Gingerbread House Knee Socks

For my 2nd pair of post-tenure socks (begun in mid-March), I turned to KnitPicks Imagination, a cushy blend of 50% Merino Wool / 25% Superfine Alpaca / 25% Nylon, in the colorway called "Gingerbread House," which setssix different cheerful "gumdrop" colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple) against a background of warm ginger-brown. I really love this yarn for socks!! Which is good, because I have several more colors stashed away... It knits up into a wonderful fabric, soft and warm and snuggly against the skin. I wanted to see how far I could go on two skeins (= 438 yards) to fit my smallish (US size 61/2, European size 37) feet. So I used the Lace and Cable pattern from Wendy Johnson's Socks from the Toe Up, with one skein for each sock, and basically kept knitting until I ran out of yarn.

What I got, to my amazement and delight, was a splendid pair of honest-to-goodness KNEESOCKS. Once againI worked the two socks in tandem by switching off between two sets of dpn's: first both toes, then feet, then heels, then legs, then cuffs. To shape the calves, I measured the circumference of my lower leg at 2" intervals and calculated first increases and then decreases based on my gauge. And to help the socks stay up, I switched to smaller needles for 1" of ribbing at the top, and finished off with Jeny's Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-Off (JSSBO). They fit me perfectly and don't fall down with general use, although a brisk walk can cause them to sag a bit, but that happens with commercial wool knee socks too. I had less than a foot of yarn left over on either side. The colors pooled a bit here and there, but I don't mind the effect. In fact, I rather like it. As always, click on any one of these photos to view an enlargement.

Oh my, but to my mind these are genuinely *happy* socks, so bright and colorful and toasty warm, and they go beautifully with the tawny brown leather clogs that I wear pretty much constantly through 3 seasons of the year, in all but the most inclement weather.

Bunny mittens!!

These were a huge hit with people on campus and my friends on Facebook, so I'm excited to be bringing them to the blog audience at last...

Before I get down to the subject of knitting, I want you to meet two special somebodies who are very important to me. They are a bonded pair of house rabbits, known formally as Cinnamon the Mocha Bunny (right) and Olorin the Little Gray Bunny (left). She is a mini-lop, while he is a Netherland Dwarf mix. They have lived with us for quite a few years now, long enough for many legends and stories to spring up about them. For instance, the phrase "Cinnamon the Mocha Bunny" is fun to say in a wide variety of circumstances, or even at random, and can be sung as the lyrics to ANY tune imaginable (trust me, my husband and I have amply demonstrated this!). And Olorin happens to be Gandalf's name in the language of Westernesse, for those of a Tolkienian bent...

I could go on and on about the charming personalities and funny antics of my beloved furry creatures. But for purposes of this blog post, the salient point is that they are different colors. So when I found a pattern for Bunny Mittens from House on a Hill Knits, I knew in an instant that I had to knit them as a tribute to Cinnamon and Olorin. And so I did, using 6 different shades of KnitPicks Pallete yarn (black, white, bison, marble heather, lipstick, and teal), and adding features that appealed to me from two other patterns: the Latvian braid and hem from Deep in the Forest mittens by Tuulia Salmela (a pattern waiting eagerly in my queue for just the right moment to arrive) and the side outline and lining from Fiddlehead mittens by Adrian Bizilia (which I had already made and enjoy wearing quite often). As with my Fiddleheads, I used KnitPicks Andean Treasure (100% baby alpaca) for the lining, which feels deliciously yummy and soft next to the skin. The following photo gallery tells pretty much the whole story of how they were made, step by step. I am proud of my colorwork on this project, and feel particularly smug about the fact that I paused to weave in all the hellish ends neatly before picking up stitches for the lining, even though my hard work and attention to detail will never show. But that's what pictures are for, to commemorate events and accomplishments hat would otherwise go unnoticed. As always, click on any one of these images to view an enlargement.

Between the double layer of Peruvian highlands wool from the stranded colorwork and the thick, cushy alpaca lining, these mittens are phenomenally warm and essentially windproof — just the ticket, in other words, for my chilly walks to & from work in the dead of winter. And even apart from keeping my hands from freezing off, they make me ridiculously HAPPY just to look at, because it's like having lots of little Cinnamons and Olorins along on my adventures. I am particularly fond of the gray bunny on each thumb.

Continuum Legwarmers

Stress points in the space-time continuinuinuum... — Ponder Stibbons, Department of High-Energy Magic, Unseen University
(from the novel The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett, c. 1988)

The minute I saw Sivia Harding's Continuum legwarmers, featuring 100's of beads and an amazing Celtic cable design, they went right to the top of my queue for Christmas break. I thought of them as my Christmas gift to myself. Our house gets decidedly chilly in the winter, you see, and for the sake of the long afternoons and evenings that I often spend sitting still while struggling to stay warm, I sought to maximize the coziness factor by using an alpaca yarn (Knit Picks Andean Treasure). I paired the rich charcoal gray color called Mystery Heather with 6/0 beads in Metallic Amethyst Gunmetal. The beads glow with a quiet and distinctly purple intensity that marks a delightful contrast with the fuzzy warmth of the yarn. It was a match made in heaven (see left, and click for a closer view).

The ~450 beads for each warmer had to be strung in advance, which got interesting as I went along, because each skein of the yarn contained only 110 yards. I used six skeins in all, and although I always tried to err on the side of stringing too many beads at any given time, rather than too few, inevitably there were a lot leftover whenever I changed skeins, so I ended up re-stringing some of them several times. It felt like many more than 1,000 beads!!

But the biggest challenge that I faced with this project was not the beads: it was the fit. The original design called for 100% wool yarn, with a broad flare toward the bottom to accommodate a pant leg and/or boot. See the example shown in white on the left here. Of course alpaca fiber, though warmer by weight than wool, has little trace of the elasticity and springiness for which sheep fleece is justly famous, so I knew I would probably end up altering the pattern somewhat to help the legwarmers stay up. But I was still surprised by just how much the fabric wanted to stretch out and hang loose around my ankles. To make the fabric more pliable, I decided to move up a needle size to a US size 6 (4.0 mm), which naturally also enhanced the floppiness of the bell-bottom.

In fact, after some experimentation, I ended up reworking the lower half of each warmer to remove the bell-bottom increases altogether. It took several weeks to complete the alterations. The end result fits a lot more snugly, although the ankle still flares out to some extent. I still wouldn't trust them to stay up either, if I need to walk or move around very much, and especially if I wear them over any kind of slippery fabric.

I used Jeny's Surprisingly Stretchy Slip-Knot Cast-On for this project again, as I had first done with Rivendell, and then I also taught myself the corresponding Surprisingly Stretchy Bind Off, which has since proven its usefulness time and time again. It is so much fun to experiment with new knitting techniques and expand one's repertoire.

The top two photos below show the upper portion of one warmer and the elaborate cable motif at the knee. Then there is a picture of the knitting in progress, followed by two full-length shots of the finished object: one as written from the first time around, with all the extra fabric, and the second as I revised the pattern to make the two ends match. The change in shape was really quite dramatic. As always, click on any of these images to take a closer look.

These elegant beaded legwarmers do a magnificent job of fending off the cold, and they look fantastic all the while, but I have to admit that they also tend to fall down at the slightest provocation. So I have concluded that they are best suited for times when I need extra warmth while staying put for extended periods, such as around the house or in the car. Fortunately, there are plenty of such times, when I can put them to good use. They perform beautifully under the right conditions. I have plans to make another pair in pure wool specifically for my walks to/from work, either with an even more heavily modified version of this design, or perhaps with another pattern entirely. Never a shortage of new knitting projects around here, no sirree...