Friday Stitch Day update: October 1, 2021
Happy October!
It’s the season of wanting warm knits. You’d think that would mean I would have touched my Wassailing Stole as mentioned in last week’s post, but you’d be wrong.
Instead, I tried my hand at knitting socks.
Well, one sock.
Well, I got a couple inches in before I realized that while I was knitting to the gauge recommended on the tag/band thing of the ball, 28 stitches, which matched the gauge in the pattern I tried (Nomia) but it soon became obvious to me that it didn’t match the density of the socks shown in the picture, and I read somewhere that you should knit socks extra-tight/dense because it helps them hold up to wear.
So I unravelled, and I debated starting over but with a smaller needle to get it up to 32 stitches per 4″ and trying a different pattern to match that gauge (I still want to try Nomia, but I think I’ll try it with a fatter yarn), but instead I decided to use that yarn for a small shawl/scarf, and the gauge is perfect as-is for a pattern from the same site called Nori.
So far, so good:
And the yarn, in case anyone’s interested (WYS Signature 4-ply):
This color doesn’t appear to be on the website currently, and I forget when I bought this ball, probably 2-5 years back. They have others, though.
And, of course, I forgot to take a photo of the initial sock attempt. Oh well.
I did find the mess of double pointed needles a pain in the ass. It seems to me I’ve seen people do them on a pair of short circular needles and I also have a book talking about how to knit two at a time on one really long circular needle, so I might try that for my next sock attempt; the only issue is you then need 2 balls of yarn, which is a pain in the ass if you buy the usual hanks of sock yarn that are big enough to do a pair as you have to unwrap it and somehow find the middle to split it into 2 equal balls and then wind them up, which is a major pain in the ass.
I mean, cheap sock yarn from places like Michael’s is often sold on smaller balls so then that’s less of a hassle, I guess.
Or I could just buy 2 hanks of each sock yarn I like and knit a couple pairs in each color, which I suppose is a way to minimuze wearing them out, assuming I managed to rotate through the 4 socks equally. Or I could do different patterns on the same color.
But that’s getting ahead of myself.
Anyway, onto cross-stitch…
For the Saturday “stars and stripes” theme I did a bit more on Tiny Modernist‘s “Land of the Free“:
The L is a fairly light blue, but en masse it does show up just enough, I think. And I don’t feel like finding a substitution, lol…
I may well find a second darker red since there’s a variety of blues in the original design but only the one red, and then I’d have a bit more variety.
Or I might not, dunno.
Sunday was “samplers” and I started in on the teal substitution in the columns as I mentioned last week for Moira Blackburn Samplers’ “Don’t Worry Spiders“:
The plan right now is to do that inside half of the columns and then mirror it on the other side. I haven’t decided yet if the outside will be a darker green/teal or one of the pinks… actually, I might do darker teal on the outside on this side and then do a similar lighter inside and darker outside with the pinks on the other side… dunno yet.
But I’m liking it so far.
For the Monday “merry” theme, I worked a bit more on Lizzie Kate‘s “Tiny Tidings XXII“:
I think now I just have to do all the snow (including the snowman) and the border on this one.
For Tuesday’s “trivial” theme, I continued on with The Primitive Hare‘s “Imbolc” sabbat freebie:
I think I mentioned last week that I swapped the fence to DMC 4000 instead of black, and I’ve swapped the bottom border and the stalk to DMC 4066… where I live, we may get some snow in February (Imbolc being February 1, aka Candlemas), but it’s mostly green and mucky on Imbolc, and the last couple years my bulb shoots (and I get a ton of snowdrops, which is the flower in the design that I haven’t gotten around to yet) have tended to come up rather yellowy and green, so this seemed like somehow the most realistic color for the stalk.
I mean, they come up yellow because they’ve been coming up through a ton of leaf mulch, and after I’ve hauled the mulch off, the shoots do turn a normal green, but they start off as yellowy green.
Anyway, so that’s that. I’ll do all the white last because of my grubby paws.
Wednesday’s “witchy” stitching was a little bit more progress on Lila’s Studio‘s “Halloween Quaker“:
Emphasis on “little.” I mean, some days I stitch more, some days I knit more, some days I barely spend 10 minutes on either one… and there’s kinda the eternal argument between the two approaches: stitch on one thing continuously until it’s finished or stitch a little bit on many things. I guess I tend to waver back and forth between the two.
For the Thursday “tropical” theme, I mentioned last week the issue with how I’d handled “Quaker Gone Tropical” thus far and my plan to restart it on 22 count aida. That fabric hasn’t arrived yet, though, so this week I decided to put some time in on an old WIP, By The Bay Needleart‘s “Blue Hawaiian Garden“:
Usual fabric info for this: it’s 22 count aida that I hand-dyed. In fact, it’s the second round of it; I’d done one that was more sky-blue but the blues in the palm didn’t show up. Then I tried swapping the colors and going darker and it looked bad, so I did this more orange-y sunset sort of dye job and it’s all good. I think I swapped maybe one color on this and I think it’s one of the greens and I don’t remember why, I just found notes in the baggie about that.
Most of this was already done, I just started the outlining of the garden area on the lower right this week.
And so far today I’ve done a few stitches in the trunk of the tree on “The Birds & the Bees” by Carriage House Samplings:
I should get a few more done later, maybe.
I think that was about it for the week, other that I was doing some decluttering in the family room which is used as a sort of sewing room and I realized I have one quilt finished and ready to sandwich and baste, another with 100 almost finished blocks red, white, and blue log cabin blocks that I just have to finish pressing and squaring up to 7.75″… now I could do it 10 blocks by 10 blocks and I’d end up with a square quilt 72″ wide and long, which is big for a lap quilt, short for a twin bed quilt, and definitely too small for a queen. But then, y’know what… I could treat it as a large throw for on a sofa and there’s my patriotic 4th of July throw quilt for when I move to America and try to fit in.
Of course, that’s just the quilt top, but I know I have a ton of red, white, and blue fabrics to whip something together for the back and just improv piece it.
And I seem to recall that there’s still vast amounts of those sorts of fabrics to make another.
But first I’ll work on getting the other one sandwiched and basted this weekend.
I guess the name of the game is sorta to get projects finished… and by that logic maybe this next week I should skip the daily themes and just stitch one thing til I finish it and then grab the next almost-finished thing and so on.
But that’s not really how I work, so we’ll see how long that lasts.
