sweetgeorgia

Getting Ready for Fall Knitting

This is the kind of knitting that makes me absolutely, positively blissed out. Simple top-down socks in the most basic pattern ever, knit in plain old stockinette on 2.25 mm circular needles. I’ve been knitting this in one of our new yarns for fall, the BFL Sock. It’s a blend of superwash bluefaced leicester and nylon in a 3-ply sock yarn… pretty much what I consider ideal in sock yarns. Sturdy, wooly, warm, elastic… and takes dye oh so vibrantly.

I do love these Dutch heels too, as a reinforced heel stitch. Right now on the needles, I’m knitting a toe-up sock with a real heel flap… very new for me, since I’ve always knit short-row heels and then been disappointed when they wear through. If these socks are a success, I might permanently switch to toe-up & heel flap sock knitting!

While knitting these, I realized how much I love the fine gauge of this sock fabric… it’s about 8.5 sts per inch (nearly 9). If I had swatched ahead of time, I might have considered adding more stitches to my sock (which I’ll probably do next time). After washing and wearing these socks a few times, I really love how the yarn blooms and fills in. I’ve stashed a few skeins of this at home so that I can knit simple socks all winter.

And speaking of socks, have you seen the new Sockupied? I haven’t downloaded/purchased it yet. I hear knitters are sad it won’t work on the iPad or iPhone. Has anyone read it? What do you think?

Random pre-wedding insanity.

So after about a year and a half of planning, Josephine is getting married to Norm this Saturday. We are all heavily involved in some way — from Michelle, DH and I who are in the wedding party to Jen who is pretty much single-handedly taking care of all the decorations and day-of activities. Oh, the cake tasting meetings… the invitation making parties… the ribbon tieing parties… Crazy times. It also doesn’t help that I have major deadlines for the end of July, but when it rains, it pours, eh? Here are fibre-y photos today because next week will likely be wedding photos.

This one is for Betsy who won my little contest last week! She asked for something in darker colours, maybe blues… so here is the new colourway, “Stillwater”.

More new colours…

Heh heh. This yarn makes me laugh. We had dinner at Blue Water Caf?¬© last weekend and they had a “Kill Bill” vodka martini on the cocktail list. Jo and Norm are using a song from the Kill Bill soundtrack for their wedding reception entrance music. It seemed fitting that I dye something inspired by the same. These four skeins will go in the package to the [Make One Yarn Studio](http://www.make1yarns.com/blog/) in Calgary this week.

When Jo’s wedding is over, this is what we have to look forward to…

We lucked into three gently used looms plus an Indian Head spinner and a whole bunch of other weaving and spinning accessories and books. Serious luck. Michelle has a lovely 24″ 4-shaft table loom tucked away at her house. Jen is getting the 36″ 4-shaft Nilus Leclerc loom on the right and Jo is getting the 35″ 4-shaft Leclerc on the left.

Jo’s loom is interesting… It’s called the ["Initiation Loom"](http://www.camillavalleyfarm.com/weave/leclerchistory.htm) and is a four-shaft direct tie-up loom with four treadles. So basically, if you want to treadle shafts 1 and 3, you’ll have to use both feet. If you want to raise three shafts, you’ll need to put one foot on more than one treadle. So really, any combination is available and you don’t need to worry about tie-ups.

But whoohoo, the girls will hopefully be taking weaving with me in the fall at Place des Arts! Ok, now back to those deadlines, packing yarn, and generally running around in circles.

*_Silly Cameraphone, Silly Me:_ Thanks for your funny cameraphone stories. Happily, my phone dried out and I realized that it wasn’t turning on because I had the battery in upside-down. _Heh._ The screen on the outside of the phone barely works now, but the inside screen is just fine. It’s how I managed to get that photo of the looms off the camera. Yay.