Now on the Needles
Last night I finally finished knitting the last of my Christmas gifts! I know it's past Christmas, but as I'm not seeing the recipient of this gift until Wednesday, I gave myself a little bit more time to finish it up. Here are a couple shots of the latest Christmas scarf:
Blocking detail:
Blocked and ready for wrapping:
And now that I'm done with my Christmas gifts for this year, I'm free to try my hand at some new projects. I was given some cash for Christmas so I put in an order over at KnitPicks for some sock yarn and a couple patterns and had planned to wait until the package arrived before starting a new project. But, itching for something to do with my hands - I cannot seem to watch TV without knitting; feels like a waste of time to me - and since the KnitPicks package hasn't yet arrived, I dug around in my stash and decided to give sock-knitting a try with the Debbie Bliss Wool/Cotton I've had sitting around for a while. On my last trip to Mom's Extensive Knitting Library, I'd found a couple sock knitting books that looked interesting, so after figuring out the gauge I could get with the yarn and the size five dpns (double pointed needles) I had on hand, I chose the "Denmark" pattern out of Nancy Bush's Knitting on the Road.
The wool/cotton isn't exactly fingering/sock yarn, but it's fairly thin and seems to be producing a nice - if slightly loose - fabric. When I knitted a stockinette stitch swatch the fabric looked good and the gauge was spot-on, but the resulting sock seems really large to me... so I don't know. Here are a couple shots of the first sock in progress:
Sock detail:
Struggling to get the right gauge is an endless nightmare for me - I tend to knit tight as a general rule, and often have to increase the needle size by two to get the correct gauge. Sometimes this is fine, other times the resulting fabric is looser than I'd like. I don't know what to do about this, because it seems to be a problem with everything I knit - I just can't seem to loosen my stitches. So it's frustrating - especially because I'm impatient and hate knitting swatches - but I guess I just have to do the best I can - either use a heavier yarn weight, increase the needle size or rewrite each and every pattern to more closely match the gauge I'm actually getting...
Just my cross to bear, I s'pose. Regardless, I'm excited to be attempting socks - even though I dislike knitting in the round with dpns (much prefer circular needles) - and have been surprised by how quickly this first sock is knitting up. Almost 4 inches in one evening!
Oh, and just for the record, this post marks my 200th post on this blog! Wow, who knew I had so much to say?
Comments
That scarf is *stunning*...!
Just dropping by to wish you a very happy new year - especially now that you're back here in PDX!
Posted by: Betsy | December 31, 2005 10:29 PM