Radioactictive phrog

Phrog is moving right along, though slowly. Who'd have thunk that knitting a ribbed and cabled sweater in sportweight yarn might take a while? (To be fair, I've been writing a pattern for my lovely step-grandmother on the side and made some more roving into utterly unusable yarn.) (To be perfectly honest, I was also procrastinating on the four different pieces of math I needed to do, not even accounting for some rejiggering I needed to do to account for the fact that I lost 10 pounds in the last few weeks.)

It's a little more obvious now that Phrog is another variation on the tailored cables theme. The cabling serves as a straight line that contrasts to the curves on a woman's body. There's nothing that makes something look as much itself as the presence of its opposite.

Now all I need to do is split and knit the rest of the body flat before "swatching" for the sleeves. In this case, read "swatching" as "start knitting the sleeve. rip it out and call a mulligan if it turns out wrong." Knitting is all about deniability, unless and until it felts. Then you're just screwed.

Neverending carnival of excitement

How could I have knitted so many pairs of Artyarns Supermerino socks and not know that they make self-patterning sock yarn? Cathy and Sandra D, you rock for picking out this yarn!

Aren't those fabulous? I love the spiraling stripe of different colour stripes. (Click on the photo to enlarge it; the entire sock is pink/dark stripes, but the spiral is formed of a bold salmon and grey on a background of pink and brown. It's a spiral of stripes on stripes!) I wonder if the other yarn I have from them will do the same thing. Sadly, these mark the last socks for my trusty bamboo needles, which started trying to kill me with splinters. They've been found guilty of pointy treason, and will be burned at the stake or put out to pasture.

Pattern: my standard 48-stitch toe-up sock with magic cast-on and 9-deep short-row heel (may I suggest an afterthought heel instead?)
Needles: treacherous size 3 crystal palace bamboo needles
Yarn: Artyarns Supermerino in colour 141

I've gotten tired of knitting random bits of a shawl while I wait for my tailored cables sweater to dry (every. few. inches.). I'm a bit tempted to leave the sleeve as-is.

It's kinda punk, don't you think?

In any case, I'm starting another sweater. Meet Phroggy:

All I have is a Delphine-Wilson-inspired swatch, because I swatched, washed the swatch, cast on, frogged, then totally ignored the swatch, switched to different needles and a different pattern, and started cranking away. I'm winging this one much more than anything I've done before. If the waist decreases work out, I'll let it out in public.

Now the kitty wants to be petted. He'll breathe his terrible kitty-breath in my face until I do, so I'd better go for now. Here's hoping for a bunch of snow so I can work from home and be productive tomorrow!

Just call me the crazy lady

I went out today to be the crazy lady at the crazy movie with the crazy socks. If you were at Ruslan i Ludmilla today, hi from the crazy lady who kept giggling all the time. (A special "hello" to the woman in the row in front of me with what looked to be a hand-knit shawl in white mohair and cabled legwarmers.) I managed to pay enough attention to the movie to learn several valuable lessons, however:

1. Only trust blondes. (The hair dye manufacturers are obviously missing a huge marketing opportunity with this one.)
   
2. If the blond hero swings a sword in the general direction of your regiment, you should all fall down in unison. He won't bother checking whether he hit anything.
   
3. Women are either dark-haired (and thus evil) or blond (and thus dumb as a box of rocks wearing a silly hat.
   
4. Blond women wear white panties. Dark-haired, "magically seductive" women wear colourful, extremely shiny panties. Some of these magical women apparently got lost during the filming of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and wandered into the Russian Castle Anthrax, wearing only shiny panties and gauze. The other magical women apparently all had hip-high-slit inducing wardrobe mishaps.
   

I haven't even gotten into the flying dwarf with the 50-foot-long beard, so perhaps knitting socks was not even registering on anyone's weird-o-meters.

I've made some more progress on my tailored cables sweater. It's really a lot slower to knit something when you're both designing it and it has to be blocked to look reasonable. (Go, go oily coned yarn!) The good news is that every time I wash the yarn it looks better. The bad news is this means that the farther up the sweater you look, the worse the yarn looks. In any case, it's drying again, so I took some pictures. I've added a vee-neck and armscyes for set-in sleeves.

This is best shot I can get in this light of the detail of the shaping at the bottom of the sweater. I've twisted the cables together as they merge.

Progress in toyland

I haven't finished anything new (or rather, I haven't finished anything new that is dry yet), so I wanted to show you all my new toy. My friend got me something that's been lurking on my wish list for a long time: what Claudia calls a drug dealer's scale. I don't think any drug dealer worth his or her snuff (so to speak) would be using a scale that's accurate only to 1/10 of a gram, but yarn does have a certain crack-like quality. I've been wringing my hands yet again, worrying that I wouldn't have enough yarn to finish my current pair of RFC-reading socks. It's a little close this time, but I'll make it. (Four plastic needles weigh only 3.4g.)


I think this calls for a spree of stash-using, mixed yarn socks, once I finish these and the next two pairs waiting for me. What can I say: I owe my mom some nicer socks than the last ones. She was the recipient of the first thing I ever knit. Let's just say that my socks are nicer after a year of practice.

Here's a preview of my tailored cables sweater. It's grown, but it's still in the "wet" pile. I'm trying to write the shoulder shaping by hand, which should be an interesting exercise in applied mathematics. Thank heaven for bust darts, where the math is much more simple!


And just for kicks, this is my husband's favorite drink. A yarn prize to anyone who correctly identifies it!