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……..

Related posts:

1. Chevron Socks

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 8:45 am and is filed under argyle socks, Entrelac Socks, Life in NJ, Socks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.