A Strange Sock Affair

Now that I have the big commissioned scarf out of the way, I will finally have time to work on my big batch of commissioned socks for my Aunt as well as the time to finish up the Christmas Socks for my fiancé.

I have been working on the toe of my fiancé's sock for a while now because he has long elegant three-inch toes that are nicely slanted. Unlike mine, which are about two inches and are mostly all of the same size. This means that I've been working on a new type of toe and I had to do math to add in the extra inch of plain knitting that I had to do. I could have just knit for an extra inch and then knit a regular two inch rounded toe, but I decided that the extra fabric that toe would have made might have rubbed his toe funny and made it uncomfortable to have in shoes.

I only have a few rounds left until I can finally finish the entire sock. The round toe isn't any harder than the regular wedge toe that I normally make, but I have to keep track of the pattern so it is going a little slower.

The other sock is just a simple grey sock, but that is stalled on the needles until I finish the first sock of my fiancé's socks because of the cute little nine inch circular needle. The cable is too short to comfortably knit a complete heel flap and there are going to be too many stitches on the needle for the extra gusset stitches, so I have to move it over to double pointed needles. I do like that little needle to knit the sock legs with. It would be perfect to make little sock swatches with or to test out a pattern to see if it would look good on a sock before actually knitting the sock.

-MegWesley

New Week, New Skills

Every week in Hogwarts at Ravelry there is a new challenge that you can attempt to do. This week, the Headmistress declared all of the rememberalls contraband which left us with two options:

1. Knit something that is so easy to us that we don't even have to reference a pattern anymore; or

2. Knit something that requires so much concentration that we have to continually reference a pattern or a set of directions to finish the project.

Naturally, being sorted into the prestigious and ambitious Slythern house, I decided to go with the second option and decided that the guidelines meant that it was time to learn a new stitch pattern: the brioche stitch. For some reason, this week I had the brioche stitch on the brain. I had read about how it was supposed to be this fantastic stitch for scarves because it was reversible and you could do awesome things with two colors, but it was supposed to be super difficult. That was when I did decide to do the smart thing and start off learning the stitch with just one color.

The brioche stitch is nothing but slipping a stitch, doing a yarn over, and then knitting a stitch together with a yarn over. It sounds super easy and it is actually pretty easy, but I had to concentrate to make sure that I knitted the two stitches together and actually remembered to do the yarn over. I made a simple washcloth out of regular dishcloth cotton, expecting it to be normal and about as dense as garter stitch. It turned out to be super squishy which made it feel really thick. I love how it turned out and it feels so nice to wash your face with because it is so plush feeling!

I am glad that I decided to learn a new stitch and that this challenge inspired me to do so. I really want to make a blanket with this stitch now because it will be so delightfully squishy to cuddle.

As a side note, I finally got a background on my blog now. I know it probably doesn't look like much, but it is actually coming along quite nicely with my vision of having an Alice in Wonderland inspired knitting blog. More updates to the aesthetics to the blog will be coming this month, so there will be some more changes coming. Thank you for your patience!

-MegWesley

The Shiny Sylveon Scarf: A Knitting Montage in Pictures

-MegWesley