It's a helluva town.

Alright, it's been a little quiet round here recently. But rest assured that as soon as we get home and can download all the pics I've taken on BCB's iphone there will be some Very Interesting Posts. Get home? you say. Yes, my friends, I am in Melbourne.

Be prepared for images of the World's Most Astonishing Fabric Shop ($10 p/m for genuine 1950s skirt panels in pristine condition; $10 p/m for bird-poo stained calico; priced according to how the owners feel that day...); possibly the World's Largest Vintage Store (also selling, oddly, a stack of berets knitted to Ysolda's gretel pattern...); photos of some Very Lovely Handspun at Extremely Reasonable Prices ($6 - $8 per 50g sound good to everyone? Yep, good). Oh, and I bought the Cutest Vintage Dress Ever. 1940s, black velvet trim, fabric with little pink birds singing all over. Tres Black Apple.

Just hang on a day or two more.

edit: If customs have a tantie over my suitcase (they shouldn't - I was talked into not trying to take cheese and fresh pasta on the plane) my cover story is that I'm a fashion designer, okay? There is no other way to explain how yarn and fabric takes up over half my suitcase. Back me up, okay?

Socks of many techniques 3: the 'body'

The heel in these socks is going to be an afterthought heel. There are three reasons for this:
(i) I need a contrast heel because I don't have enough handspun for full socks;
(ii) I don't want to interrupt the stripes/ variegation in the handspun; and
(iii) I get bored with knitting the leg.

When I knit toe up socks, I am always so anxious to finish after I turn the heel. I get bored of knitting the legs. So I thought rather than break the flow by turning the heel, I'd just knit a long tube - I'd be finished before I got bored! After I finished the first tube, I put it on some spare needles, and started on the second. Note that I didn't knit the cuff at that point - it made sense to leave the live stitches to check that the tubes were the same length before I did the cuffs.

Another nice thing about an afterthought heel is that the sock is flat. It makes it easier to check that both socks are the same length when you don't have some crazy heel sticking out the side. Once I knew they were the same length (well, half a round out and I wasn't going to fuss) I knit the cuffs on one sock then the other. Then just the heel to go!

Zimmermann tam (or: the cute beret)

Don't I look tired? This is me, after a day at work.

Now here is an admission: I have never been very good at knitting hats. I have knit two okay ones, and two truly terrible ones for BCB. The first looked like a mushroom, and the second was comically too tight. Then I knit a Gretel for me, which, while it is an excellent pattern, just didn't work out for me, as I used the wrong weight yarn.

Then came the recipe for a tam, in Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac. It just works. It's cute. I love it. In the 'monster tam' sizing (27" circumference as the widest part). Messing with the gauge, I squeaked this hat out of 111 yards. It has a contrast under-band. You can't really see from the photos, but this yarn is just luscious. Simply luscious. It's the most buttery soft merino, handspun by the wonderful Linda Lee. And while it looks just grey in the photo, it's actually a wonderful subtle dark grey with red, turquoise and white fibres too. Look.

Tropical Island socks/ Socks of Many Techniques

I'm on a massive handspun kick right now. I'm not even going to tell you about all the Etsy goodness wending its way towards me right now. I 'destashed' recently, only to replace it all with handspun! Anyway, that's some handspun sockyarn I bought from DivineBird, 'Leapyear' colourway. I loved the colours. It's a very fine sockyarn - drops down to laceweight in parts - and a little overspun (easy to fix). But the colours are just great, and the yarn very soft. Because there's only 200 yards of it, it's coiled around what will be the heels, toes and cuffs. Some pure merino I dyed with onionskins and vinegar as a mordant a while ago. I'm not sure that the colour won't fade out a lot, but I don't mind.

Now, I've been reading some Elizabeth Zimmermann recently, and she's inspired me to think about the way that socks are constructed, and how I might best make them. I've broken down the socks into four elements: toe, heel, long tube (foot and leg) and cuff. Now normally one knits either cuff, half of long tube, heel, rest of long tube, toe; or vice versa. I'm going to break the order up a little, for reasons of motivation, neatness of sock, and limitations of yarn respectively. I intend to, over the next couple of weeks, run a set of tutorials on what I've done. None of it is terribly original (more EZ's 'unventing'), but hopefully it might give some of you some ideas.

Tutorial one involves the mystery of getting that single hank you saw above into this.


Two even cakes. I don't have scales to work it out by weight. But this method works nicely if you have a swift and winder. Take your little twisted skein apart so it's a big hank of yarn. Count the number of strands at any point in the hank (I counted by twos, it's quicker). For me it was 105. I want two even cakes, so I'd want 52.5 'rounds' of the hank in each ball. I put the hank on my swift, and tied a scrap of yarn to an arm of the swift where the start of the hank was. Lined that up with my ball winder. Then I just had to count that scrap of yarn passing the ball winder 52 times, and cut the yarn off halfway around the 53rd pass. Easy! I admit I did count in batches of ten, with a little pause between each to stop my poor little brain getting confused.

I also discovered when winding that in general, the yarn went dark - light - dark across its entire length. If I want the light and the dark on my socks to roughly match up, I'll knit one cake from the inside and one from the outside. Also easy.