Wilted

Imagine the steamiest shower you've ever taken, the hottest wettest laundry room, the alligator pond in full sun at a suburban zoo--scummy water with a cloudy overlay of mosquitoes and midges, mainly but not quite obscuring the rarely-blinking eyeballs of the mostly-submerged, sludge-colored reptiles. Humidity, heat, stasis, torpor.

That is today's weather in New England. It was also yesterday's and that of the day before, and it will be tomorrow's as well.

O divine goddess of the conditioned air, I thank thee for thy cooling breath that refresheth my listless, depleted, heat-enervated soul, and for thy wise, judicious thermostat that gloweth in the dark and maintaineth my dwelling in shady comfort. 

Of course, I am knitting socks. I mean, why not? Inspired by a recent post on the Knitting Daily blog, I did a heel in the Eye of Partridge stitch.

I like this! It looks kind of Byzantine, and it also seems cushier and is possibly more durable than conventional heel stitches. I'm thinking about how Eye of Partridge can be adapted to toes, which usually bear more stress than do the heels.

Meanwhile, I finished the buttercup yellow socks of North Light Fibers' lofty and light alpaca/mohair sock yarn called Island Meadow Blend, but it is simply too hot hot hot to wear them, so they obligingly struck a footless pose for me amongst drooping greenery:

Please note the fine stitch definition of this yarn.

Gentle knitters, if you have additional interesting suggestions about coping with sticky, horrible, horrendously humid heat, I should be ever so pleased to share them with the readership. Do let me know.

Bad yarn, great yarn

Gentle knitters, it's been a frantic few weeks, hence the silence. During this blackout period, I've crammed in as much knitting as possible to remind myself that actually some things do come to a good end, even if the process is a struggle. For instance, these socks, lying peacefully next to Molly:

You'd never suspect, to look at them, that this is Yarn from Hell. To explain briefly: it's served up in a pull-skein, theoretically an efficient way to dispense yarn. Pull the string from deep inside and the yarn neatly flows onto needles. Except in this case, what came out from the depths was a huge, seemingly endless tangle, and it was maddeningly difficult to unknot. In fact, I had to cut the yarn several times to continue. The manufacturer is some German company whose name I repressed after I tore the ball-band into a million bits.

Compare this to the delightful unskeining today of North Light Fibers's Island Meadow Blend (60% baby alpaca, 40% kid mohair).

The skein is neatly tied, and the tie opens cleanly. Nothing to cut, no knots to untangle.

This ball-winding process was smooth as could be. Tweak the tie, it drifts gently apart, yarn (sitting cleanly on yarn swift) rolls into a perfect ball:  voila! the Platonic Ideal of Yarn Readiness.

How could any knitter not love this already, even before casting on? I was a goner from the get-go.