Susan Goldstine

Thanks! I’ve cooled on socks for a while, but when I’m back at it, I’m looking forward to more little Frankenprojects. 😉

Well damn, that’s cute! 🥰

🧶 knit 🧶🧶🧶

Three pairs of socks lie flat on a wooden deck. The pairs on the left and right are stacked so mostly the top sock is showing, and the left and right socks of each pair match. The left and right socks of the middle pair do NOT match, and they are laid out side by side. The lefthand pair is striped in an eight-color sequence of greens and blues, with solid teal at the toe and heel. The right-hand pair is striped in a six-color sequence of various blues, with dark royal blue toes and heels. In the middle pair, the striped yarns from both outer pairs of socks are helix knitted together so that they flow seamlessly around the sock like the stripes on a candy cane. One sock has a teal toe and a blue heel, while the other has a blue toe and a teal heel.

My bonus pair of socks on my feet, which are side by side on the deck floor. My toes are pointing towards the top of the photo, teal on the left, blue on the right. I really enjoy the way these socks go together without matching. The stripes in both sock kits alternate light and dark, and I tried to keep them out of phase so that I would have light on light, light on dark, and darks on dark. The different numbers of colors in the two kits (eight blue-green, six blue) also naturally shuffled things up. The result is that in place of the crisp, four-to-five row stripes each ball of yarn makes on its own, these socks have broader stripes of mixed shades with blurrier edges.

My feet in the blue-green-blue chaos socks, but crossed to better show the inside edge and heel of the left sock. I do a fair bit of show-off knitting, but my goal with these socks was to take a break from complicated patterns and enjoy the exquisite colors. Vanilla Extract, the pattern I used for all three pairs of socks, is now my go-to nothing-fancy sock pattern. I experimented with several different types of ribbing for the cuffs; this pair has 1x1 twisted rib, which I particularly like for the muddled striping.

#ShowMeYourKnits

Luckily, I bought a heap of self-striping sock kits from Lollipop Yarns before they vanished. Since there’s always half a pair’s yarn left over, I decided to helix knit the remnants of two kits for stripe-on-stripe chaos #socks.

🧶 #knitsky 🧦

www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...

An easier way to Kitchener Stitch (also called "grafting seams" or "weaving seams") knitting blog

Part of what brought me knitting #joy when I was rearranging the shawl was my first time using techknitting’s genius method for grafting without a sewing needle. Life changing. Perhaps it will bring you joy, too.

🥰🧶🎉

techknitting.blogspot.com/2007/05/easi...

My Shawlography, after its recent brioche-flipping surgery, draped across a grey stone slab and the brickwork under it. This was Stephen West’s Mystery Knit Along in 2021. I’m not really a mystery knit along fan—I sometimes knit them after the fact, since I prefer to know what I’m knitting—but I got swept up in this one and it was a blast! The yarn kits from Stephen and Penelope dropped right around my 50th birthday, so I splurged and ordered the Flamingo Cherry Mominoki yarn kit. My pattern modifications were holding a glittery mohair from my stash with the pattern yarn color in a few places (love!), and switching foreground and background colors in the brioche stripe (regret). Here, I’ve reknit the stripe so the colors are as planned, and the black in the foreground echoes the black in the multicolor fan at the center of the shawl’s crescent.

My Shawlography lying on a bed, midway through the process of grafting it back together. The color way consists of black, dark purple, dark cherry, flamingo pink, and purplish ecru. In the center of the semicircle, the shawl starts with a tiny cherry semicircle, surrounded by a fan of textured stripes in prominent black with the other colors peeking out from behind. The shawl design has a two-color brioche strip many sections later that echoes that central fan, with black in the raised foreground and cherry behind it. I flipped them, thinking the brighter color would look better on top, and my fervent desire to go back to the original design is what moved me to pick the shawl apart in the first place. I thought I was going to knit a new startup row, attach the brioche strip the other way, and then make a second incision to flip the border, but I decided it was easier to knit a new brioche section from scratch so I only grafted once.

My Shawlography as I originally knit it, wrapped around my stoic blonde cockapoo. Good girl, Kiko. I’ll take it off soon, I promise. With the flipped brioche colors, the cherry yarn in the brioche together with the cherry in an earlier section of red and purple were just too much of the cherry color for me. It felt like the shawl was out of balance. The mohair I added is a sparkly lavender grey. I held it with the black for the i-cord spiral that looks like an old telephone cord, with the cherry in the line of bobbles, and with every sixth garter stripe in the border, so it cycles through all five yarn colors.

#ShowMeYourKnits

Shawlography has brought me #joy on several fronts. Beyond the pattern being a surprise, I was surprised when my entire knitting Zoom crew jumped into the MKAL with me. And this year, it was a joy to take it apart and put it back together the way I wished I’d made it.

🧶 #knitsky

I second the recommendation. Nice work!

I wear orthotic inserts for fallen arches, and that makes most sandals unwearable. So when I find a style of open-toe, closed-back sandals I like, I tend to stock up. 🙂

🧶 yarn

I feel your pain. ❤️

Yeah, it’s a simple process with a super neat result. You do have to slide the knitting back and forth on a circular needle between colors, but it doesn’t take long to get the rhythm.

My rectangular Reversible Stripes scarf, pattern by Purl Soho, laid in a zigzag on a wooden deck. The arrangement shows three segments of the right side and two of the wrong side. I’m calling them right and wrong for clarity, but as the name implies, both sides are meant to be showing. The scarf is knit from a solid black yarn and a bright jewel-toned slow-color-change Noro yarn that cycles through teal, mustard yellow, pink, lavender, cornflower blue, and grass green. At this scale, both sides of the scarf look like a dense field of bright color dabs carpeting a black background, with a more bumpy texture on the right side.

A slightly up-the-nose selfie of a younger me wrapped in the Reversible Stripes scarf she’s just finished. I’m wearing a melon colored top, whose front is mostly covered by the spread-out ends of the scarf running down my chest and off the bottom of the photograph. Both ends are showing the right side, with vertical columns of jewel-toned purl bumps jutting out from the black yarn. In fact, the black yarn has a similar texture, but being black and slightly thinner, it visually recedes into a backdrop for the brilliant Noro colors. Around my neck and at the inner edges falling from my shoulders, the scarf folds over to show the wrong side. The stripes here are smoother and run horizontally, each stripe a sequence of alternating knitted Vs and yarn slipped to the front.

#ShowMeYourKnits

My favorite #scarf knitted for myself. With two yarns, the free pattern turns linen stitch into bumpy vertical stripes on one side and flat horizontal stripes on the other. I ditched the trendy urban neutrals for neon Noro on black.

🧶 #knitsky

www.purlsoho.com/create/2017/...

So excited for you! It gets less scary as you go. ❤️

YouTube video by Netflix The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix

The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell. Such a delightfully weird concept, beautifully executed. Martha Stewart by way of the Muppets/Addams Family. 😘

youtu.be/a6UKGhiE_Nk?...

I have blocked and *worn* a shawl and then noticed I dropped a stitch. Fortunately, only one motif was unraveling, and I managed to stabilize it and camouflage the error pretty well by weaving in some more yarn. 😬

My recently finished Shawlography, Stephen West’s Mystery Knit Along from fall of 2021, being blocked on my guest bed. I’m not really a mystery knit along fan—I sometimes knit them after the fact, since I prefer to know what I’m knitting—but I got swept up in this one and it was a blast! Shawlography is a highly textural five-color shawl, and I ordered one of the S&P kits made for the event: the Flamingo Cherry color way of Mominoki yarn. My pattern modifications were holding a glittery mohair from my stash with the pattern yarn color in a few places (love!), and switching foreground and background colors in the brioche stripe (regret).

My Shawlography after the initial incision. The color way consists of black, dark purple, dark cherry, flamingo pink, and purplish ecru. In the center of the semicircle, the shawl starts with a tiny cherry semicircle, surrounded by a fan of textured stripes in prominent black with the other colors peeking out from behind. As written, the shawl design has a two-color brioche strip many sections later that echoes that central fan, with black in the raised foreground and cherry behind it. I flipped them, and it has annoyed me ever since. Here, one row of cherry yarn has been picked out, and the stitches on either side are on two long circular needles. The needle sizes are smaller than the size 4 I used for the shawl to make it easier to catch all the stitches.

A closeup of the divided shawl, this time with the outer part flipped over the way I will sew it back on. I like it so much better this way! I will have to do a second cut, flip, and graft at the top so that the sections above the brioche are turned the right way again. The mohair I added is a sparkly lavender grey. I held it with the black for the i-cord spiral that looks like an old telephone cord, with the cherry in the line of bobbles, and with every sixth garter stripe in the border, so it cycles through all five yarn colors.

#ShowMeYourKnits 🧵2/2

… and so I finally began the first of two surgeries to flip the brioche strip so it echoes the center of the shawl! I’ve been meaning to do this for four years, and it’s finally time. I have the yarn remnants standing by.

This is my current #WIP. Wish me luck!

🧶 #knitsky

Shawlography pattern by Stephen West This semi-circular shawl was originally published as the Westknits Mystery Shawl Knit Along in 2021. Choose five contrasting colors of fingering weight yarn and enjoy all of the fun textures throughou...

#ShowMeYourKnits 🧵1/2

Just finished a long knit and am unusually indecisive about my next knit. So I turned a finished object back into a #WIP.

I did the #westknits 2021 Shawlography #MKAL as a mystery, with a few mods. I always regretted having swapped the colors in the brioche section…

Right! That tells you how far apart 13 evenly spaced decrease rounds should be. So for instance, if the sleeve has 110 rounds before the cuff, 110/13 is 8 and a bit. If you decrease every 8th round, you’ll do the final decreases at round 104, then have 6 rounds until the cuff.

Glad you find it interesting. This is actually knitting, but I’ve done mathematical crochet, too.

Also, if this was too much of a distraction, then perhaps I shouldn’t leave this here. Or mention that there are 15 years of exhibitions. 😬

gallery.bridgesmathart.org/exhibitions/...

I don’t understand the question. Isn’t it self evident? 🥸😀

If the black very-close one had been the blue exact-same-style one, I think today’s outfit would have clicked.

Yeah, the way I found out was looking down after a colleague unironically declared “I love your shoes!” Now, I’m determined to find the perfect outfit for them. 😀

The lap of my academic robe, dark pink with black velvet trim. Below it on the grass are my feet with red glossy polish on my toenails. My left foot is in a beige suede sandal, while my right foot is in a metallic black sandal.

Opening Convocation.

“Tell me you were running late this morning without telling me you were running late this morning.”

🤦‍♀️

Right? The Blue Brick gradients are something special.

🧶 knit

My Vitamin D cardigan just after I finished knitting the sleeves. At the top of the image is the sweater’s yoke with its grids of eyelet increases, the fronts and back on stoppered circular needle cables. This section of the cardigan is crescent shaped and blisteringly bright green. The sleeves, which jut down and outward, show the yarn’s gradient fade through pinks into maroon and purple.

The Vitamin D cardigan in progress. The sleeves are knit flat and then seamed, and this photo shows the sleeves after I’ve sewn them into tubes. The upper part of the cardigan is now folded so the left front overlaps the right front, and the sleeves hang down.

The Vitamin D cardigan after the first set of short rows. Since the pattern stops these short rows before reaching the front edges of the cardigan, the cable of the knitting needles encircles the body, with both needle ends emerging a few inches from the edge of the left front. The color of the body has reached the greenish orange, melon-y tones, with a smooth color fade on the back and a sharper color jump towards the front corners of the short-row wedge. The rest of the cake of body yarn sits in the lower right, showing the rest of the color fade into magentas and purples.

It’s been a while since I posted any progress shots of my Vitamin D Cardigan, so here are both sleeves and some of the short rows. We have hit the technically wearable phase!

🧶 #knitsky

www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...

thebluebrick.ca

If you go for it, good luck!

Again, I wouldn’t, but if you’re set on it, wait until you’re well rested and capable of immense patience, and don’t be set on getting it loose right away. Just tease it gently until you can follow where the main strand is going and decide if you want to unweave and reweave, or just tweak tension.

What they said. It’s not going to be noticeable unless the scarf end is laid flat on a contrasting surface and the corner is smoothed out. But if you really can’t stand it, I’d recommend taking a very fine, sharp needle and gently picking at the grippy mohair bits to loosen it up.

Yes, their blog makes it look like they’re trying to bring something like the old PoD marketplace back, but that it would have to be rebuilt from scratch. Also, that post might be from many months ago, so who knows.