Knitting, science, love, nerditude. http://www.johnnysstew.com/nano/nanopants.html This is starting to get silly.
That'd be 5 finished objects in the last month and a half, thank you very much. But it'll probably be the last one for a while, because the only project semifinished project left is a ways from being done. Well, I did just do a good job of hemming up some pants, but I don't consider my short-leggedness to be especially blogworthy.

I started these socks the day we moved to Ithaca. We had an empty house, and I only had odd bits of yarns that no mental gymnastics could turn into an actual project. The one unread book I had was boring. This gave me a perfectly reasonable excuse to go to my new local yarn shop and buy yarn despite the overgenerous amount I already have. But like the reasonable person I am, I avoided the huge piles of Schaefer (a local yarn producer!), and instead got some fairly plain sock yarn, with the thought that doing some interesting stitch patterning would keep my brain occupied and take more time while I was waiting for the movers.

Except that all my knitting books were on a truck....somewhere (3 days later, we found out they were still in Chicago). I can start a toe-up sock without a pattern, but this yarn really needed some texture. So, as I knit the toe of the sock, I thought about what I could do with patterning. Any patterning on the sole of a sock hurts my feet, so I decided on a simple panel up on the top. I doodled around with a few different cables before I came up with this one. Unlike the more traditional Aran-style braids, the individual strands here don't move all the way from the left to right side; each intertwines with one neighbor, then heads in the other direction. The behavior of the individual moving strands reminded me of a chain link fence.

When I got to the leg portion, I thought a bit about how I wanted to do the back. I didn't want to add more cables in; I continued to think of the patterning as a fence, and chain link fences don't just separate in mid-air. Instead, I added the ribbing in slowly, which you can see on the sideways foot above. I was thinking of a picket fence going into the distance. I'm not sure that worked, but I like the diagonal line of ribbing anyways.

A few weekends ago we spent many hours sitting at J's baube's bedside with his family, and I pretty much knit the entire foot of the second sock in the car on the way to Buffalo or at the nursing home. It's nice to have something to do when you don't even want to go to the bathroom "just in case", and it lent a bit of normalcy to my world at that moment.

I finished the socks yesterday. They're the same size as each other (which is my usual sock problem), but they're both the teensiest bit baggy. I'm hoping that a run through the wash will help tighten them up, but they're pretty comfortable even if that doesn't happen. They took me just over a month to knit, but it feels considerably longer, since more happened in the last month than in the last several years all put together.

I'll be posting this pattern here for free soon, because it's been a while since I've done that. I'm still working on the Crowned Heads scarf pattern, though, so it may be a bit. http://www.johnnysstew.com/archive/mar08.html#31808 The FO's just keep on coming:

(I got the giggles mid-picture. It always happens when you're me.)

A sweater I started working on... when? early July, apparently. Yikes. 95% of it was knit within a month of my buying the yarn, but it sat in my knitting bag, half-basted together with two different sleeve caps, until about a week ago. Then I finished it in two nights.

The hardest part was choosing a sleeve cap. I used methods I roughly lifted from two separate places to design the sleeve caps; one was short and wide, the other taller and narrower (each I would describe as "more like the way I just described them than a usual sleeve cap", for what it's worth). Interestingly, I now know from ripping one out and redoing it that each used almost exactly the same amount of yarn, and so both covered nearly the same area in spite of their very different shape. When I first basted the sweater together, I tried to get some pictures to make you all decide, but it just wasn't working.

What was the difference? Well, although it wasn't photographable, they did look different to me, which again, is interesting since they each covered the same number of square inches of arm. Each seemed to fit well; there was no particular bunching or tightness on either. I finally decided that the wider sleeve cap looked slightly less "formal", in a way I can't define. It just had a slouchier way about it, in spite of the similar overall fit.

If this sweater was intended for lounging, I would have chosen the wider sleeve cap. But I wanted it for work, so I went with the narrower one. The next time I'm doing any sleeve cap, either following a pattern, or striking out on my own, I'll probably keep this in mind and adjust accordingly. I'm sure this stuff is in seamstressing books, somewhere, but I just pick it up where I can. (Anyone know of a good seamstressing book? I'm tired of unfitting buttondown shirts.)

I am sooo happy with how this sweater turned out, though. The sleeves are the teensiest touch of a bit too long for the lab, but it's super clean, professional-looking but not too stuffy, and the short-rowed v-neck makes me feel more clever than my Ph.D. does.

I mean, just compare it to the my initial doodle:

That's it!

I'll probably post the pattern at some point, but as a one-shot, one-size-only- fits-my-broad-shoulders thing. I got into a fair amount of detail about the design process along the way, so go look at the July and August archives for some ideas, if you're interested. http://www.johnnysstew.com/archive/mar08.html#31208 A reason for a few days of quietness.

I'll be back this weekend. http://www.johnnysstew.com/archive/mar08.html#30408