Ha!

[In which I finally upload a picture and pick my own jog-less join method.]

If you've read Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys recently, you'll recognize what happened to me to cause me to change my posting style. I just received the book back from someone and went looking for the part about the lime (because I had run across mention of it and couldn't remember anything about a lime and didn't have the book at the time, which then permanently attached the existence of the lime into my consciousness in a way it could never have been attached before.) Of course, once I found the lime, I had to read the rest of the book.

If I'm not careful, this is going to turn into one of those Batteries Not Included experiences. We had cable back in the late '80s, and one of the premium movie channels was doing a one month free promotion. I would come home from work and channel surf until I found myself watching Batteries Not Included. I usually watched to the end. But in that entire month, I only actually saw the beginning of the movie once. I very vehemently did not want to buy this channel after that experience. So much for the get 'em hooked with the free trial marketing strategy!

Still waiting for the promised picture? Oh, alright!



These are the Tulip Socks designed for me by my From the Heart Swap partner, Cathy!

I turned out not to be up to the task of taking a decent picture of them on me. They're lovely, though. And the rolled cuff is really neat! Thank you so much, Cathy!

Meanwhile, I've been knitting and not taking pictures. I finally got some Lang JaWoll in acceptable colors to use for the Hogwart's Sock Swap and had to start over from scratch at about three inches in.

Here's the thing. I'm really sure that I'll give away who I'm matched with if I post a picture. So ... sorry. I'll tell you all about what I picked to make and why after the socks have been received. But I can tell you about my gauge experience. I have knit about four pairs of socks in Lang JaWoll after swearing I would never, ever touch the stuff again after I failed miserably to turn the heel on the first sock I tried after about 20 years after the first sock I ever knit. (From that experience I learned that blindly following a pattern was not enough to make something you could wear.) I must've ripped that heel out five times before giving up in frustration and getting myself some inexpensive KnitPicks yarn to fight with.

So I picked the sock which seemed the closest to what I'm planning to knit for my swap pal and measured the gauge on it in as many places as I possibly could. I came up with a pretty consistent 9.5 stitches per inch. I cast on and started knitting and concluded very quickly that something was not right. My pal has feet that are narrower than mine, and I had cast on more stitches than I need for my own socks and these socks were clearly coming out considerably larger in circumference than my ordinary socks. So I checked the gauge on all the other socks - the ones where the only place I can check the gauge is on the bottom of the foot - and concluded that my gauge in that yarn with those needles is ... 8 stitches per inch.

I decided not to send them with a note suggesting that perhaps after repeated washing she could borrow the socks from her husband once in a while to see if they'd shrunk enough.

But my other problem was that I hated the way the "jog-less join" was coming out. Knitting two stitches together with both yarns and then pulling on the ends wasn't making so much of a jog-less join as a wonky join. I just didn't like it.

Enter a combination of Elizabeth Zimmerman's advice (something about when joining a new piece of yarn to knit one stitch with both the old and new one and then knit with the new one) and Nancy Bush's tendency to have a seam stitch (one purled stitch). I've been purling the one join stitch with both yarns and it's looking pretty jog-less to me.

Hey, I'm satisfied. That's about as good as it's gonna get.