This is the one good shot I got from Boston. I am not a good photographer. This was last Friday morning on Boston Common. While it was cool, the day was beautiful and the trees were in bloom. We had just walked back from having breakfast on Beacon Hill and were headed to pick up the car to drive to P-town.
I’m working on a pair—I hope—of socks from Nancy Bush’s Knitting Vintage Socks, Gentleman’s Sock in Railway Stitch (p. 37). Obviously, using Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock Stripe is deviating from the pattern, but I mainly wanted to try the shaping and liked the effect of the railway stitch. I’m not sure what I was thinking. I had just stated that I dislike purling on dpn’s and then chose a pattern where 40% of the stitches are purls. I like the sock, but it will be too large for me. I knew it would be, but I wanted to follow the pattern once before altering it. I just have to find someone with bigger feet.
The striping is a little odd in the Shepherd Sock. The the length of the pewter sections is slightly longer than that of the neutral ones. On the leg the pewter overlapped slightly, but the neutral never does, giving me a meandering grey strip down the back of the sock. Fifty cents that the other hank does not behave the same way on the second sock. I like what the yarn did on the heal flap and the finer striping on the stockinette bottom of the foot.
Birthday Stash Enhancements
This is what I bought myself for my birthday (at Woolcott & Co.). Top left is two hanks of Malabrigo in Sunset. I should have bought three. The color in this yarn is stunningly rich. I’ve started a brioche stitch scarf. Top right is two hanks of Malabrigo in Continental. I needed more blue in my stash. I seem to have mainly greens and greys. Below the Continental is two hanks of Schaffer Yarns Anne for socks eventually. The first os mainly red and blue with a bit of green, the other is blue and greens. Again, I need more blue, but managed to add more green. The dark blue on the lower left is 1375 meters of Skakel Merino Lace. This took forever to wind. I had to pull up a chair. The light blue in the center is Jade Sapphire Cashmere-Silk, a beautiful, soft yarn that was an absolute bear to wind. Both hanks were very loosely wound and tangled immediately on the swift. The first eventually resolved itself. The second I painstakingly wound on to the spindle of my ball-winder, threading it in an out of the tangles. Halfway through, the yarn broke under the strain and I had to slip-knot it together to continue. Then I unwound the whole thing back onto the swift in order to wind it on the ball-winder properly. This was 400 yds of fingering weight yarn so the process ate a good portion of yesterday morning.
This is a close-up of the brioche stitch on the Malabrigo scarf. The brioche does a good job of highlighting the color variations in the yarn.
Meanwhile, I’ve ordered the yarn to make the Feather and Fan shawl from A Gathering of Lace. I’m still reading Bleak House (to the far right in the stash photo. I caught up on my e-mail at work, but we moved offices to Manhattan Friday, so I’m behind again. The new cubicle has half the space of the old one so getting organized may take awhile.
I had a great bike ride yesterday and I’m already up to end-of-season speed and almost up to endurance. New York drivers still lack graciousness. Some guy shot me the finger yesterday as he made a left turn in front of me, cutting me off. In front of a patrol car—like that matters. Why do some people in cars have antagonism toward people on bikes?
