Falling Up

Remember this?



Well, a while back I designed a sock with my friend Stephania's yarn, and now her yarn and my pattern are going to be hanging out together at Sock Summit. :) (Her etsy shop is Three Fates Yarns and she has some lovely semi-solids up now!)

So it's time to introduce Falling Up!



The idea for this pattern was based on a sweater I saw at the mall while visiting my mom in Salem. In fact, I was walking out of the mall with my mom when I suddenly saw a sweater with some lace panels and snapped a quick picture with my iPhone. It took a while, but eventually Stephania gave me this yarn to design with and the idea came together. After some swatching I finally figured out a similar pattern (I think it's slightly better, my decreases make more defined vertical columns) but there was one little problem...

It had to be knit toe-up.

Now, it's not that I dislike toe-up socks, it's just that it's hard to find a heel that fits me well. There's one, and it's the one I used in this sock. But doing a gusset in a toe up sock requires a lot more thinking and calculation to figure out when you need to start the increases to have your pattern line up with a certain row for the leg. There's the number of increases, which you use to find the number of rows, which you then plug into the pattern to figure out which pattern row you'll end on... it's much easier to just *end* on a certain row (like in a cuff-down sock).



But I persevered, and came out with some lovely socks that have all that annoying stuff figured out for you already!

It will be making it's in-person debut at the Knit A Bit booth #808 at Sock Summit, with a sample sock and Stephania's beautiful yarns, but the pattern itself is up for sale on Ravelry right now.




Listening to: Dark Waters ~ Brave, Digital Bath ~ Deftones

Wow, I have a fan club?

In the wee hours of this morning, my dear friend MJ sent me a message on Ravelry to inform me of something I never would have dreamed...

Apparently I have a fan club. I totally thought she started it, but she didn't. A person I don't even know in real life started a fan club for me! Quite the ego boost. But I didn't join because, well, that just seems conceited.

Well, my fan club and maybe even the rest of you will be happy to hear that I have a few new patterns in the works, and hopefully a couple of them will be out in the next couple of months. And there's another one that's all done in theory, but I really need to get around to knitting up one of these days...

Since I can't show pictures of any of that, here's one of my current socks in progress:



The pattern is Nebula and the yarn is Three Fates Knitting. It's a sample sock for Sock Summit, and I think it's turning out beautifully.

Listening to: Hollow ~ Remy Zero, Die With Me ~ Type O Negative

Horcrux Twin Socks!

Way back in March, right before moving away from Salem, I started making twin Horcrux Socks with Eloise in our Harry Potter Draco yarn from our mini yarn crawl to Twisted. And today I finally finished them!



Pattern: Horcrux Socks
Yarn: Opal Harry Potter in Draco
Started: 3/1/09
Finished: 7/4/09
.26 miles for a total of 2.29 in Sock Marathon

Although the Harry Potter yarns are an exciting idea, I didn't really like most of the colors. But blues and greys, though a bit boring, aren't bad. One weird thing was that after my psycho efforts to match the stripes exactly, they get all wonky after the heel. But there wasn't a knot! Just all of a sudden the order of the stripes changed! Strange but true.

So I've joined Summer of Socks, because it's summer and I'm planning to knit socks as I usually do. I've decided that my first goal will be to finish all my sock-WIPs this summer, this is 1 of 9 1/2.

Listening to: Kimdracula ~ Deftones, Evil In a Closet ~ In Flames