Maisie has asked for a pair of blue socks. I let her pick out a skein and we wound it up together. I traced around her food and took some measurements. All that’s needed is a bit of math and I can cast on.

I’m wearing my new sweater today and it is just what I wanted. The pattern is Clarke by Jane Richmond. I’ve been wanting to make this sweater since seeing her in-progress sample last summer and snapped up the pattern as soon as it was released. I love the colour combination she used but wanted to work from my stash as much as possible. All the colours in my sweater are leftover skeins of Cascade 220. The red was a full skein (thus giving me my three stripes) and the others were all partial skeins. I bought the grey to tie them together. I also bought a scale to weight my skeins as I went along. I was really set on getting three stripes out of the red and needed to track my yarn carefully to make sure I’d have enough yarn for both sleeves. I have a very small ball of leftovers. I had to do a minor pattern adjustment to accommodate my gauge. My swatch was just a bit looser than the pattern gauge but I didn’t like the feel of a tighter fabric in this yarn. With the aid of a bit of math I determined that the stitch counts for the 34” size would give me the widths for the 36” size. The pattern is fill-in-the-blank style so I filled in all the stitch counts from the 34” and the lengths from the 36”. My sweater fits just the way I wanted it to: it’s loose but not billowy, the sleeves are close fitting but roomy enough to get a shirt underneath, the fabric is dense but soft, and the collar is just right - not tight, not open. The only other adjustment I made was to add an extra half inch to the sleeve lengths. When I finished my first sleeve I tried on my sweater to see how it fit and decided it was just a smidge short. I like my sleeves to go well over my wrists and cover the base of my hand a bit in a cozy shirt. I played a bit of yarn chicken doing those sleeves and ended up having to search out and buy a third skein of grey in the same dye lot for my extra inch of knitting. Consequently the stash is down five but up one. Grey is always useful though.

I took these pictures on the trail near our house. I was a little worried about a rambunctious dog coming along and knocking over my tripod but I had the trail to myself for the duration of my photo shoot. I’d been hoping for sunshine to record my sweater but at this time of year sunny = cold. It was a very pleasant -11℃ with very little wind while I was outside. A pearly overcast day probably shows the colours better anyway.

Ravelry link with details here.

Pattern: Basic toe-up socks
Yarn: Regia 4-fädig Color in colourway # 3726
Size: 60 stitches around (to fit my feet)
Yardage: about 80% of the ball
Needles: 2.00 mm wood

I’m wearing new socks today. I finished them last week and finally found some time and light to take some pictures of them during Maisie's nap yesterday. Unfortunately this is the only picture I got where my camera decided to focus on my socks instead of my background but I like the way it came out so that’s okay. I love self striping yarn. It’s so much fun to work with. As soon as you get used to one colour, bang, there is a new one. These were my carry-around knitting for ages. My Ravelry notebook tells me I started them in March. Six months isn’t too bad for a project I don’t spend much time working on. I decided to try out a new (to me) bind-off for this pair of socks. I usually use a sewn bind off but I’ve been curious about Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-off and wanted to see what it was like. It turned out well and was pretty easy to do. I don’t know if it looks quite as neat as the sewn bind-off but it really is surprisingly stretchy. The bound off edge at the top of my socks can stretch at least as far as the ribbing making for some extra comfy socks. I’m very happy to be finally adding this pair to my sock drawer.