Geek Sock-Knitter's Heaven

Tomorrow night I will watch a live video stream of the IgNobel Prize Ceremonies.

From today's Mini-Air:

2010-09-05 Ig Details

Ten new Ig Nobel Prize winners will be announced. Almost all will be at the ceremony. Several Nobel Laureates will hand them their Ig Nobel Prizes.

The ceremony will also include...

Keynote lecturer (for 60 seconds) RICH LOSICK.

24/7 Lecturers NEIL GAIMAN, TOSHIYUKI NAKAGAKI, MARY ELLEN DAVEY.

The premiere of "THE BACTERIAL OPERA", about the bacteria who live on a woman's front tooth, and about that woman. Features a cast of trillions.

Musicians EVELYN EVELYN, AMANDA PALMER, JASON WEBLEY, NICK CARSTOIU, and DEBORAH HENSON-CONANT.

Past Ig Nobel Prize winners TOSHIYUKI NAKAGAKI and ATSUSHI TERO (slime mold can solve puzzles); ELENA BODNAR (invention of a bra that converts into 2 protective face masks); DON FEATHERSTONE (creation of the plastic pink flamingo); KEES MOELIKER (homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck); and CHRISTOPHER CHABRIS (people can overlook anything - even a woman in a gorilla suit)

... and much more.

DETAILS: http://improbable.com/ig/2010

WHO'S WHO: http://improbable.com/ig/2010/ignitaries/index.html

OPERA CAST: http://improbable.com/ig/2010/ignitaries/index.html

What does this have to do with sock knitting?

Ah. Well, there's the video with the only partially misleading title:


And the article.

A Little Bit of This and That

Biblionomatopoeia. Really, it's brilliant.

Why I haven't posted my knitting in progress: I'm knitting Kiri.


Not much to look at, all scrunched up like that, eh?

I'm also nearly done with a pair of socks I plan to submit someplace - anyplace. I'm going to have to ask for test knitters once I've written it up.

It seems that I have one project for each place I knit. I have the by-the-bed sock, the traveling sock, the next-to-the-computer Kiri, etc. It's going to be a long time before I finish anything at this rate.

Oh, I just have to link to an Indexed cartoon here. Indexed is often brilliant. This one is timely and to the point. The comments are pretty interesting, too.

Obligatory Fiber Post

I've been doing my weekly blogging to the questionnaire put out by Secret Pal 12 and failing to admit that I have, in fact, been knitting. Occasionally, I even finish something. Well, almost. I still need to finish making the ends disappear on this. Look, a whole pair of socks.


These are made from Tofutsies. I decided to do afterthought heels. I think I've done these before. In any event, they were a great success in this case.

Part of what made me decide to do the afterthought heel was the problem I had with the yarn. I found a rather large section of yarn that was twisted differently from the rest if the skein at about the point where one of the socks got near the heel. I had a lot of time to think about how I was going to deal with this, and ended up deciding on the afterthought heel.



The lace pattern really wasn't the right pattern to use for this yarn. Still, I'm happy with it. I'm making another pair in plain yarn, because you really can't identify the pattern here.


My big disappointment was the too-loose bind off. But when I tried the sock on, it would appear that the sock isn't going to fall down and nobody is going to notice this. Unless you look at this picture.



I'm a little tired of Tofutsies, but I still have another skein. And I seem to have a lot of this one left over. Ah, well. What's a stash for but to save yarn for a rainy day?

A Gift and Finished Objects!

I came home one day last week and my sweetheart asked if I wanted an early birthday present. Ok, my photo is a little fuzzy. It's a Cue Cat. It makes Library Thing much easier to use. I love it! Thank you, Sweetie!



He also got a quick-release post so we could use our cameras with our new tripod. Well, new to us. I took him to a Goodwill store and we found a really high-end used tripod for $2. I think the post cost him $10. He's been in America for over twenty years and this is the first time he'd been to a Goodwill store!

Meanwhile, I did finish two things. One was a pair of socks. These are really simple Knit 2 Purl 2 socks. I needed almost mindless sock knitting after my last two lace pairs. I also finished another clapotis. I have only made two of these in the full size and a bunch of little ones. I made this one from a ball of (I have to go to Ravelry to look it up, hang on...) Stacey Charles Ritratto dye lot 0010. 28% Mohair, 53% Viscose, 10% Polyamid, 9% polyester. I would not recommend to anyone making a clapotis with mohair, but it worked out ok in this case. There's only one way I can think of to describe this: warm fuzzy bling!



Finally, I seem to have disabled the blogger spell check. It just doesn't seem to work for me. Unless, hmm, lemmetrymisspellingsomething. Nope. Nothing happens. I have to copy my post into a word processor to spell check it. Hmm. I wonder what I did. OH LOOK! It's a known bug! I cause those all the time at work. Hey, at least I searched help before whining!

I Won't Knit Socks This Cheap....

Occasionally someone sees me knitting socks and suggests that I could make some money doing this on the side. Of course, nobody would pay me a "living wage" for a pair of hand knit socks.

But this site charges less than half of what I would, if I were going to go into business knitting custom socks!

Another Clapotis on the Needles

I'm on the foot of another pair of socks, and I've given up and started another Clapotis. I have yarn that doesn't want to be anything else. It's quite irritating, actually. I'll swatch a yarn or knit something with it and not quite have the right amount of yarn and I'll throw up my hands and realize that the yarn just wants to be a Clapotis. Good grief. What did yarn do with itself before the Clapotis?

In other news, sometimes you juts gotta say HUH???? Case in point. If I say the name AOL to you, do you not immediately wonder how many "install AOL now with this free CD!" offers you received in the mail over the years? You do know that the software AOL uses includes an embedded version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer software, right? So, I wonder, is it just slightly possible that AOL might have been able to avoid this? Perhaps they could've shipped their own browser? Maybe?

And finally, the article I'm about to link to is not funny. But I dare you to read this headline and not snicker. I do hope everybody's ok.

Fuzzy Sock Pictures

I can never seem to get a good picture of these socks.
These are the sock savior socks I knit for Sockapalooza.
We're going to ship them from the country to which they're going - England!
But I decided it would not be a good idea to ring a stranger's doorbell and say, "Hi! I made you some socks!"
I'm just a wee bit too shy for that.

$1.81 to Arrive on Monday

[In which I finally post a photo of the socks I knit for my Sockapalooza pal.]

When I went to the post office to mail these, the postman said to me, "$1.81 to arrive on Monday," and I thought, "Hmm, maybe I should post that picture before the socks arrive."

So now that it's Sunday night, I think I'd better get a move on, eh?

I lost the ball band on this yarn, but I'm pretty sure it was Cherry Tree Hill yarn. The colorway was called "Carnival." My pal said she doesn't like pale colors. When I saw this yarn, I thought it was too vibrant for me and would be perfect for her. As I knit them, I became somewhat skeptical. Did the colors just look a bit paler than I thought at first? Or are these growing on me so much that I want an excuse to keep them?

Well, they're too big for me, so she gets them, even though I'm not quite sure the yarn is vibrant enough for her.

And I couldn't get a decent picture of them. This is the best I could do. Both the colors and the pattern got great accolades in person. This is just a poor photo.

I've really enjoyed meeting my pal through her blog. She lives in the same state as I do. Maybe we'll bother to meet one of these days.

To Becky, With Love

[In which I get the best sock swap pal ever, gush enthusiastically, tell seven things on demand, and fail to follow instructions]

When I first got myself involved with the Hogwarts Sock Swap, I went to one of those sorting links and got myself sorted, just like I'm supposed to. Then, about a week later, it dawned on me that I probably could've skewed the results to get a color combination that I'd really like.

I started worrying, a little bit, that I'd get ... bumblebee socks that I'd always want to hide under long-ish jeans, much like some of the socks I've knitted for myself. After all, there have been plenty pictures posted that I haven't liked the looks of much at all. There have been a lot of nice socks, if only they weren't in black and really dark bright yellow.

Meanwhile, I have been watching pictures go up on the Hogwarts sock swap blog that I do like. There was this one post of a washcloth that I thought was really, really cool. And the same knitter posted that she'd mailed her package, which, as you can see, was absolutely lovely. I found myself hoping she was my pal.

Then I got tagged for the seven things meme by Becky. And I poked around on her blog a bit and I found the socks she knit for her swap pal and I thought, "Gosh, I like those a lot." And I also thought, "Look! She's the same person as knit that really good-looking dishcloth!" And then I thought, "Oh, she can't be my pal. She posted not-anonymously to my blog."

So while I was taking my sweet time looking for seven bloggers who hadn't already been tagged for the seven things meme, that beautiful package was winging its way through the mail ... to me!



A part of me didn't want to unwrap it. Wrapped packages are so attractive, don't you think? And Becky got all this properly-colored tissue paper and ribbon and made such a beautiful package out of this!

But I felt a timely thank-you was most important, and ripped the lovely wrapping to shreds to find this...



No socks? Well, I hadn't unwrapped quite everything. Look at this stuff! She sent me two different kinds of SweeTarts. I must live in the wrong part of the country or something. I've never seen chewy SweeTarts! (They're good!) The bowl is a 7-quart Good Cook Bowl. Don't worry, I will use this! Ghirardelli 60% Dark Chocolate mmmmmmmmm! Chili-pepper (perhaps jalapeño?) and spice sticky notes and a magnetic shopping list. Clover Bamboo double-pointed needles, 7" long size 2. I'm thinking I'll make a hat on those. Out of sock yarn. The coveted dishcloth itself! And...a skein of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in Watercolor! Yes, yes, YES!

But wait! the SOCKS!

Not only are these beauties MINE...



But they fit PERFECTLY!



If your monitor has washed-out the yellow like mine has, Becky used a slightly paler-than-required shade of yellow. I think I might have asked for that, but I don't remember clearly. I really, really like these and will NOT be hiding them under long jeans. The stitch pattern is really nice, too. Just a little texture that goes really nicely with the yarn.

Becky gave me the ball-band from the socks. She used Louet Gems, which not only meets my stringent requirements for being machine-washable, but I have heard a rumor that this is the yarn used to make that gorgeous hand-dyed line we know as Koigu.

She also sent a little note saying this was her first sock swap. Becky, you knit great socks, and I am not worthy.

So here are my seven things:

1/ I am the only child of two only children.
2/ My father's parents were born in the town in Germany (Hameln) where the story of the Pied Piper originated. I still have relatives there and I visit once in a while. My German is atrocious.
3/ I do not own a television, and I actually found a man who also does not have a television. He's perfect for me in so many other ways it's as if we'd been raised to be together.
4/ I'm right-handed, and when I was a kid, for fun, I taught myself to write with my left had. This came in really handy when I broke my right collarbone in high school and couldn't get my right arm up on a desk for six weeks.
5/ Mental illness runs in my family. Sometimes I feel very guilty about being ok.
6/ I still haven't graduated from college.
7/ I own two different models of Hybrid cars. One is the Honda Insight, and the other is the Hybrid version of the Honda Civic. Both have manual transmissions, even though most hybrids are automatics.

As far as finding people to tag, I'm not doing so well. A lot of people on my blogroll have already been tagged, even if they haven't answered the tag yet. I noticed that Dave declined to even participate, in the most clever way (scroll to the bottom of the post)! So here's an open invitation to anybody who'd like to be tagged - you're it! If you'd like it to be official, let me know and I'll come on over and tag you! The rules of the meme are that you tag seven people and list seven things about yourself. Well, it's easier than the 100 things meme, eh?

So...I'm going to go back to weaving the ends in on the socks I'm knitting for this sock swap. Too many ends. Waaaaay too many ends.

Time for another chewy SweeTart. Mmmm.

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.

The Hogwarts Sock Swap Questionnaire

You know, I'm really surprised at how much I've been looking forward to this sock swap. I enjoyed the Harry Potter books and movies quite a bit. And the knitted garments in the movies were strikingly, well, perfect. But, you know, I have actively resisted becoming a Harry Potter groupie. Mostly. Well, maybe not particularly successfully!

And my answers to the Hogwarts Sock Swap Questionnaire are...

1. What Hogwarts house have you been sorted into?

Hufflepuff

2. Shoe size?

U.S. Women's size 8 1/2 Medium. I bet I'm really an 8 wide.

3. Foot Length?

9 inches

4. Foot Circumference?

9 inches (call me square).

5. List your three favorite double-point needle brands, including size and length.

Well, I've got some Susan Bates metal dpns that I'm not too fond of.

I've been doing the magic-loop technique exclusively since I first managed to actually get around the foot. I really love my Knitpicks size 1, 32" circulars - they've got a nice long point. I used to use only Addi Turbos, and I still use them sometimes, but the points are too dull for me, and I'm not about to spring for a set of Addi lace needles when I've got four sets of the regulars. The Addis I use are 40" and 60". And since my gauge is approximately 8 sts/inch on size 1 needles on most sock yarns, I don't have plans to knit with a larger or smaller needle any time soon.

6. Would you like to try a new brand needle? If so, which brand? Size? Length?

You know, even though I specifically have stuck with the magic loop technique because I have been known to pull the wrong needle out of my hand when starting the next needle (leaving a bunch of stitches flapping in the breeze, yes, I know I'm an idiot), I have been thinking that I would really like to try dpns again. I'd need a five-needle set - I just can't be bothered to figure the stitches for thirds. And I'd like something that's not metal and with a decent point. In size 1, about 7" long, perhaps?


7. If you are a RAVENCLAW, do you prefer the colors in the film or the book? Do you have a strong preference?

not applicable

8. Are you willing to have an international Hogwarts Sock Pal?

Yes, I most certainly would.