Socks and Natural Selection

Like many of you, I love to knit socks. Behold a recently-completed pair, modeled by my Companion in Life:

These socks are entirely typical of my repertoire, consisting of about three variations of an archetypally basic pattern, the brainchild of my friend and local Langworthy Librarian, Jane Green. It has served me well during the first three years of my sock-knitting mania (life total to date: 40 completed pairs). A pattern like this is a great teacher of sock knitting, and an excellent way to showcase variegated or printed yarn, being, as it were, a blank canvas.

Almost two years ago I started a complicated pattern, with faux cables and lacy bits. It looks great, but I cannot knit it unless I'm in isolation, so I save it for when I have hours on Amtrak ahead of me. This Sterling Lace pattern, while beautiful, has furthered my resolve to simplify, simplify, simplify, as HDT says.

A free download,  Lace Sterling is designed by Clara Masessa for Kraemer Yarns.

Frankly, though, I am getting a wee bit bored by knitting the same old same old, so have been searching for a subtle variation. I found a much-touted pattern on Ravelry that looked like just the ticket, a classic rib with nice detail over two stitches:  SKYP; but I should have known something was wacko when I saw the sizing chart offered the following options only:  Men's X-Small [Small, Medium, Large].  OMG, I wondered.  Where would my women's size 8 feetsies fit into this? Regardless of all warning signs and alarm clocks, I dove right in.

This beautiful yarn is from Dirty Water Dyeworks, a New England hand-dyeing atelier.

It took me until the heel, when I tried it on, that I realized continuance was futile. The gauge and size were enough off to be tacitly annoying for the rest of my life, and suddenly, like a big blurp of water down the drain, the entire pattern lost its allure. I felt annoyed at all the hours I'd wasted, until I thought of how to adapt the herringbone pattern formed by the designer's SKYP (slip 1 purlwise, knit 1, yarn over, pass slipped stitch over).  Then this seemed to me a useful rehearsal for the next iteration, which I will share with you before too long, I hope.

Up close and personal so you can see the SKYP.

So ultimately, the time spent seemed more like a good practice, and possibly an evolutionary stage.

Ripped and ready to roll.

A place for lace

Some years ago, whilst in the San Francisco area, I visited the Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles in Berkeley. It's one of the stranger exhibitions I've encountered in my many years of enthusiastic museum-going, not the least because it's actually a store specializing in needlework accessories, and there just happens to be collection of strangely-curated lace tacked onto it. It's a rather nice needlework store with a good selection of needlework-related books for sale. As a museum it's kind of pathetic. In fact, let's call it a "museum." I wonder if a store that calls itself a museum derives some special kind of "tax benefit"...?

If I wanted to become my own lace and textile museum, I might exhibit the beginnings of a scarf/shawl and a sock that are in process as I write this.

The scarf/shawl (haven't yet decided which), a gift for my friend Ana, is the Oscilloscope Shawl from the Fall 2010 issue of Knitscene Magazine.  The Lace Sterling socks, a free download from Kraemer Yarns, are for me, if I ever, as it were, put my nose to the grindstone. The thing about knitting lace, IMHO, is that absolute concentration is required. Such focus has many benefits, but it's hard to summon the focus if your life involves social interaction, myriad commitments, and competing interests, as mine does. So, the sock grows slowly, and I am allowing myself the option of truncating the shawl as a scarf if  I can't finish it before Ana, now twenty-seven, grows grey hair.

Ana