Socktoberfest #9
Oct. 8th, 2006 01:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI'm six rounds into the colorwork for the socks. (Remember that I'm doing both at the same time, so that's 6*140*2, which is 1680 sts into what is allegedly the *hard* part of the socks.)
This is a whole lot easier than I thought it was. Seriously. The tensioning thing is a bit tricky and of course, getting your hands to work both at the knitting is a pain in the ass, but those are a matter of practice and can be overcome by knitting a mindless 2x2 checkerboard square pattern until you have everything under control WRT the mechanics of two-handed-color-knitting. (If it seems like I'm getting up to speed right quickly, here, note that I learned to do two-handed-color-knitting when I played with the pink and purple mittens that I got bored with and abandoned halfway through. I already knew how to do that part, thanks, and my m4d sk1llz got brushed up during the swatching for this project.) The first row or two, I had to pay attention, to make sure I was chunking the information in a reasonable and knittable fashion, and to make sure I wasn't getting lost in the chart. After I got a couple of rows under my belt, the whole thing became a whole lot easier. It's fun. It's got a rhythm. You can kind of look at the chart for the first half of the motif and then the second half is semi-autopilot. For real. Here, lookit the strip I'm doing next.
It looks mindless and all... but it's not. Put the strip in context, and you can kind of see where things are. Also, because I have the damn thing divided up so that the motifs end at the needle breaks, finding one's place ain't all that hard. First, here's the context:
Here, you can see that the pattern repeats for the large motifs... you knit to the middle and then you repeat, reversed, how you got there. For the first big motif, we can see that there's the following... RGRRGGRRGGRGRGGRR(g)RRGGRGRGGRRGGRRGR. The colors and such sort of unwind in my head for the second half of the motif. Honestly, I thought that the HoHI project would entail a whole lot of staring at the chart. That is not turning out to be the case. The case is that I have to read the chart pretty carefully for the first needle (which has both motifs on it), but after that, there is plenty of time for eyeballs to watch television.
This is a whole lot easier than I thought it was. Seriously. The tensioning thing is a bit tricky and of course, getting your hands to work both at the knitting is a pain in the ass, but those are a matter of practice and can be overcome by knitting a mindless 2x2 checkerboard square pattern until you have everything under control WRT the mechanics of two-handed-color-knitting. (If it seems like I'm getting up to speed right quickly, here, note that I learned to do two-handed-color-knitting when I played with the pink and purple mittens that I got bored with and abandoned halfway through. I already knew how to do that part, thanks, and my m4d sk1llz got brushed up during the swatching for this project.) The first row or two, I had to pay attention, to make sure I was chunking the information in a reasonable and knittable fashion, and to make sure I wasn't getting lost in the chart. After I got a couple of rows under my belt, the whole thing became a whole lot easier. It's fun. It's got a rhythm. You can kind of look at the chart for the first half of the motif and then the second half is semi-autopilot. For real. Here, lookit the strip I'm doing next.
It looks mindless and all... but it's not. Put the strip in context, and you can kind of see where things are. Also, because I have the damn thing divided up so that the motifs end at the needle breaks, finding one's place ain't all that hard. First, here's the context:
Here, you can see that the pattern repeats for the large motifs... you knit to the middle and then you repeat, reversed, how you got there. For the first big motif, we can see that there's the following... RGRRGGRRGGRGRGGRR(g)RRGGRGRGGRRGGRRGR. The colors and such sort of unwind in my head for the second half of the motif. Honestly, I thought that the HoHI project would entail a whole lot of staring at the chart. That is not turning out to be the case. The case is that I have to read the chart pretty carefully for the first needle (which has both motifs on it), but after that, there is plenty of time for eyeballs to watch television.
