I thought this would go mid afternoon, but I have time and ambition both right now, so here we go.
First up this week are completed socks, the first pair of the year. I actually finished them on Saturday, mailed them off on Monday, and according to the USPS although they should have been delivered on Wednesday, they're out today. I'm blaming the snow on the East Coast.
The knitting specs, which I've given before, for these: The yarn is Knit Picks Felici self-striping sport in colorway "Seaside. The pattern is "A Good Plain Sock," from the book Knitting Rules! by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. Slightly modified for sport weight yarn to be a 56-stitch sock knit on size 3 (3.25 mm) needle).
And now for this week's swatches. I didn't loathe any this week, but I didn't love them all equally, either.
January 22: Knotted Cords. This one is a meh. I'm not particularly fond of the look.
January 23: Organ Pipes. Another sort of picture pattern. I don't see organ pipes myself. In the calendar I see bowls with steam rising out of them in a very straight manner. In my sample, I don't really see much of anything, you can judge for yourself what you see.
January 24: Four-Stitch Cable 1. The name is pretty self-explanatory. There are 4 stitches involved in each cable. This is a 6-row repeat so there's some space between each twist. I did do one cable in each direction, just because it's possible. I like cables a lot. They're not hard to knit and add a lot of visual interest. They also add some warmth because they make the fabric thicker. As an aside, although I can cable without a cable needle, I generally prefer to use one. I feel like I have more control that way, and because I've been using a cable needle for so long, it's much faster for me with. I know a lot of knitters cable without a needle; I'm just not one of them.
January 26: Six-Stitch Cable. Again self-explanatory, and again I did one in each direction. What's interesting is that this particular pattern is a 4-row, i.e., much shorter, repeat, so the cables draw the fabric in a lot more and they have a more rope-like look.
January 26: Eight-Stitch Cable. I know, I know. There's a theme here; I sensed it, too. There are a total of 8 stitches involved in each cable, and they cross every 10 rows, so it's a bit more open. However, due to the amount of stitches in each cable, even though all 3 cable samples were knit on the same number of stitches, this one was the narrowest because it drew in the most. Is that physics, or geometry, or some other form of math? My favorite for this week. I knit this one in less than an hour.
January 27: Little Lace Panel. This one is OK, nothing particularly special about it. It's a 5-stitch pattern in a background of stockinette, so I did it twice to make the swatch a bit more interesting.
January 28: Faggoted Panel (I do not have anything to do with the naming). A 9-stitch repeat in a stockinette background. This one is has more visual interest than the one above it (to me) and was more fun to knit. I could see this going up the front of a crew-neck cardigan just in from the button bands. This one looks good upside down as well as this way, so that cardi could be knit top down or bottom up, depending on your preference.
That's all I have in the way of swatches and projects for this week. I have everything ready for some mittens up next, and I'll probably find time to get those started this weekend.
Oh, I forgot to tell you, somewhere last week around the time of the loathsome, hateful swatch, I accidentally managed to shift down to a smaller needle size. That actually helps explain why, during the second half of last week, the swatches took forever and looked really stiff. They were knit on a size 4 needle and not a size 6. Amazing how much different 0.5 mm makes.
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