Thirteen Geeky Knitting Projects, 20th

(I was going to write this last night while watching an hour of Friends reruns but a bizarre issue with the Bad Behavior Wordpress plugin and some blacklisting site kept me from uploading and then accessing my own account from my own computer. But it took me 4½ hours to figure out that because the error said that my computer had been sending out spam mail and that was why I was blacklisted and that if I had any questions I could email the web admin and gave my own email address to contact. So, I updated my McAffee and installed Google’s free Spy Doctor and ran both and came up clean, which I knew I would because I am an IT geek who obsesses about that sort of thing. Finally at 11:30pm a new link showed up in my Google search for answers. Someone had just posted an hour before on the Wordpress.org forum that they also couldn’t get into their site with the same error and someone had replied with a link to the Bad Behavior Blog which explained what happened. Grrrrrrrrr! Wasted my whole Wednesday night.

And then today after I spent forever writing this up, my server went down and I couldn’t save it…for over an hour.)

Whenever I start a new hobby, I go a little overboard searching for future possible projects. The nice thing about knitting as opposed to counted cross-stitch, which I did through my 20’s, is that there are a lot of free patterns out there on the Internet and a lot of people who are willing to share their ideas. Plus, as it turns out, there are also a lot of geeky guys and gals just like me who have merged the hobby with their eccentric personalities. Some of these made me laugh out loud. Some of them are just too fun to resist.

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Look At Me, Look At Me

Curse Of The Knitting Heel

Tuesday night I finally finished the cuff on one sock. It came to 4½”, which is the same length as those blue, green, and yellow knitted socks my mother gave me last Christmas. I’m really pleased with how the stripes came out with this yarn. I had expected something more erratic when I picked up the balls.

I started on the heal and, of course, my troubles have started anew. I got 3 rows in and discovered I had lost a stitch. So I backed out a row — is there a knitting term for that? Frogging? The second heal row was also a stitch short and I couldn’t figure out where it had lost the stitch so I pulled out that row too. Back down to the first row of the heal which was supposed to be *s1 k1* across 28 stitches, there were 28 stitches, but upon close investigation, I had skipped some k1’s in there. So, I frogged some more stitches and reworked the row, but when I got to the end, it looked just as bad or worse, and it’s really not a difficult pattern! I tried to fix it one more time without positive result and then put it away and went sulkily to bed.

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Knitting Socks Attempt #5,000,002

Well, it’s taken me a week of try-and-try again, but I think I may have finally figured out knitting in the round. I’m currently working with #3 bamboo circular needles 29″ long. I cast on 56st and I’ve been doing a K2 P2 rib. I’m planning on a 6in leg.

When I was working with my #2 Addi’s, they were a shorter length and kind of hung in the way. So I bought the 29″ circulars thinking they would hang longer and out of my way while I was working the active needles. For some reason, the bamboo needle’s cords are like coils. They twist everywhere and all in my face and in my way and everything. I’ve been laying them flat at night under 12-packs of sodas but this doesn’t appear to help for longer than 30 seconds. I read somewhere to run them under hot water to straighten them out. That too only helped for 30 seconds. If anyone knows how to straighten out the cord of a coiled circular needle, I’m willing to try suggestions.

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Knitting Socks Is The Tool Of The Devil

Thanks to the fact that I have been feeling quite well both physically and mentally for the last few weeks, I have begun engaging in activities that are supposed to be fun and bring me enjoyment. You know, like knitting.

Knitting socks is clearly an activity created by the Devil to drive people insane.

I’ve started about a hundred pairs of socks and have yet to finish even the cuff of a single one. I was actually doing pretty well on one, which was going to be a pair of baby socks for a friend who’s baby was born last summer — missed that deadline. However, I made the mistake of putting it down for a while and coming back to it and when I restarted I could never get my new work to match up with the old ribbing work. I mean, I was still doing K2 P2 and in the same places but it didn’t look the same and it didn’t even look inside out. It just looked garbled.

So, I’ve put that aside for now. I’ve cast on a pair of #3 bamboo circular needles to start on the basic woman’s medium sock at the beginning of Socks Soar on Two Circular Needles by Cat Bordhi. I’ve only done one row so far. It’s taken me about 8 hours to get that far because I’ve started, pulled it out and restarted about 5 or six times already. At least once I thought the stitches were way too tight. Once nothing looked right. The rest of the time, my counting has gotten really screwed up in such a way that I just didn’t know how to fix it — in fact, once the join came undone two rows in and I have no idea how that happened but the count was also off.

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The First 2 Inches

Well, I’ve had some setbacks. Wednesday night I had about an inch cuff but I realized that 1/2 of the inch was done one way and the other half another or rather it seemed like all of a sudden I’d started knitting where I’d purled and purling where I’d knitted. I considered just pulling out the second 1/2 inch but really the second 1/2 inch looked far better than the first because, of course, I’d finally got the hang of things. The first half looked like someone trying to learn how to knit socks, which was what it was. So I pulled the whole thing out and started over again on Thursday.

I’ve now finished about 2 inches on the cuff. The pattern calls for 4-1/2 for the cuff before all of the terrifying roundy-bits start. I didn’t have a lot of knitting time over the weekend because of the cleaning and shopping sprees. However, I feel I’ve come along way and I think it looks quite nice, much better than it did when I was starting. I’m quite pleased. I definitely love using the circular needles; I can’t imagine how anyone uses four or five double-pointed needles.

Sock Knitting: Take II

Well, I decided that I didn’t like the yarn I was using when I started trying to (learn to) knit the baby socks on Sunday; it just wasn’t dainty enough, in my opinion, for a premie newborn little girl. As the nice lady at Yarn Central said, “You have to love the yarn.” So, I bought this ball of fine really really soft yarn that alternates between pink, blue, green, and purple pastels.

I restarted on Monday night. Of course, that took two tries. I did some weird miscount in the join and when I got around after the first row, I couldn’t figure out what had happened so I restarted.

Then last night I realized that somewhere somehow I had started working with the dangling tail rather than the strand going to the ball and I had to pull out about 8 stitches and that’s always a bad thing for me.

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The Pursuit of Sock Knitting

I spent most of the day watching DVDs and T.V. and trying to learn how to knit socks — in particular baby socks.

I had purchased a learn to knit socks kit from the internet with 5 double-pointed #2 needles, yarn, and instructions. I had read through the instructions the other night and reread them this morning and I thought that the first part — the casting on, the cuff, and the ankle — sounded fairly straightforward and easy.

That is until I tried to do it.

Casting on is extremely easy, unless of course you have bad fibromyalgia and your hands don’t want to work. Of course, my first thought was that I only had to do Casting on once…silly me.

I ended up having to Cast on about 20 different times today. I was fine after the casting on, I thought, until I had to do the k2tog (knit 2 together), which was a new knitting “stitch” or whatever you want to call it, for me.

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Thirteen More (Possibly Scandalous) Things You Might Not Know About Me, 3rd

I am a liberal Independent and a nondenominational Christian, questioning institutionalized religion, which is weird because about 15 years ago I was a conservative Republican serving as an officer on the student council for a Baptist Student Center. Interesting how people change over time, huh? I once got sent home from Vacation Bible School because my skirt was too short. I was the art teacher. I went to my Senior Prom with the 25 year old Youth Minister from my church. That wasn’t really the scandalous part. My high school was a private Christian school that subscribed to the belief that dancing was a terrible sin, so as a result Prom was not school-sponsored, chaperone-free, organized by the students, and held in a local hotel. The school also had a rule about not “intermingling the phalanges” — you know, holding hands or playing footsie. I once had a dog named “Chekhov” after the character on Star Trek, and my parents’ friends thought I was so literate because they thought he was named for Anton Chekhov, the Russian author. Of course, my parents had to correct them. My great-grandmother moved in with us when I was in high school and stole my dog. She managed to do this by keeping a handful of dog food in her pocket all of the time and every time she sat down she’d put a few on the ground at her feet; so Chekhov followed her everywhere. However, she could never get his name right and would call him “Check-out” and “Quick-check” all of the time. That dog loved her. In later years, she would cook meals just for him. Talk about spoiled. I used to be a stand-up comic. It’s much harder and not as fun as it looks. I took on stand-up comedy because I had a fear of talking in public. As a result of my year in depressing, smoke-filled bars cracking jokes, I now cannot do a work-related presentation without making smart-ass side comments. Audrey Hepburn is my favorite actress. I don’t think there’s ever been anyone as graceful or as beautiful since she left the silver screen. She was timeless. Not to mention that she was a great lady — a courier for the resistance during WWII, a singer, a dancer, an actress, a humanitarian, a survivor. She’s a real inspiration to me. My mother once told me that she thought I was like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I hadn’t seen the movie at the time, but years later my best friend and I rented it. Quite frankly, I’m still a little confused. My friend thinks my mother must have meant that Holly and I are alike because we’re both quirky, neurotic, and kind of free-spirits. I can see that, but I’m definitely not a gold-digging man-hunting call girl flitting from party to party and visiting mobsters in prison. I don’t know anyone in prison. I’ve discovered that it’s just as hard to meet single guys whether you are interested in getting married or not. For the record, I’m not. Ever. Since I made that decision, I’ve had a strange problem with guys lying to me about not wanting commitments. My mom actually once found out from a boyfriend’s mother about our wedding plans, to my surprise. He was also lying about not wanting to have children. There are lots of guys in their 30s just as desperate to get married as women apparently. I managed to remain friends with all of my boyfriends after we broke up. Supposedly it’s my superpower. In fact, we have helped each other move more than once, we’ve been on vacation together, I’ve helped one of their now wife move, I’ve been to one’s wedding, and some of us still email weekly. In fact, most of them are friends with each other. I believe one of their now wife’s once thought we were rather “incestuous”. None of us are related. O.K. I did date those brothers, but that was like 20 years ago or more and no one’s heard from them in ages. We saw The Secret of N.I.M.H. on my first date. It was many, many years before I had another one. Maybe it just felt that way. I have a metallic lime green iPod Mini, which they don’t make anymore. Inscribed on the back is “do a loony-goony dance” from the poem “Put Something In” by Shel Silverstein. I’d really like a 30G iPod, but they only come in white and black. Oh, and they cost money. I am trying to learn to knit, but so far I’ve only succeeded at knitting a scarf using only the knit stitch for 300-something rows. Living in Maine, I really want to knit lots of scarves, hats, mittens, and socks — mittens and socks in particular scare me because of the use of more than 2 needles. Links to other Thursday Thirteens! Erin Gordon Nancy Liedel Nicole SusieJ Christine d’Abo Gloria TeaMouse L-Squared Angela at mommy bytes Ed Damozel Emmyrose

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