Nerd Wars 2 Dissertation Finished, Gallery of Hats :D

 

 Back in June (before we went to Japan :) I posted about my big summer project, what they call a dissertation for Nerd Wars 2. My proposal was to make 14 hats, one for each week of Nerd Wars 2, to be donated to relief efforts for the survivors of the March, 2011 earthquake & tsunami in the Touhouku region of Japan. The deadline for my original proposal is August 31st & I'm happy to say that I posted the finished project today. Yay!

 Here's a gallery of the hats I made & some commentary on them:

Hat #1) Yotsuba& Hat. The green Fair Isle hat is themed to the “Yotsuba&” manga. The main character, Yotsuba, is a little girl with green hair who wears it in 4 ponytails, like a 4-leaf-clover (which is also reflected in her name, as Yotsuba means “4 leaves”). The design on the hat could be a 4-leaf clover, & it’s green like her hair. It’s made from Knitpicks Swish DK & my own pattern.

Hat #2) This the “Naruto & His Mom” hat. In chapter 498, “My Mom’s Red Hair”, of the Naruto manga we learn that Naruto’s mom was a redhead & that Naruto’s hair is yellow like his dad’s. This hat, made from KnitPick’s Bare DK superwash merino that I dyed with procion dyes, reflects the colours of their hair, & celebrates their reunion. The pattern is Lion Brand’s crochet earflap hat, & I used an I/9.5.50mm hook.

Hat #3) The Tsubasa Sempai hat, in honour of the character from the manga “Gakuen Alice”. This character is a friend & supporter of the main character, Sakura Mikan, & is most often shown wearing a fun & funky hat. His Alice is the power to manipulate people by using their shadow, & the colours of this hat have a strong light & shadow component as well. In the manga he’s often wearing an earflap hat. This hat was made from Knitpicks Bare superwash DK yarn that I dyed with procion dyes & the above-mentioned earflap hat pattern.

Hat #4) The Kobato hat, named for the title character of the Kobato manga series by CLAMP. Kobato is required to wear a hat at all times & the ones she wears are always very cute, often with flowers, bows, & lace. I designed an earflap hat around a motif from the wonderful book that is an hommage to Kobato’s cute hats. It’s made from Swish DK.

Hat #5) Cardcaptor Sakura Hat, from the manga of the same name, also by CLAMP. Sakura wears lot of hats to co-ordinate with the costumes she wears as she chases down the Clow cards to become the Master of the Clow. This knitted baby hat has a colour scheme that reminds me of Sakura plus a star motif on either side like the hat she’s wearing in the picture. It’s made from Serenity sock weight yarn, & the motif is from onion skin-dyed sock yarn, the pattern is my own design.

Hat #6) I’m calling this one the Ouran Cosplay Hat because it reminds me of the cosplay turbans from the manga Ouran Koko Hosutobu volume 13 (pictured below the hat). It’s the The Antelope Hat (a pattern from Ravelry), which I sized down a bit to make it child-size. It’s made from Woolease for easy care.

Hat #7) Nausicaa Hat. I present the hat inspired by the manga by Hayao Miyazaki himself, Nausicaa. It’s the Aviatrix hat (another Ravelry pattern) made from superwash, sport-weight wool that I dyed myself. Plus I added mittens to match.

Hat #8) Bear Hat. This hat (with little bear ears) is dedicated to the character Bear from the Gakuen Alice Manga. Bear was created by one of the students whose Alice allows him to animate stuffed animals using part of his own soul. Unfortunately, this ability also shortens the life the the user. Bear is first introduced as a recluse living all alone in a cabin in the woods, a violent & non-speaking creature who inspires fear in all of the students. Eventually, the main character of the series (Mikan) makes friends with Bear & learns that he’s violent because he feels terrible about his creator having given up part of his soul to create him. Bear becomes a sympathetic character & eventually makes friends.I made it from Woolease yarn & is my own design.

Hat #9) Shikamaru Hat. This hat was inspired by the character Shikamaru from Naruto. Shikamaru is a classmate of Naruto’s & is acknowledged by all to be a genius. He’s also incredibly lazy, just barely passing his classes instead of aceing them because he’s just too lazy to care. Almost all of the adult ninja in Naruto wear camoflage-type clothing (while the kids tend to wear more colourful clothing), but Shikamaru wears camo from the time you first meet him. This would have been a great baby hat for him :) This was made with Berroco Sox yarn & is also my own pattern.

Hat #10) This is the R2-D2 Hat. I designed it myself, & knitted it from Swish DK, using size 2 & 5 needles. It matches the R2-D2 Mittens (see below) that I made for a Nerd Wars 2 challenge. There is, indeed, a Star Wars comic :)

Hat #11) The Pikachu Hat! It’s crocheted from a book of Japanese Pokemon-themed patterns. Pikachu is a popular Pokemon & is featured in manga, anime, & video games. It’s made from Caron Sheep(ish) yarn.

Hat #12) The Pokeball Hat, from Ravelry. Another Pokemon-themed hat made from Caron Sheep(ish).

Hat #13) The Pu-reen Hat. This is the Pokemon called “Jigglypuff” in English (“pu-reen” means “pudding” :). Made from the Sheep(ish) from the Japanese Pokemon pattern book.

Hat #14) The Rang Hat. Rang is a mouse character from the Korean manwha “One Fine Day”. Rang is one of the cutest mousies ever created. I love this series! It’s made from Woolease yarn & is my own design.

Here are some nerdy statistics from my dissertation: 

* I used 7 different kinds of yarn to made these hats, in 3 different weights: worsted, DK, & fingering.

• I used 11 different patterns, 7 of them from books or other sources, & 5 patterns were my own design. Half of the hats were from my own designs.
• I used 25 different colours of yarn to make these hats :D

 And here are a few more projects that are going (or have gone) to the kids in Touhouku:

 The Twin Spica hat & mitts are already there, sent in June for one of the Nerd Wars 2 Round 1 challenges,

the Bunny mittens, made for another NW2R1 challenge,

The R2-D2 mittens, made for a NW2R2 challenge,

and the Frog Hat, made for a NW2R1 challenge.

I've also decided to make a pair of mittens for each hat, & so far 9 of the hats have mittens:

Which leaves me 6 more pairs of mittens (if you add the Frog Hat ones :).

And here's what I wrote when I posted the finished project, describing the process of making these hats:

I’m really glad that I was able to use lots of different techniques & yarns to make these hats because I never burnt out on hat-making & kept coming up with ideas for more. It was a lot of fun to theme them to different manga characters, especially since I don’t personally know the children who will receive these hats & so I could put happy thoughts of the characters into the hats as I made them :) Also, because I don’t know the children, I tried to keep in mind what kinds of things people in Japan enjoy or would like in the hats. One thing that’s really popular there (particularly with women & children) is anything that’s cute, so I made a lot of hats that are cute & that don’t require much explanation (for example, the R2-D2 hat, because Star Wars is pretty popular there &, of course, the Pokemon hats). Two of the hats were made while I was in Japan this summer & one of them even sparked a conversation with a lady on the train to Kamakura, which was fun. As of right now, I have made 9 pairs of mittens to match the hats. I will make 5 more pairs to add to the package before I send it, since I don’t feel right sending hats without mittens.

While we were visiting Japan we stayed with a friend who has spent the summer counselling earthquake survivors, many of whom who are suffering from PTSD & other anxiety disorders. She said that things there are still pretty bad because, even though they are working very hard to create new housing for all of the people in shelters, it’s not so easy to recreate livelihoods & fill the gaps left by missing family members. The earthquake & tsunami aftermath are also very much in the daily consciousness of the Japanese & we saw quite a few shows on tv while we were there that showed survivors as they struggle to put their lives back together. In Tokyo, every taxi we saw had a bumper sticker that said “Ganbarou Nihon” (“Do Your Best, Japan!”) & I found stickers at a temple that were being sold to fund relief efforts (& bought a few).

These little hats are not going to put make a huge difference, I know. But I hope that their cheerfulness & warmth will brighten the lives of the children who receive them & also the lives of the people who see the kids wearing the hats.

Presenting: The R2-D2 Hat

After making the R2-D2 mittens for one of this month's Nerd Wars 2 challenges, I decided to make a matching hat for my Nerd Wars 2 dissertation project & send them to Japan as well. So, I got the soy sauce dispenser out again, which I've been using as a model, & found some graph paper with smaller squares. I took the gauge from the mittens (5.5 stitches per inch with Knit Pick's Swish DK & size 5 needles) & decided to make the hat 104 stitches around. I charted half the hat, & decided to add some asymmetry by duplicate-stitch embroidering details, like the blue patch in the middle & the red patch at the bottom. Then I added crocheted accents as well.

The bottom is k2-p2 ribbing (on size 2 needles) for a turn-up cuff in the body colours of the little droid. And to explain the hat's model a bit better:

We used Brendan's C3P0 (dismembered) backpack, which needed a bit of support from Brendan :D

And here are the mittens, to complete the set. I learned a lot form making the mittens, so the hat went much more quickly. Charlie likes the hat best, which makes sense because I had more room to make it all really look like R2-D2. And that makes hat #10 finished & I'm over 75% done with the project! Now I'm working on a Pikachu baby hat- should be cute!

Coming Home from Japan: Culture Shock

This is the shirt Brendan wore for our departure from Japan :)  As departures & traveling go, it was a pretty easy day. We had done the bulk of the packing on Thursday evening, so all there was left to do was clean up, look around, & stuff a few last-minute things (mostly food to go) in bags, & then zip it all up. The front desk called us a cab around 10:15 in the morning & then next thing we knew we were heading through the heavy Tokyo traffic (Brendan & I counted 39 Priuses during the 30 minute trip!) to Ueno Keisei Station. We bought 11:40 am tickets there for the Keisei Skyliner to Narita Airport, & had only 15 minutes to wait before boarding. There were hardly any other people in our car, which underscored the lack of tourist travel to Japan these days.

The trip took just about an hour. Here's a look at the train from a curvy part of the line.

And here are my beloved blue tile roofs:

They just sparkle in the sun & feel so Japan to me.

We were sad to leave, but somehow, traveling has it's own momentum, so we went with the flow. It was a great relief to get rid of the luggage at the airport, especially after waiting nearly half an hour in a huuuuge line to check in. Then security, where laptops come out of bags but shoes stay on :)  And then waiting near the gate for about an hour & 1/2. We bought lunch at McDonalds (it's become a tradition when we leave Japan), but I don't think I'll find the excellent ebi fry (fried shrimp) sandwich I had for lunch at Narita at our local McDonalds, even if I was inclined to go...

We had decided to upgrade our seat to "economy comfort" ones after the very cramped airplane ride to Japan, but that meant that we weren't sitting together as we usually do. Brendan & I had the window & middle seats right behind Charlie, who was at a bulkhead in the middle seat. The person seated in our row at the aisle wasn't very much fun to be near- he jiggled his legs a lot, which shook mine, & he wouldn't stand up when we wanted to get up, but made us climb over him. Sigh. But, it was only 9 hours to St. Paul, Minnesota, our jet-lag stop, & after flying 13 hours to Japan, anything less is really close to heavenly. It was a very lively flight, with a lot of kids, & just about every time I looked up they were feeding us (& Brendan & I did get our veggie meals- yay!), so we didn't really rest much at all. Brendan read & I knitted (hat #9 for my Nerd Wars dissertation!) & played Bejewelled. The time passed.

Then we landed in Minneapolis/St. Paul, & then we were going through customs, got our bags, back through customs with the bags, & then we were looking for a taxi. Even at my brief stop in the rest room at the airport, culture shock kept making itself felt. I automatically looked for a stall that had a western toilet because in Japan they have traditional toilets (basically a porcelain ditch with a flusher) everywhere, sometimes they're the majority & there's only one western one... but here they were all western! Duh! Plus, there were paper towels in the bathroom, something I only found once in Japan. All of the escalators were running, which was another difference, since in Japan, in most places, at least one elevator or escalator is shut down to save electricity. And the airport was cool, rather than on energy-saving mode like most public places in Japan. Plus, there was such a diversity of body-shapes & colours of skin & clothing being worn- we were definitely not in Japan any more.

 Charlie does internet searches for neat places to stay & he found a doozy this time in the St. Paul Hotel. It's a grand, old place in downtown St. Paul. Just gorgeous! Brendan has an airbed in our room & it fits just fine, we're not squooshed at all, even with all the bags.

Here's Charlie reading the paper this morning in our 4-poster bed. I feel like I'm climbing into a treehouse when I get in bed :D Kind of the opposite of a futon on tatami floor, I guess.

We found an italian place to eat last evening, although our bodies thought it was the wee hours of the morning, we were a bit hungry. Then we showered & hit the beds about 8:00 pm Minnesota time. I was awake again by about 2:30 am, & Brendan followed me about half an hour later. We read quietly until about 5:00 am, when Charlie woke up. I was starving!! I snacked on green tea cookies I'd bought in Uji & waited until 7:00 for the hotel restaurant to open. We all had lovely big breakfasts, explaining to the waitress that our bodies thought it was dinner time :)  Now we're just waiting for the nearby Minnesota Science Center to open at 9:30 so we can walk around & get ourselves tired enough to sleep again. It's supposed to be really hot in St. Paul today, but after a week of Tokyo's heat & humidity, I think it'll feel kind of familiar. Tomorrow we fly back to Upstate, New York & our usual lives.

I can't help but feel that my usual life will never be the same, though, having spent these 3 weeks traveling half-way around the world. Living in a place, even for just 3 weeks, that is so acutely aware of electricity usage has got to have an effect on my thinking when I get home because it became such a habit in Japan. Brendan discovered a bunch of new foods that he'd never eaten before, such as zaru soba, so I know we'll be enjoying some of these together when we get home. If I carry a tenugui around with me all the time at home, like I did in Japan, then I won't need to use the paper towels in restrooms, even if they have them :) I think the thing I'll miss the most, though, will be the time we spent together as a family, doing & experiencing things together. That's a pretty precious thing, & probably one of my best memories of all of this trip. Tomorrow- home!

Nerd Wars 2 Dissertation hats- halfway there

In and around preparing to fly to Japan (this Sunday!) I've been trying to get a bit ahead on my Nerd Wars 2 Dissertation hats. I explain a bit more about the Nerd Wars on Ravelry & my dissertation in this post. I've been having fun matching hats with illustrations from manga & vice-versa. For the dissertation I decided to make 14 hats over the summer, one for each week of Nerd Wars 2. The first two hats that I made are posted here & here. I've also decided to make a pair of mittens for each of the dissertation hats, since it only makes sense to send sets. Where I'm sending them is to Knit for Japan, a site set up by a lovely woman, Bernd Kestler, who is studying at the Nihon Vogue knitting school in Yokohama, Japan. After the March 11 earthquake & tsunami in the Touhouko region of Japan, Bernd started collecting hand-made items for the survivors & taking them there. She also teaches knitting in the shelters to help people there pass the time (&, I think, to feel a bit more control over their lives, which is how I feel when I make things). If you follow the Knit for Japan link above you'll find pictured my first donations, the Twin Spica baby hat & mittens, which I made for another Nerd Wars challenge. It was such a thrill to see the picture on her site & know they'd arrived safely! Bernd sent me a lovely message through Ravelry (which is how I found her site), saying that she'd be going back in July & find a baby to give them to.

So here are 5 more of the hats that will be going to Touhouko later this summer:

The Kobato hat, based on the manga character of the same name by CLAMP:

It's a mutation of the Lion Brand earflap hat pattern that I like so much. I looked through the wonderful book of crochet motifs from Japan & found a motif that ended-up with 72 stitches around the edge, which the number of stitches you get after all the top increases. Then I made the rest of the hat from the pattern & added the motifs on the flaps, to get the Kobato effect :) I used KnitPicks Swish DK & an I/9/5.50mm hook.

This is the Tsubasa Sempai hat, for a character in the manga Gakuen Alice.

Tsubasa Sempai is an older-brother figure to the main character in the series, & he wears lots of funky hats. He's wearing an earflap hat in the black & white manga illustration. This is also the Lion Brand hat pattern, using Swish DK from the Bare line that I dyed using procion dyes.

For this little hat I redesigned a newborn hat pattern that I created before Brendan was born & have been using ever since for gifts. The pattern is part of a set of hat, mittens & socks, all using fingering weight sock wool. I made the hat a bit larger, to fit a better range of baby-sized heads, & a little longer, too. I used Deborah Norville's Serenity Sock Weight yarn, with size 0 & 2 needles. I call it the Card Captor Sakura hat, for the character from the series of the same name (also by CLAMP), I made little motifs from onion skin-dyed yarn that match the hat Sakura's wearing in the illustration. The little mittens that I plan to make will have motifs as well.

Next is the Ouran Cosplay hat, which is the Antelope Hat by Kelly McClure, pattern found at ravelry. I found the pattern, which I really liked, then had to spend some time looking for a manga character/illustration to fit it to! I found this illustration from Ouran High School Host Club of the club members cosplaying in turbans with bangles hanging off them. The hat reflects the bangles in the yarn-overs. Whew! I made it from Woolease yarn & size 2&4 needles.

And hat #7 is the Nausicaa hat (& mitten set). Nausicaa, the heroine of this manga by Hayao Miyazaki himself, wears an aviator-style hat with chin strap, like this Avitrix Hat by Justine Turner. This was another case of finding a cute hat that I wanted to make & then having to match it to an illustration, but Nausicaa came to my rescue :) I made it from Bare Swish DK that I dyed with procion dyes.

And there you have it! Half-way to the 14 hats for my dissertation & for Touhouko. This project has been a wonderfully concrete thing I could do while waiting until I could kick into high gear, Japan-trip-wise. I also plan to turn this blog into a travel blog, & I'll be posting pictures & stories from Japan as we travel around & visit friends. Stay tuned!

Some beginnings...

Well, I've had a lot of ideas lately, & they've added up to starting three different projects, but as my crafting time is divided between these three projects, I have no idea when they'll be done! (Not to mention that there's a new set of Guild Wars over at Ravelry's Ankh-Morpork Knitter's Guild...) So I thought I'd share the works in progress.

At top is my lately-much-used basket of KnitPicks Swish DK superwash wool. I was inspired by Alice's Do You Dare to Wear Granny Square post to start my own granny square cowl. I decided to use her Grandala Square instead of a regular granny, though, extending it a bit to be the right size. (On a side note, my 9th-grader son has been studying geometry in school & decided to work-out the area of the whole Grandala, & then the areas of the circle in the middle & the square on the outside, just for fun. I wish I could do that...) I made green, blue, & purple squares, but have decided to wait on the rest (Alice used 7 squares for her cowl) until an order of additional colours of yarn comes in.

Also in the basket are one completed & one half-finished Bunny Nugget, which I found from following a link on Alice's blog to this blog.

These bunny nuggets are so cute, I just had to start making a rainbow of them for myself!

I did change the pattern, which has you make it on 3 double-pointed needles, bind-off the top of the head, knit the ears separately, then sew them on. I am a relentless fusser, & prefer to knit as much all at once as I can, rather than sew things up. So here's the orange one with the first ear still on the needle. First I made it on 2 circular needles because I prefer this technique (I used size 1 needles because I knit very loosely & this pattern calls for a firm gauge). I basically stopped where she has you bind-off, knit the first 3 stitches of the next round, put them & the last 3 from the other needle on a piece of yarn (you can see it there), do a 3-needle bind-off on the middle stitches, fudge the last bind-off so there are 3 stitches remaining on each needle, then continue around on 6 stitches for 15 rounds. After finishing the first ear, I pick up the 3 on each side on the 2 circular needles, plus one along the bound-off edge (which I knit together with the first stitch in the round) & knit the second ear the same.
Then I added button eyes,embroidered the nose, made the pom-pom tail, stuffed it, & sewed an overcast seam on the bottom. The bunny sits up because of the tail. I think I'll make the eyes with different buttons, so they have some personality :)

The third project is my next pair of lacy socks!

I am very psyched about these. I plugged the Vine Lace pattern from Barbara Walker's 2nd pattern treasury into my basic sock template (mentioned here) & I really like how it's coming out. One thing I'm discovering is how difficult it is to photograph lace knitting. When I got close (to see the pattern) with my flash camera, the flash made the picture washed-out, so I tried to use my iphone camera, but it's kind of dark. I'll keep experimenting, because this lace is so pretty! I'm using KnitPicks Stroll Tonal sock wool in Gypsy (which is on sale right now!) & I just really like it.

So much to do. I'll keep you posted as to my progress :) 

Seven weeks, seven pairs of socks...

Hello! Sorry it's been so long since I've been around. First the Holidays hit- we celebrate Hannukah & Christmas, and Oshougatsu (Japanese New Year) so it was really busy. I hope to catch the blog up on the holiday crafting in time... And then, seven weeks ago I had surgery- a total reconstruction of my lower back (L4-S1)- and I've spent the time since surgery in recovery. My initial recovery went very fast & very well, (for a middle-aged chick who turned 53 in the middle of it all... :) but now I'm in a slump & looking around for amusement. So, I thought I'd finally update the blog & get some of what I've been working on into the blogosphere.

Before I went into the hospital I thought about what I'd like to do during recovery. I designed two adult Surprise Jackets, based on Elizabeth Zimmermann's pattern (which I purchased from Halcyon) and found the wool I'd need to make them (just laying around the house, you know :). I also thought that small projects would be a good idea, so I purchased both of cookie a's sock books and stocked-up on sock wool (knitpicks was having a kit sale, so that helped a lot :). I also cast-on a pair of socks for Brendan, since he needed an extra pair & I figured having them already worked for an inch or two would give me incentive. I've gotten to the point where plain sock knitting is pretty boring, hence the cookie a books (very intricate patterns), so making socks for Brendan, even though they may be from fair-isle striped yarn, & he really needs them, can be a chore. Plus his socks are BIG. He's only 2 sizes away from my husband Charlie's feet (Charlie is 6'2") and I can only just get Brendan's socks from 100g of sock wool any more (adding to the excitement, let me tell you).

OK, so I went to the hospital & 5 days later came out with a new back. I also came home with a walker, a commode seat with arms for our downstairs toilet, and the inability to walk up stairs (completely unexpected). Charlie, bless him, was able to deal with this ably (with just one day's notice!) and set up the only extra bed we had in the living room. This extra bed happened to be a Victorian monster & you can see the cosy fit in our small living room :)

It all worked out very well, though, & a week later I was doing stairs, & the bed came down, & we got our first floor back. I was very glad for the projects planned and started ahead of time. It takes some time for anaesthetic to wear off, and add to that the pain medicine (which I only used for about 9 days- yay!) and what you get is a googly me. My hands were also pretty swollen from the IV's (one in each hand, plus numerous pokes from failed attempts) so about all I could handle, literally, was sock knitting. Brendan's socks became rather a blessing- bland knitting just when I needed it :)

Another unexpected twist that affected my knitting life was the addition of an "afo" (ankle-foot orthotic) at my 4-week check-up. My right foot had "dropped" from some pre-existing nerve issues combined with the stress on the nerves from the surgery, so they recommended a brace to support it while the nerve recovers. The orthotic guy told me I'd want to wear knee socks with the afo, which is a plastic thingy that slips into my shoe, runs up the back of my leg, & then fastens with velcro right under the knee. He was right- it feels really clammy without a sock between me & the top of the thing. But I had only 2 pairs of knee socks when I arrived home from that appointment... My initial response was to start wearing mis-matched socks, since this eked out my knee sock supply. I also found that tights or leg warmers (thanks, Momo!) under regular socks help with this.

mis-matched me

I then looked for some knee sock patterns &, since I wanted to knit them quickly from sport-weight wool, ordered some more yarn. Knitpicks has a sport-weight sock wool in their Felici line, so I went with that. I also ordered some solid-coloured sport-weight wool, only to discover that this wool was heavier in weight (less yards per grams) & not appropriate for the pattern I'd put together for my socks. Of my existing knee socks, 1 pair were made from a Nancy Bush pattern (from her Folk Socks book, not unreservedly recommended as she is rather a ditz- I've met her- and I find there are errors & other monstrosities in her patterns that editors miss). As for the other pair, I looked high & low for the pattern, remembering them as Elizabeth Zimmermann's sheepfold socks. I finally found them in Meg Swansen's Knitting, a book I'd rather forgotten I had. I think I now have all my Elizabeths & Megs in one place, thanks to that little search! At any rate, looking at the charts for the socks (& blanching), I decided to make a short-cut, for the sake of quickly-knit knee socks. I will confess that, at some point in this process, it occurred to me that most people go out & buy knee socks... Anyway, one thing I dislike about knee sock patterns is the point that, if you decrease in the back, forms when you decrease from the upper leg to the ankle.

Brendan's sock at top, plus new knee socks

 Meg's socks elegantly deal with this by decreasing on the sides, by making the sheepfold smaller each pattern repeat. What I did was lift the rate of decrease from her pattern, then put a double-decrease at this rate on either side of a cable running down the sides of the socks. Whew! I kept track of my decreases & cable pattern repeats using a nifty little app on my iphone called Stitch Minder. I was able to knit a pair of knee socks in 4 days, with minimal messing up, thanks to that app.

My version of Kai Mei, with Momo's leg warmers buffering the afo zone :)

In and around making knee socks, I've managed to make 4 other pairs of socks, 3 from cookie a and one, my second pair of crocheted socks, that I will feature in a future blog post. My first foray into cookie a was from her book Knit. Sock. Love. I really liked (& still do) the look of the Pointelle socks, partly because they're so beautiful & partly because they're knitted mirror-image for each foot. The charts weren't too hard to read, but, as always when dealing with charts, I ran into an impediment. I am left-handed & must reverse all shaping in order to get the lace to come out right. I usually just read charts from left to right, but that was difficult with these charts, as they're slanted & not numbered on the left & tiny. So I just read from right to left, reversed all the shaping, & it all turned out just fine.

Pointelle is the pink sock...

Her right sock was my left, & vice-versa, but what the heck, & I love the socks. Encouraged by this, I decided to take-on the Kai Mei socks from sock innovation. I decided to use the new sock yarn from Knitpicks, Chroma fingering, in Pool Party. (I actually started the Wedge sock from K.S.L but they didn't really turn me on, so I ripped.) I love how the lace pattern starts in the arch & moves over the foot so gracefully. Unfortunately, when I got to the lace, I ran into a big snag. The pattern, as charted, just didn't work :( No way could I get her instructions to make the pretty-heart-shaped lace- maybe a lefty issue. No idea. So, I went looking for another lace pattern to plug in & came up with one that was narrower, requiring more ribs between it & the rest of the sock.

It's not nearly as nice as the original lace, since it kind of gets lost in the general ribbiness of the pattern, plus the Chroma is a bit fuzzy, as it turns out, for lace, so it obscures things as well. But I survived & learned along the way.

The next cookie project was much nicer, cookie's Monkey socks from K.S.L. I could read the chart from the left & it was easy to memorise, & I really enjoyed making them.

What next? I have a gorgeous ball of red sock wool waiting for a willing pattern... I have also taken on some other recovery-time knitting projects, to be detailed in a future post. My sock population is certainly benefitting from my recovery  :) I have doubled the number of knee socks I own, & hopefully, within a month or so, I'll no longer be wearing mis-matched socks at all. I'll keep you posted!