Once Upon a Sock – June 2019

It’s Once Upon a Sock time! Hooray! Come join us on the first Thursday of the month (after a fight with the new wordpress editor, I am slinking in on the Friday.) and join us over at the link up hosted by Paula at Spin a Yarn.

I come bearing two pairs of socks this month! One pair of Rose City Rollers, knitted in some leftover West Yorkshire Spinners sock yarn in Yarn Shop Day, which was a special colour way they did a couple years ago and some leftover Sheldridge Farm sock yarn for the heel and toes.

These were cast on while heading up to London for a mini OUaS meet up, with Paula, Kat and Liz. We had a lovely day which involved plenty of time in Loop, some tasty food at Wahaca and then tea later on. It was so nice to meet Liz and Paula in person, while Kat and I have known each other for more than a decade!

The other pair is the completed Hortensia socks from OUaS passim. Hooray! They are in Coopknits’ Socks Yeah! and I’m very pleased with them. I look forward to knitting other patterns from Socks Yeah! volume 1 in the future.

I am having a bit of a fight with the WordPress editor again, so the photos are a bit..plonked in at the moment. Boo.

I haven’t decided what my next pair will be. I’m almost finished with my Sweetpea crochet blanket and then I want to start my Carbeth cardigan so I shall ponder. It might be another pair of rose city rollers as short socks are very useful at this time of the year.

One FO, Two Cats and a WiP

Ugh! I completely missed Once Upon a Socket and have some other projects that are completed or in progress that I meant to blog about earlier but I have been preoccupied by a) my shower giving up the ghost (while I was in it; that was a joy), waiting for a new one to be ordered and installed and now…waiting for another new one as the first new one has a heater fault. So while I have a shower now (rather than a week and a half of sponge baths out of jugs of hot water), I can only have a barely lukewarm one. Water saving and/or military showers have nothing on me right now – I am in and out like a flash. It is definitely times like this that I wish the previous owner hadn’t ripped out the bath…

Also, two days after the shower originally failed, the two cats we adopted arrived. I’m going to try not to turn this blog into All Cats, All The Time but there will now be furry guest stars occasionally. They are a Tuxedo mother-daughter called Pepper (6) and Jess (5) and have settled in nicely. You can follow their activities on their own instagram, should you feel so inclined.

Which, actually allows me to segue nicely into an in progress project, which is my Attic24 Sweetpea Blanket, which is already Cat Approved as Jess, who is a tiny, adorable lapcat, is happy for me to crochet on the sofa, providing she can sleep on my lap. This has lead to the adorableness that is my WiP snoring, purring or occasionally stretching a paw or two out from underneath.

I am halfway through week 3 of the Posy colourway and enjoying it. It’s long enough that the cat and I can sit underneath it and the pattern is set and forget at this point. I’m not rushing to finish this but it hooks up pretty quickly.

The other project is a FO! Yes, not content with two pairs of socks in Jan, I also started and finished in early Feb, my Quarter One Good Intentions Project, which was an Oliver’s Hat from the Jamieson & Smith pattern/history book. I bought the pattern yarn (J&S Supreme Jumperweight) and the book at Kathy’s Knits in Edinburgh when t’hb and I went up to Scotland in 2017. We were based in Glasgow but took a day trip to Edinburgh as t’hb had never been.

It was a very enjoyable knit and I have enough left to knit another with a slightly different colourway, possibly for t’hb. Need to weight the remains and do some colour swatching. Like all my fairisle, I knit it inside out to even my tension out and it has been very useful in these recent gales.

I do have a sock in progress but I’ll save that for the next OUaS post as it should be in a more exciting state by then.

FO: Byatt Shawl

My Byatt has been completed since July but has been unsung on the blog since. Partially because it’s a tricky one to photo – the wingspan on mine is at least 2m (which made blocking fun) and also because it has been mostly living around my neck as we settle into the unsettled temperatures of Autumn in the UK.

But no longer! I have taken some photos and it is getting its FO post before it goes back round my neck in the arctic wasteland that is my office right now.

Knitted in an entire skein of lovely squishy Stranded Dyeworks Merino Nylon (formerly Oasis) as the MC (plus a smidgen of Debonnaire Shimmer Sock, kindly donated as an emergency yarn transplant by knitting friend J, as I played and lost yarn chicken/stuffed up the increases at some point) and Truly Hooked Sparkly Sock for the CC. The Stranded Dyework’s was purchased at a pop at YAK on LYS Day 2017 and the Truly Hooked was a Yarndale 2017 purchase. Both would be purchased again.

I’ve knitted a lot of Karie’s shawls and I always enjoy them – they’ve always got something that keeps me hooked into the knitting and the shaping on this one is a nice change from the usual triangle. I even didn’t mind the garter stitch.

This was also my Good Intention’s Quarter 3 project, over in the KnitBritish Ravelry group. I shall post more about my Good Intentions Projects at a later date but I do believe it will be running again, which is great news. I definitely have to knit from stash next year, what with shortly to be possessing a mortgage. *shocked face emoji*