Well, maybe not all the suspense. I’m sure you want to hear all about Maryland and see the final haul, but I actually have today off and there are a million things I need to catch up on and clean up before I head back to work tomorrow. I’ll also apologize for not posting more during the festival. After I put up the first post and checked things it didn’t seem like it was going through and then I saw much later that it had. Oh well. Lots of pictures and stories from the festival soon. In the meantime, how about some socks?

Here they are in all their argyle glory!

Spring Argyle Socks

Pattern: [Okay, I'll Wash Them] Diamond Socks from the book “Never Knit your Man a Sweater unless you’ve got the ring!” by Judith Durant (which I reviewed here)

Yarn: White – Silja (most of two balls), Blue – Regia (part of one ball), Pink and Yellow – Dale Baby Ull (part of one ball for the pink, a very small amount for the yellow)

Needles: Size 1 addi turbos

Knit: 3/15/-5/1/2007

Whew! They are done! Despite all the crazy construction elements on these, I really did enjoy making them. This was my first attempt at Intarsia, and I’m glad to know it really wasn’t that hard to do. I’m certainly glad I checked out the videos on this site first, but it really wasn’t that hard. I did have a few holes in the first sock, but they were easily sewn up. I learned the value of using bobbins during this project, and I’ll certainly be using them for future argyles (yes I do plan to knit more of these!). I think the one thing I would do differently in the future is to not continue the colorwork onto the instep. That little element causes the need to knit the flat gussets and adds more sewing to the project (certainly not my favorite thing). I like the look of it, but it would be far more simple to only do the argyle patterning on the cuffs and knit the foot in the usual manner.

Occasionally I still look at these and think, “I really knit argyle socks?!”

Yep. I guess I did!

First, just a few quick notes about the Summer of Socks 2007.

Oh. My. God. I’m so excited! The response so far has been amazing! I knew when Wendy came on board (thanks for the shout out Wendy!) this was going to be big. Very big. There is still plenty of time to sign up, but you might want to do it sooner than later. If this thing gets out of hand, I may have to close it sooner than expected!

The sponsorships keep coming in which is making the prize pool very interesting (the more the merrier!). I’ll be putting up a page with more descriptions of the prizes donated so far sometime after Maryland. If there is anyone out there that does hand-made stitch markers that would like to be a sponsor, please contact me [Jessica (at) zarzuelaknitsandcrochets (dot) com]! I think stitch markers would be great prizes for the Weekly Link contests.

Speaking of socks, I’ve finally gotten to take some better pictures of how my argyle socks are constructed. There seemed to be some confusion last time, so I hope this clears it up for all of you.

The cuff is knit flat because of the colorwork. It really isn’t possible to do argyle intarsia in the round unless you take out the single lines that criss-cross the diamond pattern and duplicate stitch them on later. I didn’t really want to do that, so I went with the flat cuff knitting. When the cuff is finished, this particular pattern has one diamond continue onto the instep. In order to do this and still have the stitches for the heel be in the right place, some edge stitches on the flat cuff are put on holders while the final diamond is knit. The instep stitches are then placed on holders in preparation for knitting the heel flap and gussets. Here’s the completed colorwork:

After the colorwork is complete, the yarn is broken and the cuff is folded over to form a tube. The stitches on the holders are picked back up, the yarn is rejoined and the heel flap is knit from them. The heel is then turned as usual. This picture shows the heel stitches as they are being knit for the heel flap:

And here is the completed heel flap, with the heel already turned, looking at the wrong side:

Next, the yarn is broken again and stitches are picked up along the sides of the heel flap to knit the gussets. This is pretty much the same as normal construction, but you don’t have the instep stitches on the needles just yet. The gussets are knit back and forth in the flat as this part of the sock has to be the right length to match up with the instep portion that has already been knit. Here’s the view of the completed gusset looking at it from the bottom of the sock:

Here’s another view of the gussets from the side, in line with the instep:

From there it is just a matter of picking up the stitches of the instep and knitting the rest of the foot! Piece of cake right? Questions? Ask away! Finished object post… well… maybe before Maryland, maybe after!

Holy cow has the rain been coming down around here. This was the “pond” behind my apartment on Sunday afternoon:

It just keeps getting worse. Only one living thing seemed to be enjoying the storm:

I guess if I was a duck, I would too! This whole thing makes me rather glad I live on the second floor of my building. As long as the roof holds, we should stay dry. I’m actually at home today because of all this weather we’ve been having. There’s a state of emergency in NJ and despite trying four different ways, we couldn’t even GET to the train station this morning because all the roads were closed.

I had to work on Saturday (and it looks like I’m going to have to work again this Saturday too) but I’ve been getting some good progress done on my socks lately. I finished up the first entrelac sock this week:

I haven’t cast on for the next one yet. I’ve been debating not making the second one and just saying it was a good experience and I learned a new technique. But it does fit, and it is kind of interesting, so maybe I’ll just suck it up and finish the pair.

I’ve also been hard at work on the argyles. I got some good time in on them when we went to NY for Easter since HWJF was nice enough to drive. I finally finished the colorwork and it was on to the heel and gussets. The construction on these after the colorwork is over is interesting. The cuff is knit flat, but part of the colorwork goes onto the instep, so you eventually put a certain number of outside edge stitches on holders that end up being the heel stitches. When you go back to knit the heel flap, you put those stitches on the needle so that the edges become the center. It looks like this:

Sorry for the cruddy pictures of the argyles. I kept forgetting to take pictures and I figured I better get a phone pic before it was too late.

The heel flap is knit and then the heel is turned just like any other top down sock from that point. The next weird thing is that the gussets are knit flat too! After the heel is turned, you break the yarn and rejoin it along the side of the heel flap picking up the gusset stitches, knitting across the heel and then picking up the stitches on the other side. You then reduce stitches just as you normally would until the gussets are done. Now that you have the same number of stitches as the held instep stitches, you join everything into the round and begin to knit the foot. That leaves you with a couple of big holes to sew up later:

Weird huh? It takes a little bit to get my brain around all this, but I think it’s working out pretty well so far. In fact, the first sock is done and the second is started, so I might actually have a finished pair soon. That would certainly be good considering I have *gulp* four pairs of socks going right now. And I wonder why I don’t have any more size 1 needles……..

As you could probably tell from the last post, I have a love for argyle socks that is probably not quite right. Apparently it must have started somewhere in early childhood, because when I saw the pattern in that book, it immediately brought this to mind:

That would be the remains of a pair of machine made, argyle-esque socks that I wore a few holes in since I wore them so much. I *loved* these socks. I think these socks may have also started a passion for socks with fun patterns. I seem to have collected a few over the years:

Most of these have holes in them too (and this is only a sampling of what’s in the drawer) and since I’m too lazy to fix them and too sappy to throw them out, in my sock drawer they sit, occasionally peaking out to remind me of one thing or another.

After finding the pattern for these, I knew I just had to make them. Wasn’t I the one saying winter is for sweaters just a short time ago? Yes, that was me, but no sooner did I say that then socks just seemed to take over my knitting! Here’s my progress so far:

I’m not using the yarn in the pattern. Instead, I’ve culled together a bunch of things I found in the stash and some that I purchased recently with these in mind. The white is Silja, the pink and yellow are Dale Baby Ull and the blue is Regia. All of these yarns turned out to be about the same weight, so they are working well together.

Apparently, there is no way (believe me, I googled) to knit Argyle in the round (without using duplicate stitch for the criss-crossing lines after you knit the sock, which I didn’t want to do), so the sock is knit flat for a while, then sewn up in the end. That makes this my first time doing something that requires Intarsia and except for two small holes, it’s working out pretty well. What the picture above doesn’t show is the mess of yarn that the Intarsia requires in back.

WARNING: Do not continue to read this blog if your heart is weak or you are on certain medications. The images that follow may be shocking and more than you can handle.

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 Did they go? Good. Now the rest of you, look:

Yeah. That would be NINE bobbins hanging off the back of this thing (well, 8 bobbins and one skein of yarn you can’t see in the pic for some reason. Only the most brilliant photography here at chez Zarzuela…. not!). The sock is basically divided in half, and each half has to have enough strands of yarn to accommodate the pattern without going across the entire sock. I didn’t have the bobbins when I started, but someone I was knitting with at Woolbearers one afternoon *highly* suggested them (so much so she nearly put them in my hand [Hi Cate! Thank you!]), and while they aren’t perfect, they are definitely a better solution than having everything all tangled up.

So, for some reason, all this sock knitting has me thinking about Summer and whether or not I should do another Summer of Socks. There seems to be a whole lot of sock knitalongs going on out there, is there really enough interest to fuel one more? Consider this a shout out to determine interest. If you think you’d like to participate in another round of summer sock knitting, do let me know! And if you might be interested in helping out with some geeky stuff (read: creating an online sign-up form and database stuff) and/or reading blogs, let me know that too (’cause I sure can’t make it work all by myself if we get even close to the same number of participants as last year)!