how many socks can a socknut knit?

  

  

Neapolitan socks in Sunshine Yarns' neapolitan sock yarn
"Toronto socks" - Regia Canadian Colors #4732 yarn
German flag socks in Regia nation sock yarn #5397
"Brazil Colors" Regia Canadian Classic Colors #4741

---

I finally met up with Dani to pick up the sock yarn I bought from her last week when she posted the new Harry Potter dragon colorways on her etsy site. (Were you sitting at the computer at 11 waiting to see the yarn, just like me??) I couldn't resist the Hedwig colorway, with its subtle blacks, grays, and golds. And the Raspberry Limeade has been one of my faves for a while (surprise, surprise, it's pink!).

I've actually got three pairs of socks already on the needles (some Gryffindor socks, my dyeorama swap socks, and my retro prep socks)! And none of them is seeing any knitting action these days. And yet, I feel the need to cast on with that Hedwig yarn. I really want to see how it knits up! Anyone else starting a pair of these??

Sock class had me knitting socks again. Heel flap socks. Yuck. I'd forgotten how much I dislike the heel flap.

heel flap: rear view

I wasn't far enough along in my retro prep socks to throw in a heel, so I pulled out the sock I'd started with the yarn I received in the dye swap. I did the heel in a contrasting color of Artyarns Supermerino that I had in my stash. I thought maybe if it was in a different color, I might like it more. Nah. At least it'll be easier to rip out later!

Now, I don't mind wearing heel flap socks at all. What I dislike is knitting them (make heel flap, stop, turn heel, stop, pick up stitches, stop, knit gusset, stop - anything ELSE you'd like me to do? stand on my head? stick my right foot in and shake it all about? can I knit normally now?). And after making all those lovely little short-row heels with their pretty little diagonal lines, I've completely lost my appreciation for the flap look.

Sorry, flappers, I'm a goner.

Why yes, we did bring back some legos and some yarn. Just enough for a little second birthday celebration for me and the boys!

slammer bike for B

technic truck for S

Lana Grossa Teamcolors sock yarn for me

And that's it.* Man, I was so good.

(* Okay, there were some other legos from Oma and Opa, but they're small and I didn't buy them. And then there's the bags of sock yarn I got at the factory store, but I'm not keeping those, so they don't count either, right?)

Well, maybe pen-penultimate round up.... We have a couple more finishers - "hip! hip!" for Emily and Flan - and "hooray!" for these finished sock saviors:

Allie has finished sock savior socks!
Erin finished sock savior socks (in one of my favorite yarns!).
Sarah sent off a wonderful sock savior package to her second pal.

And on an only tangentially related note, I have bought my last skein of pink sock yarn. I have had a serious pink sock yarn craving the last few months. Pink, pink, pink. I haven't even knit a pair of pink socks yet, but I clearly want to.

Regia, Koigu, Ultramerino, Trekking, Seacoast Handpainted, Shelridge Farms, Lornas, Regia

The most recently purchased skein, bought at the store over the weekend, is Seacoast Handpainted "Cherry Fizz" (it's the red-pink one by the Trekking). I've spent weeks telling people to buy this yarn so I wouldn't have to. They didn't. So I bought it and told myself it has to be my last skein of pink sock yarn. Well, perhaps my pen-penultimate skein....

I finally received a package yesterday of sock yarn I'd ordered in March after my return from Germany. Yes, more Regia Canadian Colors and Classic Canadian Colors. I decided to buy some of the colorways I hadn't seen in stores on my trip. I now officially have too much sock yarn. I almost got some more Koigu at the store yesterday. Lucky for me I put it back, because...

The next package I got was a box stuffed with color-your-own fingering weight yarn from Knitpicks! And that was followed up by a starter dye kit from the nice folks at ProChemical. Instead of buying more sock yarn, I can now focus on getting pots and gloves and saran wrap and everything I need for the dye swap. Who's dyeing this weekend??

I've got happy feet today, wearing my newly finished Regia Canadian Colors "Brazil Colors" socks! Unfortunately, in this case, happy feet means an unhappy hand, because, to finish them, I had to reknit that toe with my right hand (I haven't quite gotten the hang of knitting continental on dpn's yet). I'm such a cheater, I really don't deserve to have my hand get better. But I do deserve fabulous new socks.

I love how the heels came out on these - the stripes, the short-row decreases, they feel great too. And these socks remind me of Orlando Bloom, since I knit so much of them on the airplane while watching that Elizabethtown movie. (Does that ever happen to you, when you watch a show while knitting something or listen to an album a lot while working on one project and that project ends up reminding you of that show or song? I still remember knitting mom's sweater while watching the Osbournes and knitting the Karabella scarf while finishing Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. My favorite show to watch while knitting? Amazing Race. It's so tense and exciting all the way through that I just fly on whatever I'm working on!).

Oh, what's that you say, it's St. Patricks Day and you'd like to see something a little more green. You got it!

First up on my second day in NYC was the newest and hippest knitting store to come to town, Suss Designs. Yes, the Suss from Hollywood Knits has brought her gorgeous knits and yarns to NYC.

Wowza, is this place incredible! They had lots of yarns I'd never seen before, including the Suss yarns which are lovely - what a difference it makes when you can see and touch them - all with beautiful colors and wonderful fibers. And the knitted garments for sale were to die for! They were even having a 50% off sale on winter items, but they were still too pricey for me. The styles were fabulous though. And browsing for inspiration is always free!

A quick lunch at Peanut Butter & Co. (everything peanut butter!) and then it was back to Purl so I could finally use that gift certificate my mother got me for Christmas.

We spent a looooong time looking at the staggering selection of Koigu and Kersti. I was all set to get some Kersti for a sweater, when mom pulls out the most amazing swatch of Alchemy Synchronicity in Rich Berry. I put the Kersti back, Julia Roberts came in to pick up some yarn, and I snatched up all the Synchronicity in that colorway.

alchemy synchronicity from Purl
and artyarns ultramerino sock yarn from Suss

Then I rode the bus home with about 500 other people - I've never seen so many people waiting for a bus (we were wrapped all around the entire downstairs gate area, which if you've ever been to the Port Authority you know is huge!). They must have pulled in every bus they had that would run. When I realized that none of the seat lights inside our bus were working, I briefly considered putting the knitting away. Then I thought, who says I can't do a short-row toe in the dark?

perfect short-row toe knit by feel

When the bus made a stop for folks to grab a quick bite to eat and the driver turned all the lights on, I realized my mistake.

perfect short-row toe on side of foot

Well, at least the yarn shopping was good.

I've knit socks on the German train and now on Amtrak.

Regia Canadian Colors, my constant companion

The woman sitting across from me was also knitting and so were two very classy and sophisticated women in my subway car later. Wow, knitting sure is hip in New York City!

Well, I'm off to shop and knit in the big apple. If you see someone knitting Brazil socks in the local yarn stores today, that'll be me!

One brazil color sock is done! I simply love how they have worked out the stripes in this yarn. Some of the Regia Canadian Colors make narrow stripes like my Toronto socks. (These are my favorites.) Some make wider "random" stripes like this Brazil sock. (Totally cool!) And some are just plain variegated. (I even bought one ball of that because the colors were so great, and I'm usually not a fan of that kind of variegation.) This series is too much fun!

More stripes, of course, means another solid heel and toe, worked through the magic of cutting out one whole section of the stripe sequence and scavenging it to fill out the one color. I just knit up to where I want the heel to be (for my Germany socks it was the middle of the black stripe; for these socks, I waited until just before the little blue stripe started in the beige), then I left that yarn hanging from the sock, joined in the proper color from the stripe sequence I'd cut out from the other end of the ball, and knit the heel with that yarn. When the heel was done, I picked up the original yarn and kept knitting. So there's absolutely no interruption in the color sequence over the front of the ankle. In order to save yarn, I'm doing heels and toes in different colors this time. This way I'm only "wasting" one stripe sequence repeat for each sock.

I love doing this.

Zoob is fun!

I am king of Zoob and lord of all the Zoob creatures.

Zoob Bug

I think this one started off as Zoob DNA, but after all the cursing that was involved in daddy's constructing the Zoob Rex (which was so unstable that the boys weren't allowed to touch it after he'd put it together), the boys decided they'd have just as much fun with a Zoob centipede.

And there's some fun waiting for mommy too, thanks to Kristin, who apparently lives where folks need a lot of powdered beverage mix. She heard me complaining that my local stores only have like two flavors of Kool-Aid and sent me a "few" packets and some KnitPicks dye-your-own yarn to play with. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!

look, she even included rubber gloves!

This is going to be a fun week.

The acquisition of a significant amount of yarn always requires some stash reorganization. And I've noticed that the yarn in my IKEA storage system seems to have become a permanent fixture there, like it's part of the furniture now and not just waiting to be knit. So with new sock yarn to squeeze in and old yarn yearning to break out of the storage, it's time to stir the stash.

This is never a pleasant site. First everything gets tossed on the bed and only slowly redistributed into the storage cubbies and bins. And inevitably hubby will come upstairs during the middle of it all and catch an unobstructed glimpse at the true size of the stash.

But then things start to look better. The soon-to-be-socks bin is neat and inviting.

The remaining sock stash has been purged of a few excesses and mistaken impulse purchases.

And the lornas laces is blooming in the flower pot.

We woke up at the crack of dawn to catch our flight. The in-laws don't really live that close to the airport, so a 10:30 flight very quickly converts into a 5am wake-up time. Ugh.

That one red suitcase, by the way, was inspected very carefully at check-in. Last year the security folks picked out the boys' suitcase with the music box from their baby mobile in it to inspect. The music box did kind of look like a bomb in the x-ray machine, I'll give them that. They summoned someone who rode over to the check-in area on a cute little yellow bike and ran what looked like a mini-dust buster over it and then rode off again to get the results. It was some sort of machine that could tell whether the "device" had been tampered with or something like that. Of course, hubby's opened up that music box about five times to resolder the electronics in it, because the buttons have been pressed so many times in the last four and a half years that they keep breaking. So I was, needless to say, a little worried. But after about ten minutes they decided that it was okay and let me check in. This year they chose the suitcase filled with my socks, hubby's half-knit LMKG zip raglan sweater, and german boardgames for the kids. They called in the bike-person again and she wiped down the outside of the game boxes and rode off to get the test results. My mother-in-law said it looked like a test for illegal drugs. Illegal drugs in the Junior Labyrinth game, right, of course. After ten minutes they ran the suitcase through the x-ray again and declared it to be okay. Yes, I really am just into boardgames, thank you.

But it was all made up for when they told us we had a window seat. The boys were so thrilled they even translated for Oma so she could comprehend the awesomeness of the situation: "a fensterplatz!" And lookie, we got one of the WM-Deutschland planes with the soccer ball on the nose!

While we were waiting at the gate, I noticed that a man standing behind me was wearing, get this, a gold medal from Turino! How cool is that? It was for Men's Hockey and after searching a bit on the internet, I found out he must have been this guy from the Swedish Hockey team who plays for the Boston Bruins. And that medal was gorgeous. I remember there was some sort of uproar about the medals having a hole in them this time around, but let me tell you, it was impressive. Wow!

The boys played quite well on the plane and I made some progress on my second pair of Canadian Colors socks. (Regia Canadian Classic Colors #4741 "Brasil Color". Nah, it doesn't remind me of Brazil any more than the other reminded me of Toronto. And what does Brazil have to do with Canada anyway?)

Eventually, the boys fell asleep and I got to watch the movie (Elizabethtown - not very good, but Orlando Bloom is worth watching no matter what) and knit quietly. I overheard the couple in front of me telling their seat neighbor about their baby. You could tell there was something special about them. The baby was a typical 4 or 5 month old, who cried when you would expect and had to be carried around most of flight. But there wasn't one second of that nine hour period in the airplane when those parents didn't seem absolutely 100% in love with that baby. No exhausted looks or frazzled nerves. Nothing but pure joy. Then I overheard the word "adoption" and they explained that as soon as the airplane touched down in Boston, the baby would become an American citizen. When we landed they all clapped and I have to say, I got a little choked up.

It's good to be home.

Well, first of all, only Omis knit in Germany (the big knitting trend really hasn't hit here like it has in America, although crochet is pretty popular among the young hip girls), so I look a little old-fashioned knitting on the train. Then there's the whole how-the-hell-are-you-knitting thing that I get when I'm knitting in public (you know where everyone sort of cocks their head to the side when they don't get something just like a puppy does when he doesn't understand what you're saying). You see, even though most people don't knit, they've definitely got an aunt or a grandma who does and she don't knit English-style, I can tell you that. On the other hand, almost everyone is wearing Regia socks (knit by said aunt or oma), so that mitigates the whole weirdo thing I've got going on a bit.

And since everyone understands the joys of handknit socks, I feel much more comfortable wearing my newly finished socks all over town.

Regia Canadian Color #4732 "Toronto"
folks from Toronto, do these colors remind you of your homeland??

I finished these Canadian Color socks lickety-split (thanks to modern technology and a hubby who knows how to use it, I could knit late into the night while watching my favorite US shows like The Office and Dancing with the Stars!). And lookie, lookie, I even got the colors to match up on the heels and toes.

These are the best-fitting socks I think I've ever made. And I absolutely adore the striping and am now hopelessly addicted to this Canadian Color yarn. (Pair number two is already underway!)

So all in all, knitting in Germany isn't all that different here than at home. I'm just as much of a freak here when I take a picture of a yarn store or buy up all the Canadian Color sock yarn as I would be at home. A knitting geek is a knitting geek wherever she goes.

No more knitting progress on the LMKG zip raglan to report. Instead of knitting, I've been shopping the last two days. But I haven't been neglecting hubby's sweater entirely; I was on the hunt for the perfect zipper. I really, really, really wanted a zipper just like in the pattern with a big ring in a nice contrasting color. But I couldn't find any like that around home, so I thought I'd check in Germany.

und fündig!

It's nowhere near as cool as the original, still, it'll do. The zipper might not be much to look at but hey, look at the view from the department store cafe!

It may be a no-name, small town department store, but it has one hell of a view. And sock yarn.

oh wie schön is Canada

This is my new favorite sock yarn. It's called Canadian Color and it's from Regia so you can machine wash it and it's got that crazy 10-year guarantee and everything. And this style makes the coolest stripes! As you may know, I have a little difficulty with the whole variegated yarn thing, but I really dig stripes.

Just so you don't get the wrong idea, it's not all this lovely out here in the Hinterlands. An aunt tipped us off that there was Regia sock yarn on sale for 20% off at the local SparKauf, so we went to check it out.

the "SaveBuy"

They did indeed have Regia on sale, but not in any colorways that I really liked. (Note: Havanah Color is variegated, Canadian Color stripes.) Pssst, if you're looking for FunFur, I know where you can get some cheap! German knitters are waaaay into FunFur.

Still, we didn't come home empty-handed. My father-in-law picked up orange reflective vests that the Germans are required to have in their car in case of an emergency. Woo hoo. Well, he was excited to find them so cheap. And I found these little lovely boxes of sewing notions by Prym. (Have you looked at the Inox needles in your LYS recently? They're all called Prym now.) They were just soooo cute, I couldn't resist!

apparently the Prym people were big in the snap business

Amazing what you find when you go looking for a zipper. Stay tuned tomorrow for another shopping adventure!

I'm going to Germany!

Really, in a couple of days I'll be in Germany. Usually the in-laws visit us in the spring, but they can't make it this year, so I thought, what the heck, I'll fly over there with the kids. Hubby's stuck at home working, so it'll just be me, the boys, and the in-laws. And my knitting, of course. I'm filling hubby's suitcase with knitting projects.

How perfect was it that Carola sent me this Regia German nation sock yarn just a couple of weeks before I leave?! I knit my fingers off to get them done in time for the trip! But I got such a kick out of the flag stripes that it was really a blast to knit them (even with my little falschrum flag flub). I used my patent-pending method of cutting out color sequeces to get the entire heel to be a solid color and keep the striping in tact across the ankle (first used on my Gryffindor socks). And my foot was just long enough to end the sock in the yellow, the color at the bottom of the flag. (Oh, did I mention that these socks are for me? I had planned to make them for hubby but when I asked him if he wanted a pair of Germany socks, he sort of paused, not wanting to disappoint me. I interrupted the silence with a 'woo hoo, I can make them for myself!' and everyone was happy.)

So, any good knitting stores in the Frankfurt/Cologne area I should know about?

Do you notice anything wrong with my Regia German nation socks?

hint: check out the picture on the ball band

Hubby did. I was so tickled by how the striping was coming out and how good it looked, that I held it up to show him and asked, all giggly, 'what do you think?' He said, 'it's very nice, except it's upside-down.' Aaaaaahhhh! It seems that they wound the yarn so that you need to knit from the center to get the stripes to go down the sock in the same order as in the flag. And I didn't.

So I ripped it all out and started over. In the right direction.

hubby approved stripes

As the Germans say, aller Anfang ist schwer.* Yeah, yeah.

* - every beginning is difficult

I finished my Neapolitan socks!

wanna see B's picture?

I had been knitting these a little at a time when I was taking a break from projects for others. I was in no rush. They were a delight to knit, so why speed through it and miss all the enjoyment? Then I received this box from my old sockapal2za sock pal, Carola.

I sent her a drill and she sent me a radio!

Inside were all sort of fun treats from Iceland, including some Lopi ("it's scratchy," she writes), some Icelandic candy ("there is always something surprising inside...you have been warned"), and this Regia Nation sock yarn.

Go, Krauts!

I had admired these socks on Carola's blog last summer and desperately wanted to get some of the yarn to make socks for the upcoming World Cup, which is in Germany this time. And Carola sent me the yarn. Hooray!

But the needles I needed were in the Neapolitans. So I rushed.

With the whole cork-sweater-down-the-drain thing and the whole knitting-for-hubby thing, the new year's selfish knitting has really fallen to the wayside. Enter Dani and her fabulous hand-painted yarns.

She calls this colorway "neapolitan" and it is just as yummy as it sounds. In one selfish night of knitting I made it all the way to the heel! It was just what I needed. You know, when you're feeling down, there's nothing like ice cream to cheer you up. (That and maybe a little shoe drilling and boot knitting. Coming tomorrow!!)