Thursday, June 30, 2016

In other news, hat knitting

It's been SUCH a long time since I knit a hat, which is strange because Hugs is named for my hat knitting habit.


I like hats because they don't have to come in pairs, they are highly visible when it comes time to show off your hard work, it's not crazy to have more than one in your wardrobe, and you can knit them in bulky yarn and be done fast.

And yet: here we are.

Knitting a hat in sock yarn with about a million stitches on the needles.

(okay, 216 stitches.  it still feels like a million.)



I don't love working on these Addi lace tip needles, either.  They are really sharp on my fingertips! But the yarn - Viola, of course, nobody else I know of does this very subtle colour shifts - is so beautiful, I am enjoying this knit anyway.  Normally colour pooling bothers me but the delicate swirls on this ribbing really pleases me.

Another bonus: this hat is going to match my hair almost completely!  I have strands of almost-black, coppery red, and gold - plus of course some silvery grey, now.  As long as I don't mess up the shape, it won't matter to me that it doesn't have red in it to match my parka, because it will just be an extension of my head.

Of course that's a long way off because Sock Yarn.  Plus, I'm not sure yet whether I overcompensated for the last attempt being much too small... I might still have to rip out and reknit.  Not that I'm thinking about that right now because we're coming into a long weekend and I just want to enjoy it!  I mean I'm even thinking about taking a break from socks and this hat so I can do some spinning. 

For now though... oh, it's just a happy thing to look at a partway-done hat in the sunshine, isn't it? 


Knowing you can knit a keep-warm project and not need it for a few more months, because the weather is so lovely?


Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Linen for sewing and flax for spinning

Window coverings, pillows, table runners... give me an excuse for adding another textile to my immediate surroundings and I am a happy girl.  I was especially happy on the weekend to spot this gorgeous tea toweling in a long bolt, on eBay:


Okay, if I'm honest, I was both happy and conflicted.  I have three windows to cover in the kitchen and from the start of this process I have been picturing them with white cafe curtains.  More recently, the cafe curtains came more closely into focus and I realized I want an old linen fabric for them, something that's been washed and worn, something that looks soft and has a beautiful drape.

This stripey fabric is most definitely not a soft, supple white.  It's a never-used linen/cotton blend and will take many washes to get to the tactile state I'm after.  It is totally wrong for my mental image of the kitchen.

BUT... The photograph of it at The Textile Trunk was so very compelling:


It's also the exact colours of the bowls in my ever-growing vintage Pyrex collection, per this small sample:


And it's striped and we all know how much I love stripes.

Woven stripes, no less, so they'll be visible from the outside too in a charming way.

Also it has no holes or stains.

And furthermore it is EXACTLY the right width for the windows I am covering; I can do as little as stitching a hem at the bottom and a channel at the top before I hang them up.

I figure you can get white cafe curtain fabric anywhere, but this fabric is going to look like I went to some trouble.  It's not like there's not a crazy amount of white in the house already, either.  I don't actually need more white.

Finally, there is the small consideration that Pete loved it and recommended I buy all of the 13 yards that were available.  (I didn't do that, but I did buy 8 so I can have a table runner for the dining room, too.)


After succumbing to the stripey fabric I also bought two French vintage red-striped linen tea towels, and a very very large vintage French linen sheet large enough to cut in two and cover my most massive window, though of course if I do that I'd have to line it for its safety.


Because my days are not complete unless I'm overthinking something, I then went down the rabbit hole of researching French Linen and emerged with visions of women spinning or at least weaving their own flax into narrow linen fabrics for use in their homes.

And of course, now I'm writing in my head a kind of backstory for the house to justify all the different fabrics and furniture I'm bringing together in it.  Because it's totally normal to imagine an entire history for your house and the way you live in it, right?  As though you know the lives of everybody who ever preceded you there, and retain many of their former possessions?

I did say I overthink.

The perfect way to tie it all together, since the house was originally built in 1942 to accommodate the family of a worker at the Canada Wire factory aiding in the war effort, is to imagine that the parents in said family were both veterans of WWI - she perhaps having been a nurse and he a soldier, both stationed in France with a little time in England as well - and making use of textiles from the two countries as they created their own home together.  This also nicely justifies the French-style bed we bought for our room.

And if you think I'm being ridiculous, sit down, because it's worse now.  As I thought about those French women weaving their own tea toweling I read that linen is not attractive to moths or carpet beetles.

!!!

I had carpet beetles over the winter, did I mention this?  They ate several holes in some of my wool socks before I realized what was going on.  So even though I would love to knit and weave some pillow fabric for the house, I haven't gone far with the idea because I could so easily get carpet beetles again, or moths, and I love working with wool which is super attractive to them.

But if I use flax...

Not to mention how cool it would be to experience what women were working with centuries ago...

Basically, the only reason I haven't ordered some flax roving from Etsy is because we might have a postal strike next week. But you know I'm going to be hunting some up in a three dimensional shop very soon.  I have to do something to fill in the time between now and the fabric's arrival, which could be a while because Wendy is kindly holding on to it for me until the strike threat has passed.



Does your home have a story - manufactured or otherwise?


Monday, June 27, 2016

A perfect knitting day

Any day is perfect when it includes a new knitting project, cast on and gotten past its initial blah stage.


But if you add in cookies?


Yum.  I taught a small friend to make my mum's famous chocolate chip cookie recipe yesterday - secret ingredient: coffee - and they came out beautifully.  Probably the small friends who helped consume them would have too, if I'd thought to mention to the rest of the crowd about the coffee before consumption, but... meh, I was raised on these things, and I came out all right.

(don't argue, 'kay?)

Also helpful on a hot summer day when you're enjoying a lull from the usual firestorm of urgent issues?  Cold flavoured drinks.


Years ago at a family party, my uncle poured me a glass of Rose's Lime Cordial and Perrier and I was hooked.  That sounds odd because I am pretty sure the Lime Cordial, and definitely the Rose's Grenadine, are usually served as a mix with something alcoholic, so either I was a very young person at the time or I'd asked for something non-alcoholic because I had already discovered I am really lousy at alcohol.  I think I must have an allergy or something... all I have to do is taste wine, beer, or hard liquor and I'll wake up the next day with the worst hangover in the world.

This is the beauty of lime cordial, though: it creates a refreshing, fun sort of summer drink from either water or gin, pleasing any and all guests with zero effort by a party host.  Ditto grenadine, which when mixed with Perrier is essentially cream soda. If you like that sort of thing (and I do) I am pretty sure it involves fewer calories than pop, too... certainly the lime cordial is 35 calories per glass.  What's not to love?  And it's even nicer with San Pellegrino.  Fewer bubbles.

I had a fantastic meeting at the house on Friday after stopping to chat with a neighbour who offered to show me his new deck.  It is a GORGEOUS deck, and he said if Ray wants to come by and take a look for copying purposes he is more than welcome to do so.  So we are totally stealing Dave's design as far as we can, given that our lot presents different challenges.  Bonus development: the guy who will be doing our stair railings can make a custom curtain pull rod thingy, so that we can have curtains on the stairwell windows whose top is about 5' higher than my head.  The standard plastic ones run a couple of feet short for me to reach, and motorized blinds would cost many thousands of dollars, so this is a big Yay.  And Ray said he can stay on long enough to take care of some fencing for us as well as our deck, which is a huge relief because I know his other clients are getting kind of anxious for him to be done with our place so he can work on their stuff. 

And now, when I am not thinking sneakily of how to rope Ray back in long enough to do the condo's kitchen, I am thinking about next summer...


It will be so lovely to sit outside spinning or knitting and drinking cool drinks while nibbling melty chocolate enrobed in non-messy cookie dough.  And not making any more house decisions!  Or boring you guys with them.  Won't that be wonderful?  Never mind what will happen to the photos here at Hugs... because you know I have taken backdrops into consideration every step of the way.  Just in case the porch floor doesn't look as beautifully weathered for the first few years, heh.

Okay, enough dreaming, time to go get on with the day.  Hope you had a great weekend too!


Thursday, June 23, 2016

Trick more light into your room with paint

If you're a textile person, and especially if you do a lot of close work, you know how important it is NOT to do that in dim light.  Even during the day you sometimes need a little help, but I think this clip-on solution was something I used on movie night at the cottage last summer so I could spin without getting popcorn thrown at me.

note the faux wood paneling, aka 'dark walls' at the cottage...

My go-to solution to this problem has always been lamps.  But when we bought the condo, with its wide rooms and very limited overhead lighting, I knew the dreary mismatched paint colours that repelled other prospective buyers would have to give way to white, so we painted, first thing.  And BOY did it make a difference!  To the feeling in the condo, but also to Ray and Al, who went a little bit crazy painting a massive condo entirely in white paint.

Today though: today is the big lightbulb day (ha.)  Lynn, an endless resource for great design tips, sent me a link to Kylie M. Interiors' post on Light Reflectance Values (LRV.)

I will sum up the gist of this post in one sentence:

Dark paint colours absorb light and darken your room, and light paint colours reflect it, brightening it.

I mean obviously a dark room with lamps is a cosy room, and I love cosy, but if you can make natural light work harder you can save SO much energy, as well as your eyesight.

My condo example illustrates the obviousness of white paint = more light.  You don't even need to know the LRV of white paint really.  It's just going to kick more light around your room, period.  Ditto dark paints - if a truly white paint has an LRV of nearly 100, you know you're probably looking at something in the teens for black.  It's not rocket science.

But Kylie's explanation tipped me off to the most useful aspect of LRV. 

Paint manufacturers tell you the LRV number for each colour.  At Benjamin' Moore's site, it's on its own line just below the marketing blurb where you won't even notice it unless you're looking.

And that is huge, because sometimes you're choosing between two very similar colours for a bedroom and thinking Meh, this one kinda looks purple and this one is a little grey, I don't know.  And since they're both pretty dark really, you're not thinking about other key facts: that you're not a morning person, and your partner refused to let you seal off the window with cardboard and duct tape, and there is still some light creeping around the corners of your curtains.

Benjamin Moore's Jamestown Blue has an LRV of 34
Benjamin Moore Buxton Blue has an LRV of 45

Pick the Jamestown Blue!!

Or you look at a colour that is perfect and neutral and mid-toned and you think it will be bright enough for your windowless powder room, but its assigned LRV number is telling you No way honey, you will have to add another lamp if you want to pick that one.

Benjamin Moore's Sea Salt has an LRV of 61.91

ARG.  Does this mean I should have let Ray put a pot light into the powder room, to build on the triple sconce light, if we match our tile with Sea Salt instead of our cabinet with Cloud White?

But best of all - oh Man, this is exciting - if you know you want white paint to bring more light in through green tinted windows (I will never, ever get over that expensive mistake), and you're trying to split hairs between four warm white options that I swear are identical even on a giant paint board?






Yeah, that last one looks darker on my screen, but not in my samples.  Fear not though because you can look at their LRV numbers!

Here's the low down on these four Benjamin Moore whites, from most reflective to least:
Simply White: 90 (I picked right for the condo!)
Cotton Balls: 89
Cloud White: 85
White Dove: 83


I know I've said this before but once you pick your base paint (I like to throw money at Benjamin Moore's Aura line because that stuff is fantastic and wears so well) ALL the colours cost the same.  So why not pick a colour that's going to make your use of lamps more decorative than desperate?

And now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to admiring this possible desk lamp for our retro railroad station-themed front hall.


See you tomorrow!


Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Free the sock needles

Oh, there is nothing nicer on a sun-drenched early-summer afternoon than sitting by a window and grafting sock toes.


I mean it.  There isn't ANYthing nicer - at least, not if you've just been out in a super hot room wearing jeans because you totally misinterpreted the forecast.  A cool room, a comfy chair, a cup of tea, and the prospect of freeing up sock needles for a gorgeous summery colour to work on for a week or two - that is bliss.

Seems like just yesterday these guys were chompy socks...


Admiring the view out the window, trying to eat innocent houseplants and Biscuits...  and now they are sedate, mature socks just waiting to be grafted and worn.


It doesn't even take long to graft a sock toe.  Especially now, for me, after all the practise I've had. When I started I was terrified for every stitch, but now I can actually have a conversation while weaving the opening shut.


I gave myself a special gift this time and ran in the ends after closing the toes.  Last summer, I knit something like twelve socks and didn't run in ANY ends before going on to the next, which resulted in a Very Sad Mary once sock season started and I had to run in ends on all those socks before I could wear them.


Aren't they lovely with the ends run in?  Wouldn't it be nice if it wasn't nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside so I could wear them?

(don't answer that: we all know that summer is too short to be wishing away the very hot days.)

And now, to knit the second Kiss Me Deadly sock so I have two new pairs and not just one and a half. 

Are you knitting a pair of anything right now?


Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Digression day plus a hat in progress

I have been investing serious knitting time in the second attempt at this hat:


but I did have to stop and take a picture of it in the sunbeam that shone onto the yarn over my shoulder yesterday.  I swear the ribbing glowed, though that doesn't seem to have translated to the screen... anyway I'm going to take that as a good sign.

There is definitely a swirl of colour coming out in this yarn.  Might have to consider a stitch pattern for the body of the hat that will break it up a bit.


It's definitely June now - the 21st, wow, it's almost July! - and I am starting to realize that cottage season is upon us.  I am not letting myself think about it too much because I know various problems await there, like bugs (always, the bugs) and a broken leg on our dock that I am hoping our dock installer will have dealt with by the time we arrive.  I left him a message about it over the winter knowing that he will either get it or not, but would not have time to reply until next November.  They are SO swamped at that place, and he is incredibly generous to talk to me at all because apparently we are the only client he has on our lake.  Which means he has to send a crew especially to put our dock in and take it out. 

Really the fee for this job is so small I can't believe all our neighbours do their own docks.  It takes at least half a day and you need several young able-bodied people to do it... which I guess isn't a problem if you have a huge family coming up every weekend anyway, but still - wouldn't you rather get straight down to enjoying the view? 
 

And supporting the local economy is never a bad thing. 

I personally would like to support the local economy by sorting out an addition to the road-side of the cottage so we can stand at the kitchen counter without blocking the flight path to the bathroom, but I know that will be a HUGE production and we would be much more sensible to have the septic bed pumped out.  Such a glam life we lead up there.


Instead of planning for the cottage, I am obsessing about the bedrooms in the new house.  Specifically ours.  It is pretty much settled now that we are buying this bed from Restoration Hardware:


and even though it costs about $212 a yard I can't stop thinking about this fabric from Colefax & Fowler.  If it comes to that, I will give up chocolate for as long as it takes to pay for at least two cushions in it, but I'm going to focus first on cutting costs elsewhere. 


I know, I know, I posted this image last week.  I love it so much I would post it every day so be grateful for what restraint I have.  I've requested a sample from the upholstery store and I actually cannot wait to have it in my hands so I can look at the flowers as much as I want.  And you know what, there is always the chance that when I'm looking at it live and in person, I'll see that the background is some dismal grey, or that the flowers actually look like praying mantises or something (you'd be surprised how many floral prints contain what look very much like man-eating plants; it's quite distressing to think of sitting or lying on one).  If that happens I'll feel free to go and buy a nice sensible stripe at a discount fabric store and be happy.  So: possible bonus!


Are you a Funnel Cake fan?  This is a dessert that has piqued my curiosity for the longest time.  Fairs always seem to have a Funnel Cake truck, and I can tell instinctively that funnel cake is like poutine in that you don't ever want to try it because it is emphatically not as good for your arteries as it is for your taste buds.  And because I am sensible (okay, I'm not sensible, and I don't have a clue by what Herculean effort I have avoided eating any) I have never tasted it.  But if you're curious too... or already know it and want to know how to make it at home... Smitten Kitchen posted a recipe for Funnel Cake today.

I am a huge fan of this blog and its relentless stream of eye candy, so I would just like to say how very grateful I am that the way at-home funnel cake looks is... well, not appetizing, said Mary with uncharacteristic tact.  Because I really don't need another delicious recipe to make too much of.


Drapery has become a pressing topic for the house and I am thinking about this fabric for a massive tall window in our stairwell. 


Too much Attack of the Killer Cabbage Roses?  I wanted something with some pattern because the sconce lighting at either side of the window will be very fancy:


Plain white seems a bit dull with these lights (which are 17" tall by the way, I was amazed when they arrived to see how large they are, even though I possess several measuring instruments and should have known)... and a multicolour stripe or floral seems too shouty.  Of course I don't have a price on that fabric yet and I will need about eight yards of it, so it may not be possible.  Still, nice to dream!

Speaking of that window - you know what, the landing in our stairwell is not really what I'd call small.  Ray and Al were suggesting to me the other day that I might want to set a chair there and enjoy the view from the window, which would in fact be a great way to make me feel less like putting it in wasn't a horrible mistake.  I don't think we could fit a whole chair.  A bench, maybe, or more realistically a stool.  But if you can lean back on the wall occasionally a stool is just fine for spinning at.  And if I were going to sit there and spin or knit, investing in gorgeous cabbage rose drapes would be much less frivolous, don't you think?

Maybe I should save on yarn purchases, as well as on chocolate, the better to afford them.  (yeah, I know.  forget I said that.)


Okay, I think that's enough idle rambling from me for today - hope you're having a good day and I will see you tomorrow!


Monday, June 20, 2016

Sock kits and a sock fail

It's years ago now that my friend Sandra suggested I kit up some yarn I wasn't using, and I don't remember much about that conversation except the phrase 'kit up some yarn'.  Doesn't that sound so - organized?  Aspirational, even?  Something about the cheery, efficient tone in her voice made me feel that if that yarn got kitted up, it would get knit.


Even though we all know there is some yarn that will never get knit, unless it moves to somebody else's house.  Only so many hours in the day, right?

My 100% superwash merino Vesper yarn is totally going to get knit though, because as you doubtless know by now, I absolutely love it.  It's SO soft.  It's so colourful.  It's so stripey, and I love stripies.

The entire process of kitting sock yarn is time consuming - for me at least, because I like to knit both socks at the same time and have a light bag to tuck into my purse.  It would be a lot more yarn-efficient if I knit straight through from one big cake and just referred to the to the top of Sock #1 to ensure that Sock #2 starts at the same point in the stripe - less cutting away of unused cake, shorter tails in general.  Apparently I prefer wastefulness, and up-front effort, to ensure I have a lightweight, compact bag to cart around every day.


That said, I do have some sympathy for you guys.  Stuck day after day watching the progression of stripey socks while I continue to put all my creative energy into home renovation planning.

The other day I saw somebody I'd told about the house project 18 months ago, when we took possession of our 'temporary' condo home.  He asked if we were back in the house yet, and I said Nope, probably this fall.  He just looked at me and said That is the longest renovation project I have ever heard of.  And I get it - it's hard to explain that we have one guy and one helper doing almost everything except for some specialized tasks that get farmed out to teams, like the basement drainage and the HVAC work.  And that part of the reason it is taking a long time is because if Ray sees an opportunity to improve the function of the design, he will always stop work to call me and see whether I would like to make that improvement.

(this is why, for example, we now have a shower that's 42" x 48" with an 18" wide shelf for linens, instead of a 42" x 60" shower. seriously, one of our showers was going to be almost as big as my ENTIRE OFFICE. so, so glad he called me about that.)

Anyway....


Even though I know it is a drag for you to keep on looking at sock yarn in all its various stages, I am glad I did this kitting.  These are three or four more kits in the cupboard, which means that even if I knit nothing else, I have enough yarn to get me well through the rest of the renovation and back to some cosy future time when I can take on more complex projects, and write up the stripey and lacey fingerless mitt patterns I have promised you.

Also: it's so PRETTY.


And it takes so many hours to cake this much yarn, I feel a real sense of accomplishment, even though I haven't actually made anything.

In spite of my best efforts, in fact.  Are you sitting down?


22 rounds, people.  22 rounds of a lot of K1tbl, P1 ribbing (which takes forever even without there being about 140 stitches per round or super sharp pointy needles) before I could test my gauge planning and try it on and discover that it was too tight on, and then test it against the original sample and discover that the tightness was the result of having cast on WAY too few stitches.

aiiieeee

Well, at least I have Vesper.  These are the four most alluring-to-me colour combinations.  That one on the right is called Beach Glass and it is just dreamy, with the turquoise and orange and lime green balanced by a warm off-white.  So restful.


When I'm finished grafting some sock toes and freeing some needles, I am totally casting on one of them to cheer me up about the too-small ribbing project.

But fear not!  I have since ripped out the ribbing and cast it on again and am now working my way back up to 22 rounds.  I'll show you how it looks when I get there, okay?


Meanwhile: take care and I will see you tomorrow!



Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Fun with fabric

Do you sew stuff rather than buying it?  I do, most of the time.  In fact I've spent my entire adult life DIYing the whole curtain and decor thing, though not really because I love it.  I do it because discontinued ends of Waverly prints are not hard to find at a discount, I can run a machine, and I have been pretty sure I can't afford to get professional advice and sewing services.  And you know what?  I can't!  Even so, this week I've been visiting an upholstery shop (upholstery being NOT something I can do myself - I've tried) and I realized there is a hybrid path, which is to buy the perfect fabric you can only easily get through a designer and sew it yourself.  Check this out:


Okay... the colours are not as spectacularly perfect on my screen as they are in person so you'll have to take my word for it.  This is a William Morris print with the swatches from my blue velvet sofa, oyster coloured faux linen armchairs, and brocade silk pillows lying on top, and they are dead on right for each other.  I have been looking for a cotton canvas print fabric to layer in with the others since we chose the sofa back in January and today, flipping through the Morris book in the upholstery shop, I had to stop and stare.

ALL the colours!  The gold of the brocade and the chandelier, the blue of the sofa - even the difficult oyster.  I could not believe it.

The ladies at the store approved, impressed at the match, and then one said You know, that print comes in other colours too.

This one doesn't thrill me with the blue sofa fabric, but I bought rather a lot of the brocade to fuel extra runners and cushions, and it turns out the golden yellow in the Morris print perfectly matches the curtains I bought. 


A little of this might be amazing in the dining room or front hall, even if I just sew one of those tied-at-the-corners fabric baskets with it.

This one, though?  With the red background that matches the red leather recliners and the red walls in one of our smaller bedrooms?


Oh yeah.  A few pillows in this, to smooth the flow between some of the room, definitely.  I love the idea of repeating a print in different colours like that.

On the other hand, it is pretty William Morris.  With this stuff, there is no subtlety about the period and style of your decorating scheme. 

And on the other other hand... MAN, it is so hard to find fabric with all the right colours and the stamina to be anything other than a tiny weightless drape!

Or the right price.  Here are some failed contenders for the cabbage rose or peony print I wanted for our original sofa, so desperately in need of a new surface:


This one is 100% linen and so, so beautiful.  It is also just over $300 a yard and did I say Sofa?  Three seater sofa no less? We would spend more on the fabric than on the entire new sofa we bought for the living room.

And then this one:


This beauty has all the colours I wanted, and all the white space, and all the linen, plus: bargain pricing at just over $200 per yard.  (HA)

But my favourite?  This one, whose name is Celestine, which I could say forever:


This one is about $250 a yard but it is so lovely that I have asked the shop for a sample to see whether the blue and oyster colours are right for the living room furniture.  I figure the Morris print will cost about the same - it is William Morris after all - and Celestine is more of the mood I want, even if the red chairs are not going to love it as much as I do.


I mean the red fabric is totally not meant for our living room fabrics anyway - much better to leave it to the other sofa and the red chairs which will live elsewhere.  You can make a lot of cushions with even half a yard of wide fabric, especially if you have less expensive contrast fabric for the reverse side.  I am pretty sure I can afford a yard or half as much again of very expensive fabric to bring our various rooms to life.

It's so cool to be at this stage of the renovation, playing with colours and thinking of how it will all look in the end.  And although I don't know whether this was true before we started this project, it is certainly true now that I can look at a fabric, wait a moment, and watch as my mind reproduces it in the shape of whatever piece of furniture might wear it.  Ditto a room - I can look at things and see in my mind how they will all work together, or not work together.  I gotta think that's a valuable skill right now, don't you?

Okay, time for me to go and squeeze in some knitting time.  I have a sock I would really, really like to get along to its toe.

Hope everything is good with you, and I'll see you tomorrow!


Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Sometimes the pattern, sometimes the yarn

You know what it's like when you see a gorgeous pattern and just have to knit it, right?  You either buy yarn for it or look through your stash to see what will work, and get to work.  But sometimes, you have amazing yarn, and you want to knit it as quickly as possible so you default to an obvious purpose, like 'sock yarn  = socks' - and the yarns says NO.


I am too beautiful.  I must be seen.  Find the right purpose for me and then we'll talk Pattern.

Which is how I ended up casting on 148 stitches to a 2.25 mm needle.  Yes.  2.25mm.


2.25mm Addi Turbo LACE TIP needles.  I know capitalization is shouty but in this application we are looking more at shrieky because Owie!  Lace tips are are quite sharp.

Here are all 148 stabby stitches.


Here they are again with a big arrow showing how far back I had to go when I realized I had messed up the K2P2 ribbing on round one and done a K3 where no K3 ought to be.


Guess what happened next?  After I ripped back and reknit within ten stitches of the end-of-round marker, I realized I had done it again!

Turns out it is amazingly difficult to keep track of K2P2 ribbing when you have been on a long run of socks with K1P1 ribbing at the top.  You're always either overcompensating or undercompensating or, if you are using lace-tip needles, wishing you could remember where you put the thimbles and getting distracted in general.

The first two rounds are the worst though, really.  Once you've established your ribbing, it's more likely you'll notice the odd mis-step and repair it on the next round.  Or if you have a Biscuit, you can have her check your work for you.


Still.  It takes a long time to get through 148 ribbing stitches...


... especially when you were aiming to work through about 22 rounds of them.  I have a long way to go, don't I.

Well - tell you what, you go have a wonderful rest of the day, and I'll keep knitting, and tomorrow I'll show you something else to distract you from the fact that I am secretly falling over from numb bewilderment as I ask myself, What was I thinking??

Take care and I'll see you then!