ran out of yarn, so they end quite high on my leg and the extra stretch is more than welcome.  I'll probably knit this pattern again, and I think the only thing I'd change is the pattern on the heel flap, which was a little hard to keep track of during knitting.  But other than that, I can't wait to add these beauties into my sock rotation on the next chilly morning! 

Spinning Update: A sweater for the husbeast

For the longest time, I've been avoiding posting about my spinning because it's been so boring.  I mean, when your husband starts asking when he'll get his own handspun handknit sweater, it's such a happy moment.  I had so much fun with the first one!  Washing the fleece, immersing myself (literally) up the elbows in the processing of what comes off the sheep into a wearable garment.  That thing is my go-to sweater for beach parties.  It all sounds like so much fun, until you stop and think about all the knitted items you've made for yourself that never get worn, or get worn so infrequently that it hardly seems worth the effort you put into them in the first place.  You begin to realize that you'll just kill yourself if you make something that he wouldn't wear, so you have to start asking him about clothing preferences.

Let's just summarize a few facts here.  The husbeast is the kind of person that A) doesn't like anything too fancy (no colorwork) B) naturally runs a little warm and thus C) owns precisely one other sweater.  Oh, and this is the sort of sweater I want him to feel comfortable wearing around the home, so nothing too tight.  Did I mention that the man is also 6 feet tall, and has extra-long arms for his height?  This is going to be one huge sweater, and if I was going to spin for it, that meant a major commitment to spinning a solid color. I started spinning the singles during last year's Tour de Fleece, and haven't gotten anything new on the wheel until last week! 

That's why my fleece (Blake, the one I got washed by Morro Fleece Works) was the perfect match for the project.  First, I have a TON of fiber. Ok, not an actual ton, more like 4+ pounds.  I tend to spin yarn that is denser than commercial yarn, so I knew having a large amount was important for a big sweater for a grown man.  Second, it's all one color.  Further to that, the beautiful chocolate brown is a color I know the husbeast won't find objectionable and since it's the natural color of the sheep's wool, it won't fade over the years the way something dyed might do.  Third, it's a really heavenly preparation from Morro, which means very little predrafting and overall faster spinning.

The challenges have been keeping myself motivated to keep spinning the same dark brown merino wool over the months, and to keep myself spinning consistently.  I made a few choices in designing what type of yarn I'll spin to help with consistency.  I'm doing a 3-ply yarn (a true 3-ply, not a chain or navajo 3-ply) and spinning six bobbins in a row before plying.  That's truly the most boring part, spinning 24 ounces of brown wool singles without the quick break of plying in between.  Having six bobbins allows me to mix & match my plies to help even out the yarn a little bit.  I label the bobbins 1-6 in the order in which I spin them, then I ply 1, 3, and 5 together and 2, 4, and 6 together.  My yarn is ending up in the heavy-worsted-to-aran-weight range, which is quite plump. Having a thicker yarn means that small inconsistencies won't be quite as noticeable. 

The color boredom I've been getting around by letting myself spin a bag of Hello Yarn fiber in between each "batch" of 6 bobbins, so right now I'm spinning my "Curiosities" superwash merino.

Hopefully getting to play with a little color will help me stay motivated.  We'll just try to ignore the fact that I've already got one dark brown sweater on the needles (more on that later) and am preparing to knit a second, larger, dark brown sweater. 

Putting the "starry" back in Starryknit

I usually try to keep it to crafty stuff on the blog, because talking about the starry part of my blog/Ravelry name sometimes feels a bit too much like my day job. However, I'm making an exception because the semester ended two weeks ago and this event is so special it's worth writing about.

Tomorrow afternoon the planet Venus will be nearly perfectly lined up with the Sun and Earth, and we'll be able to watch Venus "transit", or cross in front of the Sun from our vantage point on Earth.  It's like a mini-eclipse, except that Venus will only cover up a tiny portion of the Sun's surface. This is a very rare occurrence, for several reasons:

1. Earth and Venus are tiny.  To scale, if we made the Sun about the size of a large grapefuit, Venus and Earth would be the size of poppy seeds.  Picture that in your mind for a second.

2. Earth, Venus, and the Sun are all very far apart.  They call it "space" for a reason: it's mostly empty! In our poppy-seeds-and-grapefuit model, Venus and Earth would be about 35 feet and 40 feet away from the Sun, respectively.  Even though Venus is at its closest approach to Earth, it will look like a smallish black spot on the Sun tomorrow, only covering up about 0.1% of the surface area of the Sun. 

3. The orbit of Earth and the orbit of Venus are not in the exact same plane.  Another way to say this is that their orbits are tilted relative to one another.  If you think about those two poppy seeds, you can imagine how even a very small difference in the orbital planes means that most of the time, Venus is NOT transiting the Sun even when it's at its closest approach to Earth. 

Okay, so how rare are we talking here?  Well, the last transit of Venus happened in 2004.  That doesn't sound too bad, right?  Only eight years of waiting.  If it's cloudy, no big deal.  I'll catch the next one.  Except the next one doesn't happen until the year 2117.  Read that again: I said 2117, not 2017.  So unless you plan on living an additional 105 years, you won't be able to catch the next one. As I've been telling ALL of my students, friends, and family: this is LITERALLY a once-in-a-lifetime event. 

Hopefully by this point I've convinced you that it's worth stepping out for ten minutes tomorrow afternoon to try and view the transit. If you're interested in doing so, I have a very important safety warning for you.  (If this were a 1970's instructional video, I would be wearing a lab coat and would take a second to don my lab goggles right now).  Please promise me that no matter what, you will NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN.  Even if you have sunglasses, it's just not safe.  Sunlight is very bright (especially at 3PM in early June in the northern hemisphere, but that's another science lesson for another day), and it will damage the rod and cone cells on your retina.  The website transitofvenus.org has some great information about safely viewing the transit. If you're in a pinch, take two sheets of paper and use a safety pin to poke a small hole in one sheet.  Hold the sheets parallel to each other, using the pinhole to project an image of the Sun onto the other sheet. 

You can play around with holding the sheets of paper closer together or farther apart, to get the best balance between a large enough image and a bright enough image.  Just to be clear, you don't look through the pinhole, you look at the image of the Sun that will appear on the second sheet of paper. 

Now that we've got the safety portion out of the way (takes off safetly goggles), let's talk timing.  This transit has some historical significance in addition to being a rare event.  As I said before, we had one transit in 2004, then this year's in 2012, and the next one is in 2117.  This is the regular pattern of Venus transits: a pair separated by about 8 years, with pairs spaces about a century apart.  Back in 1761 and 1769, astronomers were especially excited to observe and precisely time the two transits of Venus because they could use the information to measure exactly how far away the planets were from the Sun in our solar system.  Up until then, we knew how far away everything was proportionally (for example, we knew that Jupiter was about 5 times further away from the Sun than Earth), but we didn't have an absolute measurement (number of miles/kilometers) for any of those distances.  Despite people all over the world observing both transits in the 1760's, their timing wasn't accurate enough to calculate these distances.  Science had to wait until the pair of transits in 1874 and 1882 (when photography of the phenomenon was possible) to determine the distance scale of the solar system.  Sky and Telescope has published a fascinating piece about two astronomers who stitched together the photographic plate negatives taken at California's own Lick Observatory in 1882 into a 30-second digital movie. 

So when should you take your makeshift pinhole camera outside and view this once-in-a-lifetime event?  Well, it depends on where you'll be on our little planet.  Thankfully I've found a very good transit-time-calculator that will tell you when you'll be able to see the transit.  If you're in the SF Bay area, the transit begins shortly after 3PM and will still be going when the Sun sets.  I'll be out in a campground, eating barbeque, knitting a pair of socks, and celebrating my 30th birthday. 

Sewing FO: Quilted Coasters

Just a quickie post this time to talk about my new favorite and fast hand-sewn gift: coasters.  About a year ago I signed up for Verb's Pressed Seam fat quarter club, which means that every month I have six delightful new fat quarters of fabric arriving at my door.  I really love the idea behind yarn/fiber/fabric clubs both as a way to steadily support small creative businesses and as a way to grow creatively myself.  Clubs often get me to try things that I would normally not choose for myself; and as long as I'm careful in selecting clubs that are put together by people with whom I share similar tastes in colors/prints, I rarely get something I outright dislike.  More often opening club packages is a happy mixture of "Ooh, beautiful!" and "I would never have picked this out for myself, but it's so INTERESTING!".

With the fabric club, getting a steady influx of fat quarters is a great way to keep the creative juices going.  The first month I managed to use five out of the six fat quarters right away, and the second month I used three.  After that, I started to lag.  Six months in and I was still wowed by every shipment, but had fallen into the habit of washing the fabric, pressing it, and returning it to the plastic fabric bin.  I started to feel a little guilty about how much fabric I was amassing (although we'll have another post later on stash guilt), and started looking around for ways to use up some of those fat quarters.  Along comes the delightful little quilted coaster pattern from Last-Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts (by the same author as Last-Minute Knitted Gifts).

 

I chose several prints and spent two afternoons making about twenty coasters.  About half ended up being a gift for my sister-in-law.  Originally I was a bit worried that the coasters would be too bumpy to be really practical, but they're great!  The only part that really took some practice was cutting out squares of batting and stuffing them in the folded-up coasters, but it got easier after I'd done four or five.  And now that I've done the pattern all the way through several times, I think I could get into a good production-line rhythm with them. Here's the entire set that I selfishly kept for myself, with a large water glass for scale. My favorite one is the butterfly print where the coaster is nearly completely taken up by one giant wing!

Knitting FO: Bed Socks

In perusing the last few posts, I realized that I never showed you guys the amazing socks I made for myself (and I have to break up the sewing content somehow!). When I heard Clara Parkes talk about socks at Verb (many moons ago) I had recently listened to Brenda Dayne talk about pajama socks. We were able to touch all the samples from the Knitter's Book of Socks at Clara's talk, and I knew that the Strago pattern by Jared Flood would make excellent pajama socks.

My husband and I are both of the same mind when it comes to sleeping: it should be warm enough that you can actually fall asleep, but not so hot that you don't need a blanket or two. We'd both rather be a little too cold than a little too warm. Because I tend to run a little cooler than he does, that usually means that what's comfortable for me is a bit too warm for him.  Also, my feet just get cold if they're not covered.  The Strago socks are perfect bed socks because they're loose-fitting enough that you can slip them off by gently sliding your feet around while half-asleep.



One of the main things I was worried about was choosing two colors that were too similar in value for the pattern to show up well, so I tried to get shades on opposite ends of the color wheel.  The two colors of Shelter I chose (Hayloft and Faded Quilt) match my owl pajama pants perfectly.

The only change I made to the pattern was to knit the entire sock on 4 mm (US 6) needles, because I have pretty narrow feet and was worried about the socks staying on my feet as I pad around the apartment in them.  The woolen-spun Shelter yarn happily accepted my tighter gauge, and the fabric feels like soft cushy felt underneath my feet.  We've been getting a few sunny days here and there, but we'll get lots of June gloom as well, so these will probably continue to get lots of use even during the summer months.  

How I Spent My Blogging Vacation

Anyone else ever have to write those incredibly boring essays on the first day of school, "How I Spent My Summer Vacation"?  They always seemed so torturous. First, it was a not-so-subtle reminder of all the fun you'd been having before school started up again.  Second, you had to sit there and listen to your classmates tell you about all the fun they'd been having at horseback riding camp or in Hawaii or something else that was equal parts unexpected and way cooler than anything you did that summer. The message seemed to be "Tell the rest of the class how uncool you are and by the way, you won't be having any more fun like that until the end of December."

My summer vacations were fun, but not in the way that was traditionally considered "fun" in the very American consumerist sense: we didn't take any long trips to glamorous locations or go on expensive excursions.  There was a lot of camping, and as I got older, lots of babysitting my younger siblings.  As a kid I never felt I could brag about my vacations, but now that I'm older I know better.  My childhood vacations were the best kind: they involved lots of unstructured play time among us kids, lots of physical activity (hiking, swimming in various lakes and rivers, running around on the beach), and just wandering about learning about nature in park ranger centers or mukking around in tide pools.  Plus, I now have a healthier appreciation for my long-suffering parents who managed to pull off seven days of camping with three kids between 8 and 13 years old.  Most importantly, I had plenty of time during my summer vacations to read books quietly.  My absolute favorite pastime was reading, and I've had my own library card for as long as I can remember.  Even though my summer vacation essays weren't the most riveting pieces of nonfiction prose ever penned, the vacations themselves were magically both enriching and relaxing at the same time, in sharp contrast to my recent blogging vacation. 

I didn't intend to have a blogging vacation this semester, it just worked out that way.  This term I had a glut of "happy problems": I was offered more classes than I've seen since before the 2009 budget cuts, and decided that on top of a full teaching load I should totally sign on for a side project as well.  I know I'm lucky to be an educator with an overabundance of work opportunities (especially in this state), but it was hard not to complain and get crabby about my job when I was skipping my regular knit night because I was too exhausted from all the grading.  I've learned my lesson: you have to say no sometimes, even if they're offering to pay you, if the commitment will infringe on your mental downtime. This lesson is one I intend to apply as quickly as possible, too.  After a few years of being forced to take lots of personal-enrichment time through a lack of work, I've forgotten that I might need to forcibly protect some of that time when the pendulum swings back in the other direction. 

So I'm planning some structure into my creative time, to make sure I maintain that balance a little better.  I want to be able to rotate between knitting, spinning, and sewing projects on the blog to keep things lively and exciting for everybody.  Just because I'm on a sewing kick doesn't mean that I want my knitting readers to have another three-month-long dry spell!  I also want to try and have one blog post more than 50% written at any time, and another in the planning stages so that I always have something that can be quickly finished and edited in a pinch.  This should be easier over the summer, since I have a (small) backlog of projects from March and April and I'm only teaching two days a week.  The real challenge will be keeping up with the writing pipeline during the semester. 

To get things going, what do you like best about vacation?  Have a favorite memory from your childhood vacations?  Share in the comments!  

Neglect, and another quilt

I know the blog has been quite neglected lately. The only thing I can claim is the usual busy nature of the holidays and the beginning of a new term. I'm teaching 6 courses this time, more than I ever have in the past.

Before classes started, I did manage to finish something. It's been marinating in the must-write-this-up part of my brain since the beginning of January.



The quilt was a birthday/graduation gift for my sister. Most of the prints are from Heather Ross's Mendocino collection, and I got them specifically with her in mind: my sister's favorite place is the ocean, and her favorite color is orange. One of the prints is called "Underwater Sisters" (it's the one at the top and bottom of the stack below), and as soon as I read that name in an Etsy listing I knew this quilt would be for my underwater sister.



I started planning this quilt back in the summer, but I was collecting the fat quarters even before I finished my very first quilt. I waited a long time for inspiration, until I found this lovely quilt on Etsy and knew I wanted to recreate that effect.



I used 5 inch x 10 inch rectangles cut from 18 different fat quarters, and arranged them in a color progression from light to dark to piece the strips. I actually waited until I'd pieced some of the strips before selecting fabric for the border and background, because I wanted to be able to easily compare all the prints at once.



I had half yards of two of the prints, so after cutting out my rectangles I used the leftovers to make an interesting strip across the back. I think I used 2 yards of solid orange for the borders, and 5 1/2 yards or so for the backing. The backing fabric is a coordinating light teal with white polka dots from City Weekend by Moda for Oliver + S. I chose it because the teal matches some of the octopi and seahorses.



The binding was another Mendocino print. I managed to score a yard and a half of that one, and I knew that I wanted to use it to bind the quilt. While I was sewing the binding, I would track my progress by how many seahorses I'd passed that day.



I machine-quilted this one in straight vertical lines, echoing the lines of the piecing. Of course, my assistant tested the quilt for warmth and snuggliness.



I'm quite proud of this quilt, having made it without a written pattern to work from. So many times I double- and triple-checked my math, making sure I'd bought enough fabric to make the borders and backing. After giving it a wash, we spread it out on the bed for its photo shoot before shipping it off to the east coast.



Finishing something handmade and giving it away builds such a wonderful connection, and I've found it to be as true with sewing and quilting as it is with spinning and knitting. I love picturing this quilt in my sister's apartment, spread over her bed or rumpled up on her couch. While sewing it, I thought about all those times we went to the beach as kids, and about watching The Little Mermaid over and over and over until our VHS tape wore out. I thought about how much she loves swimming, no matter what body of water it is, and how the Monterey Bay Aquarium is one of her favorite places. I hope this quilt keeps her warm, and reminds her that even though there's a lot of land in between us right now, we both live close to the ocean. Whether it's the Atlantic or the Pacific, it still connects us and reminds us each of the other, just like the quilt does. Sweet dreams, Becky.