passed the first test

yesterday was SOOO hot along the eastern seaboard it was enough to make you want to go live in antarctica. i locked the house up and put a heat absorbing tarp (yes, a tarp. i was making do!) across the north facing glass wall which makes my office so attractive in winter and so completely unattractive for the other 9 months of the year. no air conditioning in this little beach shack, apart from the odd sea breeze. i have a self-imposed deadline of finishing the chapter im working on by the end of next week, that means i really need to get the most out of the morning hours when i work best and its cooler etc.

even with the tarp and the little fan thing, this room got too hot to be in past 1, so i lay down with the dogs on the slate floor for a while and then picked up the second berry stripe sock to cast on. an hour later and i had this:


i was pleased. i have, i think, passed the first test of the southern summer of socks and that is the capacity to knit even when its really freakin' hot. the little beach shack held its cool and there was merely a hint of sweat on the fingers.

some of this may have had more to do with issues i was having with the picot edge. its been many moons since i made the first sock of this pair and of course in that time the knowing of how to do the picot had deserted me. i had great trouble with the folding over and attaching because you have to pick up the edge of your cast on stitch and knit it together with the stitch on the needle. if you knit a little tight like me (cough - what bent knit pick - cough), then this can get tricky. the result is a facing that slants a little because you have not matched up your stitches properly.

the first one has a nice straight facing but the second one slants ever so slightly:


i am a very resistant frogger, and i know this is going to have a ribbon through it as well, and in this perspective you cant really tell, so im just gonna live with it.

meanwhile, no sooner do i blog my ideas for sock patterns and get lovely comments from people when i start to doubt myself. this is what i am thinking.

firstly, the yarn that i said was for monkey socks, its a fairly thick 5 ply, not smooth or fine. im starting to think it may not be monkey material. if i wanted to knit fairly good sturdy desert boot type socks (they're for that type of girl, by the way) then what might be a better pattern, thats not just plain old sticking stitch cos im gonna stab someone with a dpn if i have to do another one of those after the two pairs i have going.

this raises a second issue. the red black and white is not actually for st kilda fans (sorry q-mick) but for trents flyball* team, the st george phoenix. i wanted to make a pair of fibonacci socks for each of the other three members. not real long but not ankle socks, just long enough so you can get away with no shaping. and i thought fibonacci rather than straight stripes just to mix it up a bit. but thats a whole heap more stocking stitch right there, and they just are not getting done for christmas. not all three of them, and not when there is italian/german cotton sitting there bleating at me. any suggestions for a stitch that you can work with stripes that isnt boring!

also, a question re jaywalkers. i really like the zigzag effect of them, and i will be making a pair this summer. however, the yarn i had slated was the opal, in pale colours. every pair of jaywalkers ive seen are bold strong colours. im thinking the effect might get lost with this particular opal, and it would be more suited to something delicate.

which means i might have to buy some really bright coloured self striping (koigu, did i hear someone say?!) especially for jaywalkers instead. or i could try them with the red, black and white. would that work?

and another thought. i dont block my socks. does this make me bad? should i block socks?

oh so many questions.....

k xx

* flyball= another weird dog sport where 4 dogs race in team against another team, like a relay, and they run over four short jumps, grab a tennis ball and come back. seriously major fun for the dogs, if youve ever seen it.