FO: Minestrone Socks

These socks, guys.  These socks are the socks that make me never want to knit another pair of socks (in a good way).  You can’t do much better than these.  These are the ones to beat!  I inexplicably love them!  They weren’t incredibly difficult and they didn’t take very much time but I just love them with my whole heart.  I think it’s because I’ve been holding on to the leftovers to make these socks for YEARS! The pink is literally from the same skein of sock yarn that I used to knit my very first pair of socks.  That was a lifetime ago!  Maybe it’s all the sentimental value associated with them.  I don’t know.  All I know is I love them to pieces.

However, these are also the socks that cast me into a sock-knitting funk.  You saw the pink nightmare (OK maybe a bit of an exaggeration).  But overall I think the pros outweigh the cons with these socks.

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Knittings hard, guys!

Do you ever have those days where everything you cast on looks like a heap of poop?  The pattern looks so promising, and the yarn is so tempting, and the needles are calling your name but when you cast on a do the first repeat of the pattern, the result is disastrous.  This is my everyday! It usually happens when I finish a project I loved working on (for me it was my Minestrone socks that will be blogged about later).  I cast on a new project almost immediately, trying to get that warm feeling that comes from knitting something you love (knitting isn’t a drug! I swear!) and the result is disappointing.  I cast on Drunken Bees by Domesticat.  First I cast on in a coral color (it didn’t work out because it was spun with pink and white and I felt like the pattern was lost), so I frogged it and cast on in a retina disintegrating pink but I just wasn’t happy with the pattern/yarn combination.  Objectively it looks fine but I just wasn’t feeling it.

All of this is basically to say that knitting is hard.  How do you get over the blues of finishing a project you loved working on?

Neglected FO’s

I finished these Winter Buzz mittens a while ago, I just never got around to taking pictures of them.  I think it is equal parts that I wasn’t totally satisfied how they came out and that this yarn is incredibly difficult to take an accurate picture of!  I really like the color, it’s a nice traditional purple but it’s just coming up as grey on camera.  Such is life.

And I finally finished my Ugly Duckling socks!  These socks on the other hand, I don’t have a reason for not taking a picture of them!  I like how they turned out and as soon as I finished weaving in the ends (of which there were thousands!) I put them safely in my sock drawer to wear when/if it ever gets colder.

What have you finished recently?

Sock it to Me

This gallery contains 6 photos.

  Well hello there.  So these socks aren’t a new finished object, but I wanted to share them anyways!  So here it is.  These are the socks I knit in high school.  Notice how they are all ankle socks. And how they are all different crazy colors.  I had this idea that tall socks were … Continue reading →

Knitty Gritty

Sometimes I feel like sitting down to write a full-blown post can be super intimidating, especially given how my week has been going.  I’m suppose to be witty and creative an bring something new to the blogging community? Yeah no thank you.  So in comes microblogging.  One post, not a lot of words, hello savior! This is my progress on my loose interpretation of the Minestrone sock.  I plan on using most of the charts, just scrambled up a bit.  It’s going really quickly! That’s how it always seems for the first sock though, then the second one drags on and on! 

Bad Blogger

Sorry I went missing for a week!  My sister came to visit for her fall break and my schedule was turned upside down.  But she’s gone now and I’m back.  I did a lot of knitting while she was here! I finished two projects and made serious progress on my cardigan.  I finished the Ugly Duckling socks I was working on, so you know what that means! I need to cast on another pair of socks IMMEDIATELY!  I’m thinking of doing these Minestrone socks with a bunch of left over yarns.  I’m thinking of using the yarns above.  What do you think?

Swatch It Out

Swatching isn’t something I generally spend a lot of time thinking about (or actually doing).

After starting (and then ripping out) so many sweaters that were too small for even a newborn to fit into, you would think I would’ve gotten my act together and began a campaign to swatch before every project.  Not the case, folks.  Old habits die hard.  Plus, I usually only knit socks and I’ve knit so many pairs, I know from experience what size needles to use for which technique, so swatching isn’t an absolute necessity.  But now that I’m adding sweaters into the mix, I decided that unless I become infant-sized, I need to do some swatching.

So here’s where this thought came from: I’m knitting a color-block cardigan with some of the yarn I got from my grandma but I didn’t have the perfect hunter/forest green in my stash that I was looking for for the body.  So I went out in search of the perfect yarn.  Today I went out to Michael’s and bought some Red Heart yarn that I thought would work well.  The yarn from my stash is a really old (some might say vintage) acrylic and I thought Red Heart would be a good modern day equivalent.  The yarn I got was perfect.  I was tempted to cast on immediately, but I restrained myself.  Although, the forest green Red Heart felt like it was the same weight as the vintage yarn I was using, you can never be sure.  And since a cardigan that ballooned out for the body because the gauge was significantly different, isn’t exactly the look I’m going for. So I cast on a swatch block.  I found it surprisingly rewarding.