What A Week

This week wiped me out. I've been trying to get myself off my horrendous 3am bedtime, 9am wake time schedule all week with variable success. Since that's only 6 hours a night, it's no wonder I'm exhausted right now. I was really looking forward to the weekend to relax, too, but turns out I've got a few thousand lines of data I need to sort through and a few hundred calculations to make before I can get any sort of break. Boo on that. I love Excel, my passion for its number-crunching ways has been established, but sometimes I just need some space in our relationship, some time to see other people (like my poor neglected Fiasco). Sigh.

In happier news, I finished another hat!

Malabrigo Chunky, colorway Vaa

I made this up as I went along, I like how it turned out well enough. It's difficult to know where that line between "This is my design" and "I made this up" is. This hat is simple and anybody could do it, but I did fudge the heck out of the decreases at the top, 65 stitches decreased down to 9 outside of the cable panel, so I don't know if it would be easily reproducible and it's probably not helpful to have directions that say "Now just decrease where it makes sense to until there aren't any stitches left..." Regardless, nothing says "instant gratification" better than a hat knit with bulky yarn. Yay! One holiday hat left to go...

I was all set to cast on my Cotty socks last night when I realized that the needles I like using with STR Mediumweight were already occupied by this pretty thing:

STR Mediumweight, colorway Puck's Mischief

This is the wonderfully addicting South Fork Socks pattern that I truly love. I started these in October and they were moving along nicely until I put them down at one point and forgot on which row I was crossing my cables. I am morally opposed to row counters (ok, not really, they just annoy me) and prefer to simply read my knitting but I have a much harder time reading cabled fabric than plain or lace fabric and I got all confused. Was I crossing the cables 4 rows after the slipped stitches? 5? I can't remember, I can't tell, ahhhhhh! So the dreaded Cable Confusion stalled these socks. Then I got over it, gave some things a try, wrote down the right answer so I wouldn't forget, and decided to finish these socks before I start my Cotty's. The Cotty KAL goes until March so I have plenty of time to get to those. But I still want to cast on a new sock for myself in January, so I'm going to knit Blathnat, the January Mystery sock pattern designed by Irishgirlieknits for the Sock Knitter's Anonymous group on Ravelry. I think I'll use some Bugga for it.

So, revised sock goals for January:

1. finish X-mas Rocks socks (75% done)
2. finish South Fork socks (40% done)
3. start Blathnat socks
4. start secret Valentine's Day socks

That will do for now, I think! I also have plans for mittens, oh boy do I have plans for mittens. I've been knitting for about 4 years now and I have yet to make myself a pair of mittens. I have fingerless gloves out the wazoo, but no mittens. However, I think I'll talk about those tomorrow. :-) Happy Friday! Someone go have fun for me while I fight with my dataset, please!

New Toys

Here's another better-late-than-never Christmas gift hat:

Malabrigo Chunky, colorway Bobby Blue

The pattern is the free and lovely Robin's Egg Blue Hat that I modified slightly. I know I like my Mal chunky hats knit on size 10 needles to be 60 stitches around to fit right, so I cast off more stitches on the seed stitch flap to end up with 60 for the body of the hat. It's a very simple pattern with stylish results. This hat is for my cousin, Megan, to match the neckwarmer I made for her. Perfect set for a teenager, I think.

I received a new digital camera for Christmas (because my old one went swimming in a river while I was kayaking) and it has some really fun settings, like this:

Where has all the color gone?!

As you're taking the photo you can choose the color you want to keep (bright green) and the rest of the photo will be B&W. You can see that parts of the candle in the background still show up green. Pretty neat, huh? So you can expect the photo quality on this blog to vastly improve now from the cell phone shots that I was managing to make look halfway-decent before. While I was at it, I figured I'd show off my mini-skein collection:

As an aside: that candle? $1 at a yard sale. I love it. It is the candle we will use when the Fiasco and I finally tie the knot.

The top left container holds my STR Lightweight minis. The top right container is all Bugga. The bottom one is a mix of STR Mediumweight leftovers, large Bugga minis, and the tiny "emergency skeins" that come with the BMFA Rockin' Sock Club shipments. I like having my minis on display. I found the containers for something like $8 each at Michael's, not too bad. Someday, these minis will grow up to be a mitered square sock yarn blanket. I have almost 60 squares done, but I started in June, so at this rate it will take forever to finish. I'm hoping to get back into the habit of working on it regularly in the near future. As soon as I get to a nice stopping point I'll take a picture and post it here. I'm excited to start the middle portion of it, for which I have an interesting (read: hope it works) plan.

Finally, check out this little gal:

Cuteness!

My future mother-in-law gave me it for Christmas, and I think it's just too adorable. I've started reading an an interesting book called "Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep, and Enough Wool to Save the Planet" by Catherine Friend on my Kindle (another new toy I'm addicted to). The book is sort of a sequel to a memoir about a city couple who start a farm and encounter wacky setbacks along the way. I haven't read the first book but I'm still enjoying this one. The author is clearly not entirely enamored of farming or sheep and she refers to people who really love wool/yarn/the fiber arts as "fiber freaks" but I'm only in the beginnings of the book and I feel a conversion to our woolly ways might be in the works for her later. This book might be dangerous for me to read, as I'm already a fiber freak and have pipe dreams of quitting this whole academia thing and getting some land somewhere remote and becoming self-sufficient. Just me, the Fiasco, and a bunch of livestock and crops in our own little happy place working hard, outdoors year-round... it's difficult to resist, even though we would have to start from scratch, both of us growing up in suburbia. But I'm not writing it off entirely, yet. What are dreams for, right?

This Is How I Roll

If you know me well, then you probably know at least these three things about me:

1. I like thinking about knitting
2. I am prone to fits of weirdly productive procrastination
3. I'm a big giant dork

This is my way of warning you about what you are about to see. I cannot be held accountable, it was bound to happen, this is just how I roll. I give you (wait for it)...








(you curious yet?)...







KNITTING DATA!!! Complete with tables and graphs. Microsoft Excel, how I love thee. Also, you're welcome, world. These needed to exist.

Table 1. This table displays Shoelaceswitcher's knitting projects broken down by project type and status as follows:  projects finished in 2011 or 2010 (FOs), works in progress started sometime in 2011 (Current WIPs), or works in progress started earlier than 2011 (Ancient WIPs). The most knitted project type was hats (total=23) with shawls and socks tied for a close second (total each=22). The total number of projects analyzed both on and off the needles was 108.

Figure 1. This figure displays the same information as Table 1 in bar chart form. It is clear that hats and shawls were the most numerous projects completed in 2010 while hats alone were most numerous in 2011, with socks a close second. It is interesting to note that the same number of projects were completed in both 2010 and 2011 in the mitts and items for tiny humans categories. An increasing trend in sock knitting is anticipated as there is the same number of pairs of socks currently on the needles (Current WIPs) as there were finished in 2010.

There you have it, folks, a grad-student-style knitting recap. Please note that I did stop myself before trying to total the amounts of yarn used for each of those projects in each year and before attempting any sort of statistical analysis. I'm not totally off my rocker, sheesh!

Beginning with Finishing

It looks like this new year will begin with finishing things. I'll be spending the month tying up various loose ends of my master's thesis research and preparing papers for publication. I will also be working on finishing holiday knitting, those handful of pesky little projects that I just could not get done in time. Selfish knitting and free time will have to wait just a little bit longer. 

 But no matter, because knitted hats are fun! They are the first things I knitted without a pattern, I like to just wing them as I go because once you know your gauge and how tight you like your hats, they are basically foolproof and small enough that if you screw up, ripping back is no big deal. The only really important part is how and when to decrease at the top, which can be redone easily if something comes out looking wonky.

Malabrigo Rios, colorways Black and Ravelry Red

I made this hat for my 10-year-old cousin, Austin. His favorite color used to be eye-searing orange, so this black-and-red combo is a nice change. I love the Ravelry Red color, it has some depth to it and ranges from strawberry to candy apple to fire truck red. My favorite part about this hat is that Austin requested it, telling me he needed new "swag". Kids these days...

I also finished the baby booties for my advisor's pending tiny human, and whipped up an adorable little hat to coordinate:

Booties: STR Lightweight, colorway Spinel / Hat: The Alpaca Yarn Co. Paca-Peds, colorway Promise of Spring

The cuteness of this set cannot be denied, I love it. I had tried the Paca-Peds yarn as socks, but I'm used to the spring of STR and 100% wool and the Paca-Peds is 65% superwash wool, 15% nylon, and 20% alpaca, so it behaved very differently. I might try it again with the leftover yarn, perhaps anklets, but I loved it held double for this little hat. I also like how it striped even though I knit it with two strands held from opposite ends of the ball. Magic! I hope the alpaca holds up well for baby wear, I don't see why it shouldn't since it's a superwash sock yarn.

What's your favorite yarn for tiny human knits?

2012 -- Socks, socks, socks

Good riddance, 2011. You will not be missed. Yes, I got engaged and finished my master's during you, but you were also when my family started this steep downhill descent that bottomed out a couple of weeks ago and I am not sorry to see you go. 2012, be warned, if things don't start turning around soon, we will be having words.

 Now that dire warnings have been issued, let's get back to knitting --specifically: socks. 2012 is going to be the Year of Socks for me. There are plenty of other things I want to knit, though, so I decided that to keep things manageable I will be focusing on finishing one sock WIP and one newly cast-on pair each month. If I can squeeze more in, great, but my Fiasco likes to joke that if you don't aim too high you can't fail that often, and even though this philosophy goes against my very nature, for once I'm going to give it a shot.

December's sock goals were to finish my mom's Christmas gift socks and some holiday socks for me. My mom's socks got finished, but alas, the holiday socks did not. Since that was a 2011 goal I'm going to say that I'm not behind for 2012 yet, with the caveat that I better get my act together. (Let's not talk about how I'm still knitting Christmas gifts, ok?)

So! My January WIP goal is to finish my ribbed holiday socks:

STR Lightweight, colorway X-Mas Rocks

And my New Sock goal for January is to (finally!) make a pair of Cotty socks designed by Irishgirlieknits:

(photo from pattern page)

using one of the first skeins of STR that I ever bought for myself, back in April 2010:

STR Mediumweight, colorway Scottish Highlands

I'm excited to get started and I wish you all the best in the new year!