Socktoberfest #5

[which_chick]

"This one has an illustration," she said enticingly.



In the last post, I went over how to use the swatch (which, technically, should measure 4" by 4" if you're going to be all serious about it but since I knit regularly like a machine and felt that I had reached a stable gauge at an inch and a half of swatching, I stopped earlier) to generate an accurate number of stitches. I mentioned happily that I stole additional patterning from the nice Latvian Mitten book. Now I'm going to generate me some charts.

Since the HoHI socks are largely symmetric in a quadrant sort of way, I only have to chart about a quarter of the pattern if I avail myself of the rotate feature of Microsoft Paint, that graphics tool of impoverished non-college-students everywhere. I gotta say that using MS Paint to generate better knitting charts is only marginally a cut above graph paper and a sharpie and the reason I am not using graph paper and a sharpie is that I do not HAVE graph paper. For the folks at home, here's the pattern for the HoHI socks. The big diamonds will center front and back. The stuff in grey will be Charcoal and the stuff in white will be Bold Red. Charcoal is the pattern color (though with this design, pattern and background are kind of moot) and will be held in my left hand (which is the lower carry and which, for stranded knitting, is the pop-out color when I knit). The pattern motifs are cribbed from Meg Swanson's Blue and Cream Stockings and from the Latvian Mitten book but I think the sources are still obvious and I am NOT claiming this is my own work. Please don't sue me. I'm not making a profit, here. I'm making socks.



This graph does not, as yet, include the part about decreasing for to fit my legs while not-looking-like-shit. I haven't gotten that far, but I can state for the record that the decreases will occur on the skinnier of the large (not diagonal stripes) motifs. I'll think about it more here once I'm done posting and I want to look at when/where I decreased during the Eyestrain Purple socks because I can't remember what I did. Yes, of course I took notes with that, yes, of course, until I got bored with taking notes and just winged it. (Gee, couldn't see that one coming at all, could you?) I've lost the notes I had and the mohair content on the Eyestrain Purple socks has fuzzed, obscuring the stitches. *sigh*

Anyway, it's nine in the evening and I haven't done any actual knitting on my fucking socks. I've done lots of pointing and clicking but no actual knitting. (I've got the socks cast on and am generating 2x2 ribbing in the Bold Red for the tops of the socks. I think I need to actually knit, so enough with the pointing and clickiting for the evening. I decided yesterday, via an exhaustive process of trial-n-error, that the ribbing will be in ONE color and that the elastic sock-holding-up will be as per the method developed with the Eyestrain Purple (I think the actual color is called Wildflower) socks, which means I get to do that when I'm done with the sock part, assuming I am still alive by then and we aren't using antigravity or something to keep our socks up.

I'm emailing this crap to the office so that I can print it out and have charts. At least it'll be enough to give me a starting point once I get the ribbing knocked out. Stay tuned, folks. Tomorrow we'll have an exciting action shot of how to knit with lots of DPNs and one big circular, combining the worst of both worlds for a munged knitting experience that probably only works for people like me anyway. See How Not To Do It! Marvel at how lame I am. Enjoy the comforting feeling of superiority vis a vis your method of knitting. Yep. It'll be great.

Comments

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

I thought you were going to talk about the other chart of feet.

And since I have a bone spur... that's not really the best way to measure my feet...

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Nope. I post the "do this, it's cool" things and let people do or do not, there is no nag.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Argh. Okay. The internets say that in stranded knitting (what we are doing to make this pattern fly), the yarn that comes from "underneath" is the "pattern" yarn and should be the brighter of the two colors. Right. (Every time I look at the graphic above, it flickers between foreground and background. Man, the unrighteous are so totally going to know fear...)

When I knit two-handed stranded knitting, the yarn I have in my left hand is the one that comes from "underneath". That yarn will be red for these socks. Everybody make a note. (I love how, in writing, I can pretend that I have minions when in reality, there are crickets chirping.)

Everyone did notice that the patterns have offset repeats and they're the *same number* of repeats? I'm quite proud of myself for that, you know.

[not-your-real.livejournal.com]

Everyone did notice that the patterns have offset repeats and they're the *same number* of repeats?

Ah, very good. Missed the chance for a sort of Bali-ritual-calendar effect, but two relatively prime repeats would have made for very long socks if you wanted the whole cycle showing.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

It would have totally pissed me off to have not-the-whole-pattern-cycle showing. The not-lining-up thing would also have driven me batty. It's better this way, really.