It's HERE!!!

Here it is!!! This is my first written pattern design! I love these little booties and I think they would make the perfect gift!

Please send me any ideas, criticisms, etc to me through ravelry where my username is electrictree. Feel free to message me with your email address for a .pdf version.

Flynn Booties

These delightful little booties are knit with sock style architecture and a special pointy little toe, Flynn’s are a super quick knit!! These little gems have a seed stitch cuff with curled little toes. They can be whatever you want them to be: Pixie, Robin Hood, Elvish, ad on infinitum! These would also make fantastic Christmas tree ornaments!
This is an excellent beginner sock for those who have always wanted to delve into the mysteries of sock knitting. For a fantastical tutorial on sock knitting I recommend Silver’s Sock Class. (http://www.cometosilver.com/socks/) That’s where I learned to knit socks!!
I knit these booties with Lang Silk Dream and the texture was marvellous. While it may not be practical to knit baby items with a handwash only yarn, booties are small and easy to wash. If you make them as a gift, make sure you include washing instructions, or use any worsted-aran weight in a washing friendly fibre.
Size
Newborn 0-3 months
Materials
• 1 Skein Lang Silk Dream (50% Silk, 50% Merino; 98 yds per 50 grm skein) Note-1 skein will easily make 2 maybe even three pairs of booties. Make extra pairs or use the rest for a little hat!
• Double pointed needles Size US 8/5mm
• Tapestry Needles
Gauge
About 20 sts to 4 inchesé10cm: gauge is not critical to these, but it will affect the finished size of the booties.
Abbreviations
k knit
p purl
k2tog knit 2 stitches together
p2tog purl 2 stitches together
ssk slip, slip, knit 2 stitches together
sl slip stitch

Directions
Cuff
Cast on 24 st onto 1 needle.
Work cuff in seed stitch
Row 1: Ssk, *k1, p1* to last 2 sts, k2tog, turn work- 22 sts remain
Row 2: *k1, p1* turn work
Row 3: Ssk, *p1, k1* to last 3 sts, k1, k2tog, turn work- 20 sts remain
Row 4: K1, *k1, p1* to last st, k1
Row 5: Repeat row 1- 18 sts remain
Row 6: *k1, p1*
Leg
Divide sts over 3 needles-6 sts each needle.
Join for knitting in the round, a marker is unnecessary if you use the split in the cuff as an indicator for the beginning of the round
Knit in stocking stitch (knitting every stitch) for 5cm- about 12 rows.
Heel
Setup- k 14. Arrange next 9 sts on to 1 ndl for heel flap. place remaining 9 sts on 2 needles on hold until heel is finished-this is a good time to double check that your heel flap lines up with the split in the top of the cuff.
Row 1: Sl 1, k8, turn work-
Row 2: sl1, p8, turn work
Row 3: sl 1, k8, turn work
Row 4: Repeat row 2
Row 5: Repeat row 1
Row 6: Repeat row 2
Turn Heel:
Row 1: Sl1, k4, k2tog, k1, turn work- 8 sts remain
Row 2: Sl1, p2, p2tog, p1, turn work- 7 sts remain
Row 3: Sl1, k3, k2tog, turn work- 6 sts remain
Row 4: Sl1, p3, p2tog, turn work-5 sts remain
Row 5: Sl1, k5
Gusset
Arrange the 9 sts on hold for top of foot onto one needle
Set up round: Pick up 4 sts on side of heel flap. K9 sts on top of foot, pick up 4 sts on other side of heel flap, k2. Take last 3 sts on ndl and slip to next ndl.
Rather than use markers on such a small project the bootie is divided into 3 needles. Ndl 1 is the beginning of the round, Ndl 2 the top of the foot, and Ndl 3 the end of the round. At this point there should be 7 sts on Ndl 1, 9 sts on Ndl 2, and 6 sts on Ndl 3 for a total of 22 sts in the round.
Round 1: Ndl 1- k4, k2tog, k1. Ndl 2- k9. Ndl 3- k1, ssk, k3. 20 sts remain
Round 2: K all sts on all Ndls
Round 3: Ndl 1- k3, k2tog, k1. Ndl 2- k9. Ndl 3- k1, ssk, k2. 18 sts remain
Foot
Knit in stocking stitch for 3 cm-about 8 rows
Toe
Round 1: Ndl 1- k5. Ndl 2- ssk, k5, k2tog. Ndl 3- k4. 16 sts remain
Round 2: Ndl 1- k5. Ndl 2- ssk, k3, k2tog. Ndl 3-k4. 14 sts remain
Round 3: Ndl 1- k5. Ndl 2- ssk, k1, k2tog. Ndl 3- ssk, k2. 11 sts remain
Round 4: Ndl 1-k3, k2tog. Ndl 2- k3. Ndl 3- ssk, k1. 9 sts remain
Round 5: Ndl 1-k2, k2tog. Ndl 2- k3. Ndl 3- ssk. 7 sts remain
Round 8: Ndl 1- k1, k2tog. Ndl 2- k3. 6 sts remain
Place the 3 remainin sts from Ndls 1 and 3 onto one needle.
Row 1: sl 1, k2
Row 3: sl 1, p2. Ndl 2- k3
Finishing
Cut end. Thread yarn through remain 6 sts. Weave in ends. Block

Wait for it...

I just desinged the coolest baby booties!! I think they are fantastic. Sometime tomorrow or the next day I am going to post the pattern on my blog. They are Peter Pan/Pixie/Robin Hood Booties. They knit SUPER fast-maybe an hour a bootie (at most). This will be my first foray into pattern writing for others, so I would love it if people could take a couple hours out of their day and knit them, and then give me some constructive feedback on my pattern writing.
Of course, if you want to just tell me how absolutely freaking awesome I am...that's OK too...
Feeling the suspense yet??

New Robe

I got a new robe yesterday. There are no words ot describe how I feel about this piece of clothing. It's a little ridiculous. Not long ago I came to the realization that I have never owned a brand new robe bought just for me. Every single robe I have ever owned has been given to me by my Mom, who often has a rather large robe wardrobe. They are usually new-but given the fact that she is 3 or 4 inches shorter than me, they don't always fit right. I also wear them until they die. I think I hav eonly owned 2 or 3 robes in my life. I remember the one I had through teenagedom into early adulthood ended up looking like the shroud of Turin. I wore it until it caught on something and ripped in half. I wore it so long that while it was originally terry cloth the part that could be classified as "terry" had fallen off and the cloth had fallen into the category of "flannel".
I have been aware of my robe wearing patterns for a while now but hadn't replaced the one I had until yesterday. Partially because it's a very good robe (short in the arms, and body and not wide enough but good quality nonetheless) but also because I am 5'10" so "O/S" robes don't fit that great. Because apparently all women are small. I have shopped through the mens section and been lured by giant robes, but then I get stubborn. I don't want a brown robe...
Yesterday I found my robe and fell in love with it. I was walking down the aisle in the store and I saw a brillian flash of red...I reached out to touch it and it was love...it's the softest thing I have ever felt. It's red. It's incredibly inexpensive. It comes in various sizes including XL. I was sold.
Right now I am blogging in my RED robe bought just for me. I am going to knit in it. I am going to spin in it. I am going to eat my lunch while wearing it. I hope that someone knocks on the door so I can answer it wearing it. Maybe I will do some yard work while wearing it.

Rick can be SO annoying...

Lately I have been fairly productive with my knitting. I have finished several small objects, as you can see from previous posts, and finally got back to work on the skull socks. I am not 100% happy with the design and I have a lot of tweaking to do, but they turned out all right.




I have finally got back to work on Tiny's sweater. I had to take a rather long hiatus for the sake of my hands. It was become extremely painful to knit it. I think a lot of it has to do with my refusal to use a cable needle. I knit contintental so it's really easy to slip the stitches off the needle and hold them with my right thumb and index finger while purling/knitting the next stitches and then slipping them back onto the left needle. This method is infinitely faster for me and saves me the hunt for the cable needle. But with this particular project, the knitting is very tight and the yarn is very inflexible so it requires a stronger grip on the slipped stitches, which consequently requires a stronger grip on the needles. I have found a decent balance that involves me relaxing my grip a little bit and only knitting 4 rows at a time (which ends up pretty close to and inch so that's not so bad) so progress is WAY slower than I am used to, but it's moving along instead of sitting on the edge of the couch looking accusatory.




The front is on the top. I still think the back looks like it is from a Klingon...



Turkey has been not at all supportive, nor impressed with my knitting endeavours.

I have also cast on the rick socks by cookie a. I am a huge fan of cookie a and I LOVE her sock patterns. I think they are beautiful and interesting, and unlike any other socks I have ever seen. I HATE knitting them. I bought the twisted flower pattern eons ago (they look like something the Loth Lorien elves would wear) and tried knitting it a couple times and was incredibly frustrated with it, after a few full froggings I gave up. I don't mind the occasional frog (such a lie, I HATE frogging) but having to frog the whole thing back to nothing multiple times is more than my delicate psyche can bear.
I bought cookie a's sock innovation this spring and I love the book. It's a fantastic combination of patterns and techniques and goes through some really great techniques for designing your own socks. I tried the rick pattern a few times...multiple frogs...guess what happened? I put the whole thing away for about 8 months. I didn't try any more of her patterns, I was too disheartened by the fact that I hated knitting things that I loved.
The other day I picked up the book again. I purchased a nice simple solid yarn and set about casting on rick socks...again. The level of frustration is not much lower but my knowledge of knitting has increased exponentially since the spring. I am now capable of knitting from complex charts. I can read my knitting in a way that I couldn't before-now rather than blindly follow charts and instructions I can watch what I am knitting to see if it is correct as I go (not infallible by any means, but a huge improvement). The socks still drive me mad.
I have figured out a few reasons for this. I didn't read the other projects on rick before I cast on. I shall do that from now on for ALL of cookie a's patterns. The first thing that was messed was that it says to cast on 60 sts, but most people need 72 (it's a 12 st repeat). This is not because of errors in gauge, this is because the socks were designed to be REALLY skinny. So skinny that 98.2% of the populaiton probably can't wear them. There were people that persevered with 60 sts and a stretchy yarn and ended up with socks that look terrible and distorted (like wattching 4:9 on a 16:9 TV) I got the ribbing done and 4 repeats of the pattern and realized they were WAY to small so ripped them back (there were quite a few mistakes as well).
I also learned that you need to use yarn that is amazingly unsplitty with cookie a patterns. There are a lot of stitches that aren't that easy so non-splitty yarn is a must (like ssk, or ktbl right next to purl sts...blech).
Another great thing I learned about cookie a patterns is they are not conducive to continental knitters. I thought it was just that I sucked, but it's the order of the sts and the ssk's next to yarn overs and ktbl's knext to purls that make me want to shred the knitting and then curl into a ball and suck my humb while weeping softly in the corner. After some serious thought I realized this pattern would be MUCH easier if i was a yarn thrower. This is one of the only times I will say something like this. In general continental is way faster and way easier (Elizabeth Zimmerman said so, and I believe her.) I even read in a few posts about rick that the left sock is way easier than the right sock for continental knitters (yes I am knitting a sock with different patterns on the left and right...le sigh).
And last but not least, switching the ssk's for sl1, k1, psso's is WAY easier and makes for better tension (for me)
...I also suspect that knitting with one of those tiny circular needles rather than dpn's might make for more even tension because there are yo's at the ends of the repeats, which means there are yo's at the very ends of your needles.
So after this in depth analysis of these socks, I am not trying to say the socks are bad, or the patterning is bad, or that cookie a is a sadistic designer. I still think her socks are incredible and I still LOVE the designs. They make you think and figure things out. So if they are approached in that manner, they are fabuluous. I would not reccomend them to anyone that wasn't an experienced knitter-I want to keep my knitterly friends, not have them egging my house screaming obscenities about 87 row, 88 sts repeat charts....

Tea Things

So the madder was fun, and it produced a beautiful brick orange, but it wasnt' the colour I was hoping for so more experimentation is in order (I want RED!!!). We dyed a bunch of roving as well as a skein of 100% cashmere slated for The Pretty Thing
I have developed a tea obsession. Mom and I went to Foxglove (a garden store on Saltspring) and bought a couple of tea bushes, which caused a exploration into the mechanics of tea making (Wikipedia is the greatest website on earth!) I learned a whole bunch of cool things about tea, like how it is processed and that Black, Green, White and Gun Powder tea are all tea from the camelliea sinensis plant but processed differently. This caused me to go to the local tea store and buy some fancy black tea, because I have had good tea before, but never had REALLY good tea. I bought some estate (estate means it's all from one place and not blended from a variety sources) TGF-OP1 Darjeeling. TGF-OP stands for Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, the 1 means it was 1st flush, or the first harvest of the very first buds. There are MANY acronyms to denote the quality of tea and this is one of the higher ones (although 2 or 3 levels down from the highest, that's pretty good considering there are about 20 levels of quality in tea, tea bags like Lipton or Tetley are just about lowest level of quality you can get by the way).
It was the most amazing tea I have ever had in my entire LIFE. It didn't have that bitter taste that most black teas have and it was juicy and delicious. It was so good that the next day I went back to the tea store and bought a bag of Assam tea and 2 bags of White Tea. I didn't get any green since I am not a huge fan of green to start with.
White tea is the fanciest of teas, and I bought the fanciest of the white teas (pretty fancy shmancy eh?) it cost a bundle but I wanted to try it. It's called Dove Silver Needles. This tea is picked from the first buds only from the very ends of the first leaves of the tea bush. There is only a 2 day window in which to pick this type of tea before it gets too old. The tea leaves are procesed minimally and don't got through the fermentation process that black teas go through. Most tea looks like little black sticks but this tea looks like fuzzy white tea leaves. It is the best tasting beverage I have ever had in my entire life. I can't even describe except that it's incredible. It's expensive as hell, but the really good, expensive tea leaves can be brewed multiple times and often don't come into their flavouring until the 3 brewing. White tea can be brewed a max of 4 times (the 4th time isn't that grea tbut passable), black tea can be brew 5 times. So at $16.50 a 25gm bag really good white tea seems insanely expensive for dried leaves. But at less than 2 gms of leaves per cup of tea and 3 brewings per, it ends up costing 46cents a cup of tea. That's not bad for the best beverage on earth. Really good blakc tea costs less than 25 cents a cup.
Plus you feel super cultured and foofty woofty when drinking expensive tea, and you can't put a price on that.

What'sa Madder You?

The past few days have been filled with fibrey goodness!!! I have knit 3 hats in as many days. 1 luvverly merino red random cable hat (not that's not the name of it, I really just did random cables as I went). One Silver Thaw Noro Hat-plain stocking stitch. And one Noro Kujaku Hat that I did short rows for the front of the brim and it's really quite flattering.
(You can click on photos to embiggen)




Oh and I also knit a baby sweater with a hood a few days ago-it took me a full 4 and a half hours to knit and that includes the designing of the pattern and ripping back and reknitting 3 inches...I love big yarn. It's my first finished baby project-I think I have gotten over the whole jinxing thing...try to ignore the giant ball of sari silk...it was a moment of weakness.

My Mom and I have been dyeing with Madder root this evening and it's terribly fun. Mom grows Madder in her garden (incidently my tarantula is named Rose Madder because she is a rose hair tarantula, after my favourite Stephen King Novel of the same name, but I digress...) Madder is purported to make an incredible red and has been used for thousands of years (madder dyed cloth has been found in King Tutankhamun's tomb). I spent a lot of time on the internet trying find out how one is supposed to dye Madder root and discovered that everyone has a different way of doing it and they all think that everyone else doesn't know the proper way.
Working under the theory that ancient peoples doing dyeing might not always used proper scales and measuring techniques (although I am sure that master dyer in some ancient advanced civilizations did use controlled techniques, I doubt the layperson bothered.) I came up with a recipe that was fast and easy.
Step one, we dried the roots on the stove-we then discovered that we didn't need to dry the roots and added fresh roots to the pile.



Step two-chop the roots into little itty bitty pieces. This was annoying with dried roots and hard on the wrists, but incredibly easy with the fresh ones. It occured to me that all the recipes used dried roots because the majority of people don't have fresh ones available. We ended up with the equivalent to 1 oz of dried root.


We added the chopped roots to a pot of hot, but not boiling, water. More than one person said that boiling it can turn the dye brown. We'll have to try boiling it on purpose sometime to see what shade of brown-wouldn't it be wonderful to get a rich mahogany?
Below is a picture of the pot of water immediately after the roots are added. Literally, I added the roots, picked up the camera and took a picture. Look how red it is!!!



We then crushed 30gms of calcium carbonate (aka Tums) and added it to the root bath. The calcium carbonate ensures you get a true red rather than an orange red. It also imparts a nice minty flavour. Below is the dye bath with Tums.

Next step (and I didn't get a picture) was to mordant the wool. We did this by adding 50 gms of alum (maybe 2 tbsp)and 1 tsp of cream of tartar (both avaiable in the grocery store in the pickling section-you can sometimes find alum at the pharmacy) to a pot of warm water, stirred until it was dissolved and added 75gms of superwash wool top and a skein of homespun shetland (maybe 75gms)

After the wool had been in the mordant for half an hour and the dye bath had been cooking for about an hour and half (at very low heat on the woodstove, perhaps the equivalent to low on a slowcooker) I could handle the suspense no more and took a sliver of rinsed, mordanted wool and added it to the dye bath for half and hour and ended up with this gem.

The colour is amazing and the camera adds more of an orangey tone than is actually there. I would describe it as raspberry.

It's beautiful!!!

So unable to handle it any longer I rinsed the mordanted wool while mom strained the dye bath (no spinner wants to pick out a billion bits of wood and bark while spinning) and tossed in the wool.

This was a little anticlimactic as we had prepared enough dyebbath for 75gms of fibre and on a whim added the Shetland.

The result so far seems to be a variegated coral-yellow colour with little difference to the shetland. We'll leave it over night so it sucks up as much of the dye as possible and see what the resultant colour is. Meanwhile, there is a whole 'nother pot of madder root (even more than the first batch) sitting on the warm stove waiting for tomorrow.

So far the experriment has been SUPER succesful. The only thing keeping the wool from being a rich raspberry is the volume of wool versus dye. It was super easy to do and with enough root will produce colours as bright as commerical dyes.

By the way you don't need to use heat at all with madder. You can soak the roots for 24 hours and mordant overnight or for a few hours, and then have it sit in the dye bath until the dye is exhausted and you have the colour you choose. This method makes a dye product (protein fibres only) in a couple of hours-I'm impatient.

Later this week, dyeing with walnut shells and possibly making ramie from nettles.

Right Here, Right Now

I am scanning photos, renaming files, eating soup, drinking pop, listening to music, reading blogs, and posting on this blog...all at the same time.
That's why I like knitting it's simple.