In a rut

I think I'm in a stockinette rut. Part of the problem is my deep and abiding love for self-striping sock yarn. Even sock yarn like the Lorna's Laces that misbehaves so very badly.

After frogging the pooly Jaywalker, I decided a plain stockinette sock, with a picot edge would be perfect. And it turned out fairly nicely. Of course, I could barely yank the thing onto my feet pre-blocking, so I'm hoping for a blocking miracle wherein the yarn relaxes enough that it will fit the recipient.

And by "hoping for a blocking miracle", I mean "planning to frog and reknit."



I suppose I could spice things up a bit by doing a Jaywalker, but the combination of my very tight gauge and the Jaywalker's lack of stretch makes it unlikely a Jaywalker would fit anyone but my friend Megan, she of the dainty feet. I love Megan dearly, but there are other people I should be knitting for.

Like TB. Kristy asked me what went wrong with the brown socks, after all my careful measuring, and I told her that, despite my careful measuring, I just decided to wing it with how many stitches to cast on and how many stitches to pick up at the gusset and how long to knit the foot. Turns out, winging it doesn't work so well.

Not learning my lesson, I promptly did the same thing with this sock.



The yarn is the delicious Austermann Step, which I won in a contest over at the Craft Pirate's. The Daft Crafter suggested we tell everyone that the Pirate's prizes were utter crap to improve our chances of winning her contests, but she has wonderful taste in prizes. The yarn is self-striping in greens, with little red tweedy bits and is an absolute joy to knit with. You should all go to her blog all the time, just in case she has a contest. And because she's funny. And an excellent knitter, but all modest and unassuming about it anyway.

The Step yarn is infused with aloe vera and jojoba oil. I'm also using vacation-purchased Lantern Moon rosewood needles, and the amazingly soft yarn and beautiful needles are such a tactile pleasure that I just keep knitting. Even though I really did intend to just knit a gauge swatch. But after casting on 50 stitches for the swatch and realizing I knit much differently in the round than I do back-and-forth, I thought I might as well just cast on another 14 stitches and start a sock. I'm getting about 7 stitches per inch (a miraculous and previously unachievable sock yarn gauge for me), and thinking this sock might have TB written all over it.

I also need to start on my Sockapalooza sock. My sock pal seems to like pink, and doesn't like mismatched socks. My sock yarn stash runs heavy towards the variegated and the orange self-striping, so there really wasn't anything in the stash that would suit her. Clearly, I needed some new yarn.



Knit-from-Your-Stash officially begins on Sunday, so I slid this one in just under the wire. Thanks for the encouragement - I really think it's doable.

And finally, the mysterious and very funny Francois reappeared in the comments. I get a lot of amount of mileage out of the comment you made about being entitled to call yourself the Slayer after removing spiders from the bedroom, but I don't know who you are! Do you have a blog? If not, an email address? If you are (sadly) blogless, I'm at arieltinks AT yahoo DOT com, if you want to, er, reveal yourself.