Symmetry for the sock knitter

I like symmetry.

This is probably not shocking to anyone, since I’ve already devoted a post to the minutiae of even yarn overs. But symmetry, patterns, balance, action and reaction are patterns that I see and use every day. Every for loop must have an end. Every ( must have it’s ). If my equations don’t have symmetry or pattern, I’m looking for the mistake. K2tog, yo is matched with a yo, ssk. I love fairy tales and children’s books for the patterns that they use to paint a story.

I also like socks.

I’ve already knit a dozen and have another half dozen’s worth of yarn in my yarndrobe. I started with two at a time, toe up, magic looping, but these days prefer one at a time, cuff down with DPNs. The big advantage of the two at a time method is being able to create identical socks without any thought or row counting. Since I can’t do this with DPNs, these days I stick to patterned socks to make my life easier. And this is where the symmetry comes in…

Like most people in the world, I have two feet. As do the people I’ve knit socks for. These feet are mirror images of each other, curving together like gloriously matched parenthesis. Socks, as a rule, do not take this shape, but the feet are straight tubes and we rely on the stretchiness of the fabric to do all the hard work for us. For the simple stockinette or ribbed sock, two perfectly identical socks will serve just fine. Left or right, doesn’t matter, your feet will be warm, happy and symmetrical either way. There is one teeeeeeeeeensy tiny little issue that throws a spanner in the works of perfectly symmetric socks, but I’ll get back to that later.

For the patterned sock knitter, sometimes symmetry gets more interesting…

Some sock designers are really wonderful. Their patterns are well thought out, and they give some thought to how it all fits together. Cookie A is an excellent example, and I highly recommend her book Sock Innovation. She has another book out recently, Knit. Sock. Love., which I want to get too. Both books are full love lovely detailed patterns and well written instructions. I’ve knit Angee, Devon, Cauchy and Milo. For Cauchy (my most recent socks), there isn’t a pattern difference for left and right socks. The pattern is a simple zigzag of purls on a base of knits, so I just shifted the pattern along so that I started on a zag for the first sock and a zig for the second. This is entirely unnecessary, really, and was just done for visual appeal and my own peace of mind. For the socks in this book, like Rick and Kai-Mei, where having proper mirror images is important and not trivial, full instructions and charts for each sock are provided.

For some socks, like Cauchy, mirroring is purely a choice of aesthetics. For other, like Rick, Kai-Mei or Nutkin, mirroring is essential for the structure of the fabric. Nutkin is a lovely pattern. I’ve made it twice and would happily recommend it to anyone. However, as it’s written it has a problem. The pattern consists of bands formed by yo and k2tog, which has the side effect of always adding a stitch (yo) to one side of the pattern and taking away (k2tog) from the other side. This results in a twist in the fabric and the sock with spiral noticeably around the foot and leg. The first time I made nutkin, I didn’t anticipate this. Luckily, I did make the second sock a mirror image of the first (simply reflecting the chart), so while each sock spirals, they spiral in opposite ways so there isn’t any discrepancy between left and right foot.

For nutkin-the-second I counteracted the bias by using the chart and it’s mirror alternately on the same sock. So, around the leg is chart, anti-chart, chart, anti-chart. This creates a slight wave around the foot, best seen in the cuff (two points are higher, two points are lower), bit the sock will sit straight along the foot this way.

I’m currently working on some socks for my partner’s 30th birthday. They’re a lovely pattern, good to knit and we both like the end result, but the instructions for the second sock have a couple of noticeable issues. I won’t write about them here because a) I want to contact the designer and give them a chance to fix the error first and b) there isn’t much to be learned from the experience, other than sometimes you need to start a sock three times.

So, still waiting for that teeeeeensy tiny issue I teased you with earlier? Oh, alright then, but I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.

Yarn. Sock yarn. Sock yarn that isn’t a single solid colour.

A lot of sock yarns have colour changes. Sometimes they’re very random, but often they’re repeated colour progressions which can range in length from a fraction of a knitting round to several knitting rounds. Mmm, stripy socks, yum! The chances of the colour repeats in your sock being an integer multiple of the length of one round of your particular knitting are pretty slim. Just a few stitches short or extra each repeat will cause the colour pattern to spiral one way or the other over the course of the sock. And it will do exactly the same of the second sock.

This has no effect on form or function of the sock, but you may look down at your feet from time to time and say “My, those are beautiful, hand knit, almost-but-not-quite mirror image socks!”.

Or worse! You take great care to mirror the strongly directional pattern for each sock, and the spiral of colour enhances and reinforces the design beautifully. On one sock. On the other sock, the spiral of colour fights the spiral of pattern and it truly is an inferior sock.

For this, I propose a few solutions:

1. Learn to knit backwards with the exact same gauge as forwards, and knit the entire second sock that way.
2. Knit the entire second sock inside out. Oh, yeah, and hope your purl gauge is the same as your knit gauge.
3. Stop reading this blog because it’s giving you nervous ticks about things you never cared about before.

Finally, in my defense, I am by far not the craziest sock knitter on the planet. I offer up Exhibit A.

Winter Thaw

It may actually be a time span measured in years now. It was certainly pre-thesis, so that puts it at at least 15 months, and I think it was a while before that. Let’s just say, around two years ago, one of the women from our knitting group, Beata, brought in a shawl she had knit in her first attempt at designing lace. It was beautiful. Delicate, full of leaf motifs, with one pattern flowing smoothly into another pattern. An altogether sickeningly successful first lace design. Naturally, I wanted one.

Time passed, I moved away, she moved house, the original pattern notes went walkies along the way. I (and a not insignificant number of other people) waited patiently for a second version of the shawl to come forth and be made available to our waiting needles. When the pattern came out, I actually jumped out of bed to rush to my laptop and have a gander at it. Lovely! Hmm, size 3.5 needles. I do have size 3.5 needles, but they’re being used for In Dreams. Fine, I’ll wait.

More time passed. I traveled. A lot. Bigger, sofa bound projects languished while small shawls and socks that could go in a suitcase got all the attention. Returning to In Dreams, I found I had fallen out of love with it, and maybe the languishing wasn’t really the fault of the travel, but that I really had no interesting in carrying on. Rip, rip, rip. Finally, my 3.5 needle tips were free. Of course, I still had far too many projects on the needles already. Finish one. Finish another. WIP pile shrinks just a little bit.

No more time to pass. It was time to cast on. But what yarn? Back in January I received a care package from the Cork knitting group. Included was a skein of Hedgehog Fibres silk merino in a lovely purple colourway called Spell (light), dyed by Beata. Right weight. Right yardage. Right colour. Everything was coming together.

Winter Thaw shawl, just post blocking.

There are three slightly unusual design features of Winter Thaw, though they’re not unique to this design. The first is subtle, the lack of a garter stitch boarder. Instead there’s a single slipped stitch which was often followed by a yarn over or a decrease. I was slightly worried that this lack of boarder would leave the edges curling or less stable in the finished shawl, but the pattern held up well. In face, the lack of a 1cm line of plain knitting around the outside adds to the lightness of the design.

The second noteworthy feature is the huge yarn overs. Five or seven yarn overs a piece, with multiple knits and purls into them, to create a lobed edging. These holes look sloppy on the needles, and more like mistakes than anything else, but after blocking they turn into wonderful arches of space in the edging.

The final note is on the edging itself. The main body of the shawl has the standard triangle construction, with increases at the edge and either side of a centre stitch. For the last few charts, this distinction between left and right disappears and the border is knit straight from right to left with no break. This is a little more reminiscent of a knitted on boarder and really softens the harsh lines that the centre increases can create. Of course, the pay back for the knitter is that the final rows, which are marathon events as it is, seem even longer without the mental bookmark of a centre stitch to tell you you’re half way there.

The shawl is no tiny neck scarf piece, it uses about 700m of lace weight and blocks out to quite a substantial size. However, it felt like a flash to knit it. The first chart (after the set up chart) is knit several times, and it’s a fairly simple pattern to memorise. With memorisation and relatively short rows it’s a surprisingly quick knit. After that, it’s knit each chart once so the feeling of progress is accelerated through the remaining charts. The charts aren’t complicated at all (although the yarn overs are fiddly), but there’s enough going on to keep a knitter interested over 3/4 of a kilometer of fine knitting. Overall, the effort to impressiveness ratio is quite high so if you’re looking for a shawl that will wow even an experienced knitter but won’t require a lot of blood, sweat and tears on your part, this is the shawl I would suggest.

There are pretty much no cons for this pattern. It’s a pain to pin out and block due as you have to spread out each point and pin it out in many places (I was using around 10 pins per point). Binding off was tedious too, but that’s a given for lace. The copy of the pattern I have had an error, a missing decrease in the first line, in one chart, but this errata is listed on the ravelry pattern page and may now be fixed in the pdf. It’s not a tricky error to spot if you’re following the symmetry of the pattern and the stitch count.

And the yarn? Wow! I now love this base. I’ve used silk/merino blends before, but this blend has a high silk content (50%) giving it an extra dose of sheen and weight. The shawl feels delicate and like it needs taking care of, but due to that much silk it’s probably tougher than I think it is. When I’m off the yarn diet, I’ll be keeping an eye out for more of this.

But aside from the niceness of the yarn, the good pattern and the lovely finished object, this shawl is special. It links me back in time to one of the most wonderful, talented and creative groups of women I have have the privilege of meeting. It’s a shawl we saw as a new born and now we see striking out on it’s own in the world. It’s a yarn that was sent to me when I was in a new city, starting a new job. Even the needles were a present from my best friend, and the shawl pin I will sometimes wear it with was a present from my partner. Can a girl get more wrapped in love?

Wee disclaimer for this post. Beata, owner, yarn dyer and pattern designer of Hedgehog Fibres fame is a friend of mine from my old knitting group. I have received gifts of yarn and various other acts of generosity from her in the past. She also created and nourished my spinning addiction. I think she’s a wonderfully creative and hard working person who has an eye for colour that I can only appreciate in a very layperson’s way. But I may be biased. Just FYI.

More Yarn Overs

I wrote is out on the 3rd of September, then promptly forgot about it for over two weeks. Nice bloggin’ there, Suzi….

I finished knitting Damask last month, and may have made some promises about writing more about yarn overs. In my defense I finished Damask as I was packing to fly to Turku, Finland for The Quantum Circus (no, really).

Most yarn overs I come across sit between two knit stitches, or knit based stitches like k2tog. In Damask the texture of the pattern combines yarn overs and decreases with areas of knit and purl stitches, so often the pattern calls for k, yo, p, or p, yo, k. I don’t think this pattern ever calls for p, yo, p, but I have used patterns that do. So how do these combinations work? And what’s the easiest way of making them?

First, consider k, yo, k. The path of the yarn around the needle goes:

Forward, Up (front), Backward, Down (back)

i.e. a full circuit of the needle.

The next easiest combination is p, yo, p. Since we want the holes in the lace to all be pretty much the same size, the ideal situation is for all the yarn over to be the same length. So in this case, the yarn starts at the bottom front and ends at the bottom front.

Up (front), Backward, Down (back), Forward.

So the yarn has taken exactly the same circuit around the needle as in k, yo, k case just moving the first move to the end. In both cases the yarn moves in the same direction around the needle. That is, if you look at the point of the right needle, it’s gone anti-clockwise.

If you have p, yo, k, you start at the front-bottom and end at the back-bottom of the circuit. While you won’t get the full length of the loop, you’ll get something close enough by going:

Up (front), Backward, Down

Achieving this is pretty simple too, just purl, then knit without bringing the yarn to the back. In order to complete the stitch the yarn has to go up and over so just a reenactment of what most of us did as beginners, forgetting to bring the yarn forward and backward in ribbing.

The final combo, the k, yo, p is the trickiest of these beasts. Now you’re starting at the back-bottom part of the loop, and ending at the front-bottom part of the loop. Clearly just moving the yarn forward won’t make a yarn over. The most basic approach is to go

Forward, Up (front), Backward, Down (back), Forward

This is a five step process so the yarn over will be slightly larger than a full loop.

If you’re the type of person who goes with the flow and won’t mind the little difference, stop here. Well done, you’ve learned all you need to know about the four variations of basic yarn overs. Go, knit, and be merry!

*waits*

Ok, I’m going to assume that the rest of us left are the fussy types. The idea of one set of holes being bigger than others bothers us. Maybe you didn’t notice it before, but now I’ve gone and pointed it out you’ll see it every time. Sorry about that. BUT! I have a few suggestions for fixing it.

The difference between the three step look and the four step loop isn’t too noticeable. Nor is the difference between the four step and the five step. But, as in the case of Damask, if you’re using the three step loop in once instance, there’s a strong probability that it will be paired with a five step loop in the reflection of the pattern. Suddenly the difference between three and five steps is looking a lot bigger.

First Solution:

(Note: I don’t claim any credit for this one, I read about it somewhere that I would link to if I could find it again, but suffices to say it’s not something I made up.)

Replace the five step loop with a three step loop.

For those who like modular arithmetic, all I’m saying is 1 mod(4) = -3 mod(4). So we can replace our +5 step loop loop with a -3 step loop. And a minus loop is just a loop going the other way.

Up (back), Forward, Down (front)

And just like in the p, yo, k case, this is achieve by not moving the yarn forward between the knit and the purl so the yarn has to come up and over to make the purl.

The one thing to remember with this negative loop method is that you’ve made a “negative” stitch, the stitch is sitting the wrong way on the needle. This can be easily fixed by knitting (or purling if that’s the case) through the back loop of that stitch on the next row.

Second Solution:

This is an alternative to the first solution that I came up with. I haven’t seen it anywhere else, but that doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t have a prior claim on the idea.

The problem I had with the first solution was that whatever way I knit I found that the loop between the knit and purl was quite tight. So tight, in fact, that the bottom of the purl stitch was pulled up from the tension. It made it harder to knit through on the way back and actually produced an even smaller hole, possibly what a two step hole would look like. The overall effect for me was that it didn’t look like there was a yarn over there at all.

My solution? Replace k, yo, p with k, yo, k. Then, on the way back, drop the extra knit stitch (now a purl from your perspective) and pick it back up as a purl stitch (or a knit from the view of the wrong side). Turning a knit into a purl is a pretty simple maneuver. There’s a tutorial for picking up stitches (without a crochet hook) here, and I probably don’t need to give instructions on how to drop a stitch.

This second solution probably sounds convoluted compared to the first, but if you’re comfortable with fixing a purl that should be a knit it’s no less speedy and can provided more evenly sized yarn overs if you’re a fusspot like me.

Frogging a Project

It turns out, I’m fickle. I love most of my finished items, and as I get better at putting together yarn and pattern for a project I’m loving them even more, but if the project isn’t working for me, I have no compunction about sending it to the frog pond. ^{[the what pond?]}

I’ve frogged a few things over the last year or so. My friend Evin is still traumatised by a cotton top that I frogged completely just after we met. I’ve also frogged a jumper after finishing the back and half the front, no regrets. My most recent frog was the In Dreams shawl. It’s a knit along mystery shawl from the Lord of the Rings The Two Towers collection, and essentially the little sister shawl of my much loved Evenstar. The yarn I was using was a lovely silver-white silk merino laceweight. Perfect wedding shawl stuff. Had amazing project written all over it.

I started the a-long part late, and just never caught up. I followed the spoiler threads on ravelry and watched the clues take shape ahead of me. I love seeing the colour, yarn, bead and modifications that people choose. I can’t fault the yarn, the design, the instructions, the knitting or the inspiring photos, but all in all, my reaction to the finished design was … meh. I could take or leave (leaf!!!!) it, and by the time I got to clue 5 of 7, it was getting complex enough that you had to really want to finish the darned thing to continue (hmm, is there an analogy between lace knitting and finishing a PhD?). And I just didn’t. It sat in the knitting pile beside the sofa for a few months. Visitors came and went, admiring the lace so far, and I swore I would get back to it.

And then one day…

In Dreams, off the needles

… which soon became this…

And then it was gone

… and it felt good! Like that project that sits on your to do list that you just decide one day isn’t important? That party you’re dreading that gets cancelled? Yeah, good like that. Yarn doesn’t have a motivation or a destiny, but sometimes it really does feel like it has it’s own ideas of what it wants to be.

I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with it yet. It’s a great colour and good yardage, so whatever it chooses to be will be spectacular, but not this.

hop back to post To frog is to rip back a project and reclaim the yarn for something else. Rip-it, rip-it!

The end of the tour

The tour de fleece ended last Sunday. The idea of the tour (as the name suggests) is to spin every day the Tour de France rides, so from the 2nd to 24th July, with two days off.

This is the first time I’ve done the tour, and I’ve only had my wheel a few months so I wasn’t sure how much I might get done. Before the tour I bought a 1kg bag of shetland fibre dyed red, hopefully enough to spin a sweaters worth eventually. It was great to be able to make large quantities of the same yarn for a big project, but taking photos of the same red every day did get somewhat monotonous after a while.

Considering the timing (right before a conference and overlapping with a visit from the parents) and my general inability to stick to things, it went well. I only missed two days of the whole tour, and made up one on one of the rest days. One when I was away from home, and the last day as I was flying out to the conference that morning, so I had good excuses.

The end result was 11 skeins of worsted weight yarn. One mini skein, good for swatching, one dud skein where a single broke three times during plying (good for a hat, perhaps), but the test ready to wash and finish and knit into a sweater in november. I think I’ll put the red aside for a bit now and spin a different colour for my own sanity.

Yarn over and over and over again

Along with the Tour de Fleece spin along, I’ve spent the last week knitting Damask. It’s a lovely shawlette, little bit of lace, little bit of nupps and lots of texture. Unlike a lot of basic lace shawls, the shawl has a knit pattern on a purl background which has resulted in some musings on yarn overs.

A yarn over, aka YO, is an increase stitch where the yarn is looped over the needle and then, on the next row, knit into again. It’s usually done by bringing the yarn to the front (like when purling), and the knitting the next stitch. This brings the yarn over the top of the needle, oriented like a regular stitch (front leg to the right).

Well, that’s the simple version. There are lots of ways of doing them and lots of reasons why one might.

Reason the first: Just increasing

One simple increase is to make a yarn over, and on the next row, purl (or knit if you’re working in the round) the yarn over through the back loop, twisting the loop of yarn and leaving you with one extra stitch. I like this when I have to increase in alternate rows as I can tell whether to increase or not based on whether I have any yarn overs on the needle. This is pretty much the same as the increase where you lift up the bar of yarn between two stitches to create a stitch, but a little looser and less fiddley.

If you knit into the front loop of the yarn over as you would a normal stitch, you’ll create a hole where you increase. This can be nice for a decorative increase in a pattern where the solidness of the fabric isn’t important, such as a shawl.

The second reason: Lace!

I love lace. I love to knit lace. I love the magic that happens when you block lace. I’m a jeans and tshirt girl who now owns several delicate lace shawls. So, yeah, lace.

Lace, generally, consists of holes and decreases arranged in a visually pleasing pattern. Generally. This definition doesn’t cover lots of aspects of lace, so I’ll have to write a proper post on just that, but let’s go with it as a working definition.

I’ve already mentioned how knitting into the front of a yarn over will leave a hole in your knitting. In lace, this is a good thing. But it’s also an increase, so if that’s all you do, you’ll end up increasing your stitches every time you make a hole. To counter this, lace is also full of decreases, arranged in different ways around the holes for different effects. So a typical line of lace knitting could include k2tog, yo,k, yo, ssk, or a right leaning decrease, a hole, a stitch, a hole and a left leaning decrease. You start with five stitches, and because of the pairings of decreases with yarn overs, you end with another five stitches, but instead of plain knitting you now have two symmetrically placed holes in the fabric.

The zigzag lace scarf is just one example of the kind of pattern that just YO and some well placed decreases can get you. If that looks a little tame, check out Cold Mountain. It’s just the same, yarn overs and decreases (and a little bit of knitting through the back loop), but the effect is quite striking.

So is that all there is to yarn overs? Not by far. But it’s enough to get started on a basic lace project. I think my next post will be about how to handle yarn overs mixed in with purls as well as knits, an issue that I needed to address for my Damask.

Tour de Fleece, Day 1

This is the first year I’m participating in Tour de Fleece. For some reason, yarnies like to create yarny events around sports. We have the knitting Olympics/ravelympics, coinciding with winter and summer Olympics, and now Tour de Fleece, a spinning marathon running side by side with the Tour de France. (Don’t want a sports related *-a-long? There is always the Harry Potter House Cup.)

The idea, which is fairly self evident, is to spin every day the Tour cycles. It’s not a competition, just a personal challenge and a bit of fun. There are teams, and I’m on the Climbers (for personal challenges, in my case quantity) and Team Finland. I was going to be a Rookie, as it’s my first tour, but they have asked to limit it to spinners of < 1 year, which is fair enough.

My challenge to myself, spin (and ply) as much Shetland fibre as possible. I have 1kg of fibred dyed bright red. I’m spinning woolen and making a 3 ply, with the eventual goal of making a jumper for myself.

I’m hoping to spin every day, including the last day, where I will also be flying out of the country, and take photos of my progress…

B is for behind…

… and belated, and bad blogger!

For some reason the blogging thing slipped away from me over the weekend, so I’ll have to do two posts today to make up for it. I don’t even have a good excuse, like travel or illness. I was knitting a very interesting hat though, so maybe I can claim that distracted me?

B is also for Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC), the type of matter I’ve spend the last four and a half years of my life working on. A Bose-Einstein condensate is a state of matter, like solid, liquid and gas. It was first thought up by Einstein and an Indian physicist called Bose in the 1920′s, but wasn’t actually created in the lab until 1995. Since then experimental and theoretical work on these condensates has exploded, with labs all over the world having their own BEC. Unfortunately, Ireland does not have one (not even does not have one yet, there are no plans that I know of to build one), so all work on BECs in Ireland is theoretical. And that would be where I come in.

A Bose-Einstein condensate is a state of matter when certain types of atoms (bosons) get very cold, down to the nanoKelvin temperatures. For comparison, outer space is 3K (-270 C), so these atoms have to be cooled to temperatures mightily more cold than that. Since heat is kinetic energy, at low temperatures the atoms are very slow and very low energy. And in physics when slow, low and small enter the picture, we turn to quantum physics.

The “Quantum” part of Quantum Physics refers to quanta or packets of energy. The maths tells us that things can only have certain energies, and other energies are not allowed. To visualise this, think of energy as height. If you walk up a hill, you are going up in height(energy), but you can stand at any height(energy) you want. If you were walking up stairs, you can stand at the bottom (zero energy), on the first step (one energy), on the second step (two energy), all the way up to the top step, but you can’t stand on the 4.2633456th step.

Another things that the mathematics tells us is that for a group of trapped atoms there is no bottom step. And here’s where the fun starts.

We have our cloud of atoms in our stairwell. They have lots of energy so are sitting at all different heights. Now we start to cool them, and as they cool, they lose energy. They can’t sit on the top steps any more, so they start to fall down. If we cool the atoms enough, they won’t have the energy to go up any of the steps and will all have to sit on the bottom step together.

Instead of steps, we talk about states, so the atoms are all in the lowest energy state, the bottom step. Because the atoms are all in the same state, we can no longer tell which atom is which and they completely lose their own identity. If we then do something to one atom, we do it to all the atoms because we can’t say “this is the atom I am working with” anymore.

This fairly simple idea turns out to be quite powerful. You now have thousands of atoms that are all acting like a single entity, much bigger than many other quantum systems. Now you can make whirlpools or vortices (this was the topic I was working on), or make an atom laser, or many other things.

So that’s what B is for for me.

B is also for buses. I love public transport in Edinburgh. It’s so cheap and convenient compared to Ireland. And the buses queue up at the bus stops to let people on! This is still a novelty, and I have to fight the urge to run up to the waiting bus and beg to be let on before it leaves.

I spy with my little eye…

Today is the first of April. Apparently this means that I have to blog about something beginning with A, as part of the A to Z blogging challenge. The challenge is to write a blog entry for every day of April, except Sundays. 26 days, 26 letters. So here we go!

So here are a handful of things beginning with A, to start off easy.

After the PhD, Life.

It’s now five months since my viva, and nine months since I submitted my thesis. A lot has changed since then. I’m now doing a postdoc and living in Scotland, which I love. There’s a small part of me that really misses the sense of purpose and progress that came with writing my thesis. I probably found it to be one of the most enjoyable parts of my whole postgrad experience, which is probably a little strange. For now, I’m pretty happy with the physics I’m working on, the people I’m working with and all the extra projects I get to be involved in. It’s definitely exciting!

Alpaca.

I have some lovely alpaca laceweight yarn that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I have it earmarked for a shetland style shawl and I would love to cast on, but I have a few projects already sitting by the sofa that need dealing with first… I also picked up some so, so soft alpaca DK in Finland for gloves to replace the hand knit glove I lost in Dublin Airport.

Accents.

Life in academia (another A) has had me spoiled when it comes to accents. I can usually take for granted that those around me are used to working through English, and as a native speaker I can usually expect to be understood. On a recent trip to Finland that assumption totally fell through. We were working with some Finnish students who study through Finnish, although many of them have very reasonable English. And it turns out my mild Irish accent was very hard for them to understand! According to them, when I say “delicate” it sounds like “delicish”. I had to remember to speak clearly or I would totally confuse everybody around me. No more lazy pronunciation for me! Take that, English speaker privilege!

Other A’s that have featured in my life recently: Airports, airsoft, applications, apple macs, audiobooks.

Yarn Tasting

Thursday was the second (?) annual yarn tasting session organised by This Is Knit. The idea behind yarn tasting is to get a range of samples of the yarn available through TIK, swatch, knit, crochet and spin, and see what calls out to you. This year the price of admission granted each of us access to 32 samples of yarn and 2 samples of fibre. Seating was divided into small groups, each named after a type of fibre (I sat at Silk) and we went up in small groups to get each category of samples as they were released. There was lots of entertainment trying to match up the yarns in the bags to the yarns on the list, via the sample cards laid out. I found it reasonably easy to identify the lace and sock yarns, but the heavier weights threw me a bit. That really speaks to what I prefer to work with! I did get my bulky noros mixed up at the end, but the lovely helpful staff quickly set me right.

In addition to all the samples, there was a corner of the room for having your finished pieces photographed by some talented folk, and some of the indie dyers were around to talk to us about their work. All in all, not a lot of knitting happened. I tried one lace, one sock, a bulky and one fibre sample, so there is still lots of swatching to do. The company was excellent too, lots of new friends, and a couple of people I’ve seen on the forum.

I hope to get to play with each sample over the next few weeks, and blog about them, but for now, here’s the list with ravelry links for drooling over. (I also need to charge my camera battery so I can add photos.)

The lace weights:

• Malabrigo Lace (yellow). I have two balls of this, in the same colourway, already, so I now have no excuse not to do a gauge swatch!
• Hedgehog Cashmere Lace (unknown colourway, but it’s dark): I have some of this on the needles at the moment in glacier. It’s seriously yummy! I haven’t tried any of Beata’s darker tones, so I get to give that a try.
• Dublin Dye Alpaca Lace (minty green): This is the one I got time to play with. It’s very lovely, but I want to swatch it again with smaller needles.
• Hedgehog Silk Lace (browns)
• Noro Sekku (browns)
• Dublin Dye Merino/Silk Lace (pink): I’ve used this yarn before too, lovely, light, blocks very well.

4-ply and Sock:

• DB Baby Cashmerino (purple)
• Dublin Dye merino sock (pale green)
• Hedgehog Fibres Sock (dark): I already have one ball of this in Glacier, but I haven’t had a chance to knit with it yet.
• Madeline Tosh Sock (green)
• Dublin Dye Twinkle Toes (blues and purples)
• Gaiety Girl Sock (yellow)
• Naturespun Fingering (brown): I also got to play with this one for a little while, nice and soft and bouncy.

Double Knit (This is about when I got my shawls photographed, so I fell behind in the sampling time)

• Debbie Bliss Andes (gold)
• Louisa Harding Grace Hand-Dyed (pale pink)
• Madeline Tosh Pashmina (purple)
• Louisa Harding Willow Tweed (pale green)
• Malabrigo Silky Merino (blues and greens)

Fibre

• LHogan BFL Fibre (oranges)
• Hedgehog Merino/Silk Top (dark with pinky purples)

Aran weight

• Debbie Bliss Fez (dark gray)
• Lambs Pride Worsted (dark blue): I’ve knit this, and while it can be a bit rough against skin, I love it.
• Noro Silk Garden (purples) I have both knit and crocheted with this before, and (despite noro’s rep) I like it. I did even once manage to make mittens out of it and the colour changes matched!
• Louisa Harding Thistle (orange)
• Malabrigo Merino Worsted (orange)

Chunky

• Debbie Bliss Glen (orangy-red)
• Louisa Harding Millais (dark purple)
• Noro Kogarashi (purple)
• Twilleys Purity (cream)
• Noro Kochoran (silver blue)
• DB Luxury Tweed Chunky (dark purple)
• Louisa Harding Rossetti (orange)
• Louisa Harding Sari Ribbon (blue)
• Lambs Pride Bulky (dark blue): I’ve crocheted this before, but never tried knitting it.

Phew, that was quite a list to write down. Now to grab my needles, grab a ball and start swatching!