Opening Day

Despite what the thermometer is telling me, spring has sprung. And that means that as sure as Carl Pavano has been placed on the 60-day DL, baseball is back in the Bronx. I’m looking forward to my second year of providing the sort of hard-hitting knitting analysis that can only be found on a baseball blog. And baseball isn’t coming back a moment too soon. I was actually extremely happy to hear Joe Morgan’s commentary tonight, which is surely a sign of how deep my withdrawal was. I don’t expect that to last very long, though.

I never have been able to score tickets for an Opening Day game, but I will be getting to catch my first game of the season this Saturday. The first weekend homestand of the season is “calendar day”, when the team gives the fans in attendance an April-March calendar filled with team photos. My parents went to their first calendar day by accident, while I was still living up in Massachusetts, but since I’ve moved back to New York, it’s become a family tradition to go. As I learned last year, there’s a definite risk of chilly weather at these early-season games, but I’m hoping that things are slightly less frigid this weekend. As of right now, Andy Pettitte (pictured warming up in the bullpen last season) is scheduled to come off the DL to pitch that game, but that could always change on short notice.

In honor of the team’s last year in Yankee Stadium, my next project after my “stashbuster” purple socks will be pinstriped socks, based on the Yankees home jerseys. I didn’t know of a source for self-pinstriping yarn, so I decided to make my own, from some Louet Gems Opal (purchased at The Loopy Ewe) and some Jacquard Acid Dye in Navy, purchased at Lee’s Art Shop on 57th St. Up to now my total dyeing experience has been one skein of laceweight dunked in pink lemonade flavored Kool-Aid, so I decided to try my hand at dyeing the solid-colored yarn for the heels, toes, and cuffs of my socks. If I could manage that without turning myself or my apartment navy blue, I’d move on to the stripey portion.

The process was pretty simple. I knitted a mock sock toe and weighed out the yarn. Using those measurements, I skeined off enough yarn for the contrasting portions of the sock (after double-checking my estimates of 20% of the total weight against Charlene Schurch’s Sensational Knitted Socks). Then I soaked the yarn in water and simmered it in dye solution, in my dedicated dyepot and mason jar.

While I was dyeing, the dyebath was alarmingly purple, but I needn’t have worried about it. After rinsing out and drying my yarn, I had a pretty nice semi-solid dark navy blue with no oddly shaded sections.

After getting the yarn for the toes, heels and cuffs dyed, I then moved on to the self-striping portion of the socks. I followed the tutorial for dyeing self-striping yarn on Eunny Jang’s old blog pretty much to the letter, only modifying the lengths of yarn that’d be necessary for the stripes. After making a skein on two chairs spaced 10 feet apart, I cooked the batch of yarn using the same basic setup as the first one, with the minor changes of keeping the yarn I wanted to stay white in a separate mason jar, and wrapping the start of the white yarn in plastic. The plastic wasn’t 100% effective at preventing wicking of the dye up into the other portion of yarn, and more dye transferred when I washed out the excess dye, so the stripes won’t be quite as crisp as I had hoped they’d be, but the flaw won’t be too noticeable from a distance. I’m not sure what the best way to avoid having dye settle where I don’t want it to, so any suggestions for the future are very welcome.

One other thing that I learned was that there’s no way to make a 20 foot long skein of yarn look photogenic, no matter how you try to fold it up. So I wound it off into a ball:

(posed next to my Sal Fasano autographed ball. He was a backup catcher for the Yankees for part of the 2006 season, and is very nice to fans) Next I skeined up the yarn to something a bit more manageable for storage and further picture-taking.

My original plan was to knit these socks only at the games I attend this season, but I’m not sure I can stick to that resolution. I’m a real sucker for self-patterning yarn (if this actually works as such), and have a hard time putting them down. I’ve also discovered how much keeping score cuts into my knitting time, so if I stick to my plans I won’t get very far during the regular season. At any rate, it’s a rather pleasant conundrum to have, and it’s a long season, so I’ve got plenty of time to make my final decision.

One year (almost) gone

What better way is there to celebrate the completion of shockingly pink socks than with a shockingly pink drink? The day that I’m too old for Shirley Temples is the day that I’m just plain…too old. I’m very happy with the way these socks turned out. The yardage of the Twilight Sock was generous enough that I could get a pair of tall socks out of one skein with a comfortable 25 yards left over at the end. If I had made them taller, I would have had to mess around with calf shaping, which was beyond the scope of these socks, as far as I’m concerned. It doesn’t show up too well in the pictures, but the cables and twisted stitches really “pop” in this yarn, and I’m pleased with how soft and smooshy it is. All I have left to do is to wash and block them so I can wear my socks out of the house.

Now that I’m finished with the “Rib Her to Shreds” socks (sorry, Debbie Harry!), I decided to go through my stash to find some inspiration for my next pair. While I was looking at my sock yarn, I realized that I really must know what shades and colorways I like, because I keep buying them over, and over, and over again. That’s actually not even a complete set yet, and I think I can do something sort of similar with my collection of teal and green yarn as well, although there is a good bit less of that. I feel like maybe I should branch out some, but I’m not fond of warm colors like reds and oranges, so that limits things a bit.  Perhaps I should just continue with my “yarn fast” for a while after Easter until I can work my way through more of it.

I finally decided to stick with more happy springtime colors for the next set of socks that I cast on:

It’s the closest possible thing to carrying some of the flowers that are currently in bloom around with me in my purse. Of course, it’s also a lot neater, what with not having to also carry around dirt and mulch to keep said spring flowers alive. It’s a win-win situation all around.

It’s amazing how fast time gets away on you. Just a little bit over a year ago, I started this blog after going to one of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s book launches and being inspired to start writing about my knitting. I’d like to thank the Readership for their advice, patience, and proofreading, because I’ve had so much fun staking out this little corner of the internet in the name of knitting and the Yankees. I know that it’s traditional to celebrate a “blogiversary” with a Very Special Entry, and I hope to do that next year. This year, however, it’s a holiday weekend, so instead of updating I’ll be celebrating by choosing to follow some wise advice that I found scrawled on a subway wall:

Signs of Spring

It seems like it’s warming up for real around here, lately. The days are getting longer (much longer thanks to Daylight Savings being earlier), and the first buds of spring are starting to open. From the crocuses in windowboxes…

to the snowdrops in Central Park…

Color and life are returning to the city.

Speaking of color, I got a big jump on my latest pair of socks at a Sit ‘n’ Knit New York meetup last weekend. The Twilight Sock yarn pleasantly surprised me by turning out to be self-patterning. The lighter and darker pinks and purples spiral up the length of the sock. I had a little bit of a gauge issue at one point that caused some odd pooling on the leg, but I just ripped back a few rows to get everything consistent again. I didn’t want to interrupt the patterning when I turned the heel, so I knitted my favorite, a short-row heel using the yarn from the outside of the ball.

I chose a ribbed cable pattern from the first Barbara Walker Treasury, which combines twisted stitches and cable crossings. The twisted stitches make it a little bit trickier to knit this without a cable needle, but I feel that if I can deal with this pattern, I can handle pretty much any cable pattern without a cable needle.

One of the many reasons that I prefer to knit my socks toe-up is that it does allow me to make a lot of design decisions at the last minute. I decided to use two different ribbings for the cuff of the sock. For the front and back, I chose a k1 tbl, p2 rib, and I just let the k1 tbl, p1 cables unwind on the sides. The sock legs are 11.5 inches long, but the knitting just flew by. Now it’s on to the second sock of the pair, and then to continue working through my sock stash.

Rainy day knitting

I keep turning the volume up on the spring training game, but try as hard as I might to pretend that I’m actually in Tampa right now, the howling of the wind and sound of rain against my windows are a pretty strong reminder that I’m actually still up north, and the weather is still wintry. At least live baseball is back on TV again.

I managed to snap a picture of the second robin of spring. I tried to photograph the first robin of spring, but he flew away before I could get my camera out of my bag. It’s still a little chilly for them, though, I think. They were both puffed up to try to keep warm in the breeze.

I also finished up my Opal Rainforest socks. They were great to carry around with me, and to have as my “social knitting” project. The Opal is a nice, non-splitty yarn, so I could knit without really looking at what I was doing, but the self-patterning of the yarn kept things interesting for me.

I ended up with a 9.5″ cuff on the socks, and I had approximately 60 yards left over, so I could have made them a bit longer.

I haven’t quite decided on a pattern for my next pair of traveling socks, but I think it’ll be something a tiny bit more demanding than the previous pair. I’ll start working toe-up and see what kind of mood strikes me.

I have picked out the yarn, though. It’s Storm Moon Knits’ sock yarn, in Rip Her to Shreds, and it’s just the thing to chase the rainy-day-blues away.

Be true to your scarf

Remember the garter stitch swatch I had going a couple weeks ago? The true identity of the project can finally be revealed. It’s a little something that I call the “Be True to Your School Scarf”, which I designed and knitted for J for his birthday. He’s a big fan of The Ohio State University sports teams, so I decided to make him a sideways-knit garter stitch scarf in that school’s colors to warm him up during March Madness, and any of the other New England weather that would precede or follow it. It took a couple of tries to get a stripe sequence that I liked, but I think the effort was worth it. J seemed to like the scarf very much, and I think it’s fair to say that he looks rather dashing in it. Someday I may even post a picture of the scarf in action. Until then, a not-terribly-flattering picture of me modeling the finished product will have to suffice.

In a happy coincidence, the school colors for Ohio State and MIT are very similar (a mere substitution of MIT’s “cardinal” for OSU scarlet), so the scarf can serve double duty and be true to our alma mater as well.

The yarn that I used was Cascade 220 in Silver Gray and Christmas Red, but the yarn comes in so many other colors that the scarf should be infinitely adaptable.

I also got to interact with the knitting community quite a bit this week. I’m a member of a knitting website called Ravelry, and recently I got a message from a fellow knitter who had run out of the yarn she was using to make a sweater asking if I could spare any. I could, of course, because I had over half a pound of yarn left over from my Tangled Yoke cardigan, so we set up an exchange–four ounces of my yarn for four ounces of this:

Dream In Color Smooshy in Wisterious. The picture doesn’t do the yarn justice. The colors are just luminous in person, and the yarn definitely lives up to its name. While we were getting everything set up, we found out that we were both huge fans of both knitting and baseball, although we’re on opposite sides of a rivalry. But that’s part of the beauty of knitting in general, and Ravelry in specific–it brings together all sorts of people who might not ordinarily meet.

I also brought my traveling sock to my first Sit’n'Knit NYC event, a large social that can be best described as “speed-dating for knitters”. It was pretty nifty, and a lot more fun than I imagine that “speed dating for real” could ever be. I got to move around the room and meet a whole bunch of local knitters, and see what they were all working on, or had brought to show off. I had a great time, and I have so many ideas for new projects. The Sit’n'Knit seems like a really cool group of people, and I’m really looking forward to future meet-ups that they have. I’m even considering participating in the sock exchange that they run every spring. I’ve never done anything like that though, so I’m a little bit apprehensive about meeting the deadline and making socks that are up to snuff.

And finally, because I haven’t done it in ages, a little eye candy to conclude the post. We’re in the throes of some real winter weather now, so I got to take some pictures of frozen water droplets on the ornamental kale in front of a local building.