D-Man Birthday Socks Completed!

Well, I finished the socks for Dax's ninth birthday. As I have said before, his birthday is in September, but with the Ravellenics coming up and Tour de Fleece right now and the smattering of baby stuff that's about to happen, I wanted to get a head start.

They are seriously fraternal twins and I'm really glad I had an awesome model for them!

Anyway, I'm glad the heat here is so bad that he didn't want to keep them on. It makes it a lot easier to sneak them into the present bag in my closet to wrap up in two months for his birthday. Here's to hoping his feet don't grow to enormous sizes before then!

(Also, good news, BSGFPB extended the deadline so this project actually qualified for points! Yay!)

D-Man Birthday Socks

I really apologize for the long wait on an update. I have had so much stuff going on and I do have a spinning project in the works, but I will have to talk about that later as I am not pleased with how it's going at the moment.

Well, on June 1st I began knitting up some socks for my brother's birthday. Yes, his birthday is in September but I have quite a bit of holiday knitting ahead of me, as well as baby blankets for kids due in the Fall, so I figured I should get a head start on it already.

I used the Elizabeth Bennett's Perl Sock Program, which used to be available online but it does not look like it's working currently. I wonder if my sock was the last pattern it churned out? Hm. Anyway, it's a sock generator program and I'm sure there are others out there like it. I know that the pattern I ended up with was sort of wonky and had some incorrectly placed numbers here and there, but I got the trick of it soon enough and I have knit enough socks to identify where the mistakes were.

So, I have finished the first one:

By the look, it seems to fit him very well, which is good. I think what I will do when I weave the ends in is to actually take a different yarn and make a kind of lifeline so that, as he grows, if the width of the sock is still okay I can just go ahead and snip the end of the toe and re-knit it in a similar color so that he can wear them for a much longer period of time.

One thing I will note... please do not ever knit Patons Kroy sock yarn on a size 0 US needle. Your hands will really, really thank you for the consideration. I tend to prefer a very dense fabric for socks, especially for Dax, because he is pretty rough on his feet. Anyway, Patons Kroy is a very thick sock yarn and I would not want to knit it on zeros again after this next one is done. I am knitting fraternal twin socks, so the other one will look slightly different.

Into The Dyepot

Well, on Tuesday my little brother and I went ahead and dyed up some yarn! I had a partial skein of Lion Brand Fishermen Wool and thought it would be perfect for the kool aid experiment.

So, I went off this tutorial and got one kool aid packet per ounce. In this case, there were 4.75 oz of yarn, so we went for five packets. Dax chose two lemon-lime and three ice blue raspberry. The kid loves green, I'm not sure why I was surprised. Anyway, we rinsed the yarn off in the sink and dissolved the packets in some water in our huge stock pot on the stove. The huge benefit to kool aid dye is that it's food safe (duh) and you don't have to get another set of pots like you do for acid dyes.

So, we put the yarn in and added some more water to cover it, put it on high heat until it was almost boiling and let it go for half an hour or so, stirring every 8 - 10 minutes to make sure the dye was soaking in pretty evenly. The only thing I didn't see mentioned was perhaps having something to weigh the yarn down so it's not all floating above the water and not getting any dye. I went ahead and took my collander and set it on top, balanced on the handles of the pot and it weighed it down without pushing it to the bottom. Success!

He seems quite pleased with it, though he was not happy with posing for the picture. I set it outside to dry on that chair for the rest of the afternoon and took it in to hang up and finish drying on the towel rack in the bathroom and voila! It dried and looks great.

It's sort of a minty green color and reminds me of mint chocolate chip ice cream! The big problem I have with it is that I tied the ties too tightly and the dye did not soak in very well in those places. A friend mentioned that he usually takes a bit of the dye bath out before putting the yarn in so that he has some to spread over those areas and touch up, using the microwave zapping method. Others mentioned moving the ties around, which seems like a great idea but honestly messing with the yarn in its wet spaghetti form is really not that fun. Add hot water to the mix and we are a sad panda, for sure.

Anyway, I'm hoping to knit him a hat with it for Christmas or something. He will be happy with that. :)

Kiddo Armwarmers

So, I told my little brother that I would be making him some armwarmers for Christmas/Yule. I decided to make him some Gradient Mitts. The pattern is very simple, has a size that would fit for him, and would go by very quickly with a bulky weight yarn. Well, I decided to go ahead and get some Cascade 220 Superwash and hold it triple stranded for this particular project. I think that was where the problems really started. I HATED those mitts. It has nothing to do with the pattern and everything to do with the crazy yarn mess and the fact that, when he tried them on, they did not fit very well. To be fair, he has freakishly large arms for an 8-year-old. After measuring, we have figured out that he and my sister (19) have around the same size.


So... what to do? First of all, I didn't want to go through and undo the one I had made previously and the yarn tangle was still making me pretty angry. So, I decided to go ahead and make up a pattern and get new yarn. I went to The Yarn Barn, which is the only place in San Antonio to get Cascade 220. I have never been particularly fond of this store because I always thought the customer service was sort of... odd. However, the lady who helped us there was very nice this time and allowed my friend, Liz, to use the swift and winder there. I don't know what her name was, but she was knitting the most fabulous beret out of a (probably mohair judging by the halo) laceweight. Aside from the weird customer service, though, I have had the issue with leaving this store with a ball of yarn that looked like a completely different color inside than it did outside. I don't know if it's the lighting or what, but the first time I thought I was picking up ecru and opened the bag at home to find white and THIS time, I got black and blue and found black and purple when I went to start on these armwarmers. Knitting for an 8-year-old boy is not exactly a purple sort of thing. I would suggest to people going to make sure you know what color yarn you're looking at (like hold it up to the window or something) before you buy. That would solve the problem I have had there and, should I need to go there again, I will be doing so. Anyway, the kiddoo has taken it like a champ, so I'm going to get my act together and knit another pair out of the yarn currently tangled and in the other armwarmer.

Anyway, let me go ahead and give the dimensions of what I knit for him and a picture to go along with. Please feel free to use if it appeals to you. If you are interested, my ravelry page for this project is also available, though I think the same information is here, as well. It's just a few mashed numbers to result in a tube. Seriously, not very difficult at all.

Dax's arms are about 8.5" around at the widest point, right below the elbow. From that point measured down to the base of the thumb joint is 10". 

My gauge was 5 stitches per inch on size 7 US needles.

I cast on 40 stitches in color A, split onto four dpns. Knit 7 rows in color A. Switch to color B and knit 7 rows. If you are annoyed by the little jog in the stripes and want to avoid that, TECHknitting has a really awesome tutorial. 

For the thumb hole:
Row 1 of 3rd stripe: Switch back to color A, knit 17 stitches, bind off 6, knit 17.
Row 2 of 3rd stripe: Knit 17 stitches, cast on* 6, knit 17.
*I used the knit cast on. A video tutorial can be found here.


After you are done with the thumb hole, continue knitting in stripes of 7 stitches until there are 12 total (or longer, if you need it to be...?). Bind off and weave in your ends and there you go! Arm warmers!

He seems pretty happy with them: