Holiday shopping is now complete.  My cookie list is done and supplies have been purchased.  I turn again to knitting (in between the batches).

My hunter’s mittens (or shooting mittens, or flip top mittens, or convertible mittens) are more than three quarters done.  I’ve finished the first one, and am up to the fingerettes of the second.  I read through the list of patterns that I posted last week, and absorbed some general principles. In specific, I adopted the afterthought thumb and line of purls along the knuckles to make flap attachment easier from this one but mostly I just went along on instinct. 

I’m using a rustic-type worsted weight wool.  This particular bit is left over from a sweater I knit for myself from yarn I bought at a Gore Place Sheepshearing Festival, held annually in Waltham, Massachusetts. I’ve written about my No Math Pullover before.  My normal gauge for this stuff is about 5 stitches per inch over stockinette on US #7s.  For this project I wanted something tighter and more wind-proof, so I ratcheted down to a mix of 2s for the ribbing and #4s.

I worked about five inches of wrist ribbing in K2, P2, switched to stockinette, knit to the thumb point and introduced some waste yarn for the thumb opening.  Then I knit to the knuckle ridge and purled the stitches on the back of the hand.  After about four rows of spacer after the knuckle ridge, I worked some evenly spaced mini-fingers.  Once they were complete, I picked up stitches along the knuckle ridge, cast on extras to go across the palm (I used cable cast-on for that to make a firm edge).   Once I had my stitches for the mitten end established, I did several more rows of ribbing across the palm side to keep the edge from curling and stretching, then finished off the mitten end with a standard sock toe, ending it off with Kitchener grafting.  Then I went back and worked a standard thumb.

The palm side is shown on the left.  You can see the thumb and ribbed edge of the mitten end flap.  The back of the hand is shown on the right, with the mitten flap end folded back to expose the fingers.  I’m pretty happy with the result.

Now, some people have asked how I figure out the sizes for gift knits.  I try to do it by nefarious means most of the time, but for this gift I admit I showed a partially done (and woefully oversized) mitten to the recipient.  I knew I was so far off that the result would be laughable, so I spoiled my own surprise.  

Nefarious means:  For socks, I eyeball the target feet.  I’ve been known to measure footprints in the snow, sneak looks at spare shoes when visiting, or note where the toe and heel line up when their owner is standing on a patterned rug,then return later and measure the interval.  Hats are harder, but since knitting stretches, planning on a 21-inch head circumference to start with, then doing a plus or minus based on whether I think the person has a larger or smaller head than usual has always worked for me.   For mittens, I usually contrive some sort of conversation that leads to a hand to hand comparison between the target and me.   For example, I’ll ask about how comfortable the target finds his/her particular model of keyboard, note that my experiences vary, and posit a hand-size difference.  That usually leads to a palm-to-palm comparison, which gives me a rough idea of size.  I’m sure others have similar sneaky ways to evoke the needed data.  I’d love to hear about them, too.

Side trip – I’ve had a request for the recipe for Oysters.  I posted it last year around this time.  Enjoy!

Sometimes having lots of dribs and drabs in one’s stash can lead to some strange picks as projects and available yarns are aligned.  This week’s projects are case in point proof. 

Knitterguy asks why on earth one would want to knit an acrylic/cotton blend scarf.  I agree with him.  Those fibers are far from warm and cozy, and there are lots of better choices for a warm neck wrap.  In this case i plead a confluence of several factors:

• The screaming yellow color.  The crossing guard in question will appreciate it.
• Having the yarn on hand
• The target recipient’s frequently repeated statements that she can’t wear wool

Now I don’t want to start the whole, "but of course she can" or the old warhorse perceived allergies vs. real allergies debates.  I take her words at face value.  She doesn’t want anything made of wool.  She gets a nice, bright scarf in a color she favors and fiber type she believes is best for her, and I find an appreciative home for yarn I’ve held on to for upwards of ten years.  But if I were knitting this for me, I’d be looking into a supersoft merino, or cashmere/merino blend for sure.

Next up appears to be a pair of flip-top mittens.  I’d like to make something for a friend who has a predeliction for outdoor activities in the winter that occasionally require the use of bare fingers.  A pair of these should be perfect.  I note the presence of lots of free patterns on the web (convertible mittens, work mittens, two-way mittens, urban coping mechanism mittens I and urban coping mechanism II) plus several well regarded for-pay patterns (Pop-Up Paws, and Patons.)  But in true String-or-Nothing tradition, I plan to leap off the cliff and improvise something on my own.  I’ll probably start by looking over what’s out there, then messing about with the concept.  Not sure if I’ll do a fingerless glove surmounted by removable finger end cap, or if I’ll do a fingerless mitten.  I suspect the former will stay in place better, while the latter will be quicker to make. 

As to what yarn to use – I’m not sure yet.  This particular target recipient has an interest in historical things, so I may look at some of the more rustic looking 100% wools I have.  For example, I’ve got some leftovers of Cestari light fingering weight 100% wool singles in both white and heathered barn red.  I could combine the two into a Ragg-style looking DK equivalent.  Hmm….

My stash diving and holiday knitting continue.  Unfortunately, my camera and camera skills are far from the best (plus I’m still having some platform issues left over from my system upgrade), so you’ll have to use some imagination on this one.

Believe it or not, there are three strange and blurry objects above.  At the top is a long scarf knit in the loopy mohair previously described.  It’s in plain old garter stitch, but the resulting fabric looks a lot like the curly lamb stoles my great aunts wore four decades ago.  It’s plush and lush.  It also left precious little left over, but I contrived a simple beanie cap from the leftovers.  That’s the shapeless black lump at the bottom of the photo.

In between is a simple knit/purl patterned scarf in screaming yellow.  In this case, yellow is appropriate because the thing is a gift for a crossing guard.  The pattern is a basketweave variant from B. Walker’s Fourth Treasury.  The yarn is a well-aged stash resident – Brunswick Bermuda II.  Bermuda is a cotton/acrylic blend, with a maker’s gauge of 5 stitches per inch on US #6 needles.  I am not quite sure where I came by the five skeins of screaming taxicab yellow, but I suspect that this is a leftover from a project my mother made years ago.  I can say that I am not fond of working with the stuff.  It combines many of the worst features of both cottons and acrylics.

To start, Bermuda has a loosely twisted multi-strand construction, with about eight constuent plies.  Eight point-trapping nuisances that make this yarn a nominee for "Worst Splitting Yarn I’ve Ever Used."  The stuff is unstretchy as one would expect, but so much so that knitting evenly with it is a huge challenge.  To keep my stitches uniform, I’m having to knit as tightly as possible, especially on the transitions between knits and purls.  Even so, a knit/purl combo pattern is better than all stockinette for this yarn, as the texture doesn’t betray those "I’m knititng with an uncooperative cotton" occasional leggy bits.  But I can go on…  The texture of this stuff is string-like and hard in the fingers, very uncomfortable to use especially given the tightness I’m trying to achieve.   I’ve knit up three skeins of Bermuda so far.  One more should make the scarf a useable length, and any leftovers will become fringes.  Ending this one off can’t come soon enough for me.

I’m not quite sure what stash diving I’ll do next, or what the next bit of knitting will be, but I suspect that there will be at least one more pair of socks between now and the holiday, plus some more snowflakes for the tree.

The socks are done, and I’m looking over all the possibilities for gift knitting that can actually be accomplished between now and when needed.  So far I’ve stockpiled two pairs of socks, two scarves, and a pair of halfie mittens.  This is an excellent opportunity to go through my small quantity stash box and identify things that can be pressed into service.  So far I’ve found:

• A large ball of heavy loop mohair/wool blend in black, probably bought at a Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival from Tess Yarns.  If I recall correctly the year I went Saturday night and Sunday morning were quite rainy.  The Tess booth had the misfortune of experiencing tarp failure, and the stock got quite wet.  Those of us who chanced by when the inventory was being packed up at the end of the day were treated to sizable discounts on sopping skeins.  When knit up in garter stitch this stuff is a dead ringer for curly lamb or mouton.  Perhaps a scarf and (if there’s enough) trim on a matching hat.  Or perhaps if I feel adventurous (and there’s enough), a shaped shoulder shrug in imitation of a curly lamb stole of the 1950s.  One drawback – mohair and I don’t get along very well.  I’ll probably have to knit this wearing gloves, or put up with itchy, red hands for the duration. (I didn’t realize how poorly we got along until long after I had bought the stuff.)
• Some leftovers of cotton blend and cotton velor yarns – the dribs and drabs of kid sweaters long since completed and outgrown.  Since I often buy yarn in bag quantity I almost always have extra.  This stuff would be good for small seaman style inside the coat type scarves. 
• Some sport weight Shetland two-ply yarn in cranberry, olive and muted blue, left over from a linen stitch sweater-suit my mother knit sometime in the mid 1960s and shamelessly stolen from her stash.  The colors look quite good together and are not as out of favor as they have been in the past.  Hats?  Ear warmers?  More halfie mitts, but with stranded patterns?  No decisions yet, but the stuff is still in excellent condition and should be used
• Some fingering weight cotton blend sock yarn.  I am not a fan of cotton socks, I find them cold, clammy and hard textured compared to wool or wool blend socks.  But I have some sock weight cottons.  These should make nice wrist warmers or ear bands.  Or perhaps cell phone or iPod socks for the gadget-blessed who have requested such things.  (Someone please tell me why anyone would want an cozy for a device upon which engineers have lavished man-years of effort to mitigate the problem of heat dissipation inherent in small scale electronics.)

And that’s just in the top layer of the box.  Stay tuned!

First, an aside.  I finally darned in the ends of my Alcazar shawl.  I only end off ends when the final disposition of a piece has been decided.  In this case it means I’ve decided that as much as I love my Alcazar, there’s someone who deserves it more.  My shawl has now found its way to its new (and very appreciative) owner, and I beam with my own pleasure at  joy with which it was received.. 

My socks continue.  I’ve finished the first and am only a single evening away from finishing the second.  I’ve placed the motif on the ankle.  Because I chose to work it as a knit image on a purl ground, and the motif is made up of solid blocks and strips, unstretched the sock looks rather strange.  The motif draws in like ribbing and the purl background puffs out compared to the rest of the stockinette sock.  But when worn, it looks fine.  The purl ground recedes, the proportions of the knit motif correct, and the draw-in so evident in the unstretched item goes away.

The motif on the ankle isn’t very visible in this photo, so here is the graph:

Yes, it has a specific meaning.  A work-related meaning that a very small minority of the viewers here will recognize.  And no – I didn’t stick to the graph in the absolute.  My final version has the same height to width ratios as this visual, but because there is very little variation row to row, I repeated the center area rows and the upper end rows more times than they are shown here. I did that because my graph was done on square units, but my knit stitches are not 1:1 ratio.   I needed extra rows to achieve these proportions.

In terms of placement, I centered the unit on the ankle bone, and repeated it on both sides of the sock.  The red line marks the centermost point and the whole graph represents half the sock’s stitches.  Because I work with four DPNs in the work and one in hand with an equal number of stitches on each of the four DPNs, finding that center point was very easy.  I do admit that once I began the pattern panels I rearranged the stitches so that I held the motif and field stitches (the green ones) on a single DPN, eight stockinette stitches on a second, the other side’s motif on a third, and the final eight stitches on the fourth DPN.  I did the reassortment to avoid the possiblity of a loose stitch marring the center of the motif.  While I don’t have ladder-itis between DPNs in stockinette, I am less sure of myself in reverse stockinette, so I avoided the issue entirely.   I planned my vertical placement so that the motif would occupy the center third of the sock measured from the bottom of the foot to the bottom of the ribbing.  That means I worked a few rows after completing the heel and before starting the motif, and working my post-motif stockinette to the same depth as the patterned part.

Finally, I finished the sock off with plain old 2×2 ribbing, whick I did until I ran out of yarn in my standard issue Regia 4-ply 50g/210 meter ball.  I’d say the resulting sock should fit from man’s shoe size 9.5 wide through 11 (possibly 12) medium width or so. With luck the target recipient has feet in that size range.  If not, I’ve got an alternative recipient planned, and I’ll knit another smaller pair for target #1.

A couple of people wrote to me yesterday to report on faux chain mail
sightings – mostly in movies. With the exception of a couple of very
recent mega-budget fantasy and historical pictures, the majority of
movie mail is the fake stuff. For example, in Branagh’s Henry V,
a couple of the leads wear real chain (laughably without the padding
that actual use would require), but the majority of the cast including
some characters with significant screen time wear knit yarn mail.

On the knitting front, I am finally tinkering with the reverse Dutch heel flap for toe ups thought experiment
I wrote about back in March. I’m working a fingering weight sock on US
#0s, on 68 stitches around (17 stitches each on four DPNs). The method
I wrote about then looks confusing to me, even in retrospect, but
trying it out all became (sort of) clear.

I knit my foot until
I achieved the length I thought I’d need from toe to hard up on the
ankle. Then, taking care to center the pre-heel bottom of the foot
stitches on the bottom of the foot – I worked a protruding flap on
about 20% of the heel’s stitches (more on the figure later). I slipped
the first and last stitch of the flap to make picking up along it
easier, and knit it about 1.5 inches long. When the flap was that
length, and finishing with a knit row, I picked up the stitches along
the flap’s left side, then knit across the top of the foot, and picked
up the stitches on the flap’s right side. I then was ready to begin my
gusset decreases. I worked along for a while, decreasing at either side
of the picked up stitches every other row.

It quickly became
clear that this heel – although structurally correct, was flawed. I had
a narrow band of stitches along the center bottom of the foot, with two
prominent ridges made by picking up on either side of the heel. I had
extra depth in the ankle, but the heel itself was too shallow for a
comfortable fit. So I ripped back and began the heel again.

Right
now I’m inspired by Emily Cartier’s suggestion from the blog comment
she left on the entry cited above. She suggests working a reverse flap
heel on 50% of the available stitches rather than 20%. Bigger is most
certainly warranted here, but 50% looked a bit big to me. So
(apologies, Emily) I’m going to try a figure closer to 30%. Now I’m at
the large rumply yarn clot formed by ripping back, and naked foot
stitches just before the heel begins stage, but this is what I’ll do,
and how I’ll go about working the heel on 4 DPNs.

1. I’ll
   look at my toe and identify the center of the bottom of the foot (no
   point in working a heel akimbo). That point will lie between two of my
   DPNs, as I work my socks using a set of five.
2. I’ll arbitrarily
   set my bottom of the foot flap at 22 stitches total. Since I’m working
   with 17 stitches on each needle, I’ll slide six stitches from the
   leftmost bottom of the foot needle left to the one that normally holds
   only the top of the foot; and I’ll slide six stitches from the
   rightmost bottom of the foot needle right onto the other top of the
   foot needle. Finally, just to make things a little clearer, I’ll
   consolidate all the heel flap needle onto one needle. I now have three
   needles in my work: one holding 22 flap stitches, and two I’ll ignore
   for a while, each holding 23 stitches.
3. I’ll knit back and
   forth in stockinette on the 22 heel flap stitches, slipping the first
   and knitting the last stitch on all rows (making chain selvedges on
   both sides of the flap), until the flap is about 2 inches long. I’m not
   sure how many rows this will be – I could do the row gauge computation,
   but the exact number of rows is pretty much immaterial.
4. Once
   I’ve decided my flap is long enough (some trying on may be required),
   I’ll make sure I finish at the end of a knit row. Then I’ll pick
   up stitches along the left hand edge of the flap, taking advantage of
   the chain selvedge to do so. I’ll remember this number.
   Then I’ll knit across the top of the foot, back to the base of the
   flap, and pick up the same number of stitches I picked up before, this
   time heading up the right side of the flap.
5. While I’m working the pick-up row I’ll reallocate my stitches
   onto four needles. The two needles that hold the top of foot
   stitches each have six extras. When I finish the pick up row, I
   should return to having the 17 original stitches on each of the two top
   of foot needles. The other two needles will each hold half of the
   remaining stitches. They’ll be a bit crowded, but the goal will
   be to work the gusset decreases until they too have 17 stitches each.
6. I’ll begin the gusset decreases by looking at my left-most heel
   stitch needle, and noting which stitch is the last of the ones I picked
   up along the heel flap. The stitch after that one – the first
   stitch of the actual foot is the one that will be the top stitch of the
   SSK decrease column on this side of the ankle. Likewise, the last
   stitch of the actual foot will form the top stitch of the K2tog
   decrease column on the other side of the ankle.
7. I’ll work in plain old stockinette until I get to the last picked
   up stitch, identified above. I’ll do my SSK, then work across the
   top of the foot. I’ll continue in stockinette until the last
   actual foot stitch before the picked up stitches on the other side of
   the heel flap. I’ll do a K2tog with this stitch and the first
   picked up stitch, then finish out my round by knitting to the center of
   the heel.
8. I’ll work a complete round in plain stockinette with no decreases.
9. I’ll repeat the last two steps above until I have 17 stitches on each needle again. At that point the heel should be done.

Now, there’s no guarantee that things will actually work out as
planned. This is theory only. I have to try it out and see
if the heel flap is too narrow (solution – try again with more stitches
allocated to it); if the gussets are too shallow (fix – knit the
initial flap to be longer); or if the total heel is too deep (fix – rip
back a bit of the foot before starting the heel again).

Now – why is there no picture to accompany this grand experiment?
Because all I’ve got is a sock foot knit in solid gray Regia on four
needles, sitting next to a rat’s nest of rippled yarn. Not
exciting in the least. That and I’m still relegated to posting away from my base station because my computer is still in the throes of reassembly.