Mystery Sock X (part 1)

Since its been so extremely cold outside in my neck of the woods I decided to work on indoor projects for now and save the new weaving project I spoke of In my last post for warmer days. One of these projects, we all have more than one going at a time right?, is the Mystery Sock X KAL by the Knitters Brewing Company. I have knit a lot of socks but I have never participated in a mystery sock kal so when I got the e-mail from Knitters Brewing about this and saw that it was FREE to participate I couldn't pass it up. I have a good supply of sock yarn in my stash already so I decided to use some of that up for this project.

Typically when I knit socks I use double points and work top down, (from cuff to toe). This pattern is a top down pattern but doesn't begin in a typical top down way so it has really expanded my view of sock knitting and I'm loving it so far! The cast on begins with Judy's Magic Cast On for toe up socks, yep you read that right. You can google that if you don't know what that is, I did, lol  this is what my cast on looked like.

Now normally this cast on uses two needles but I find that this cast on method is harder to control the tension, at least for me anyway so that's why you see three needles in my photo. The first row has k2 togethers and it was way to tight for me to do that so I made my cast on over two needles on the working side and then slipped one out before beginning row one, worked great! The stitches on the single needle are held there as a provisional cast on and will be worked later.

This is row one finished

Other firsts for my sock knitting is that this cuff is worked flat instead of in the round and incorporates the Elizabeth's Lattice Lace stitch pattern which I have never tried before in any project. Here is a photo of the first 10 rows of the pattern.

These 10 rows are repeated till the size being made is reached, in my case size med. means I need ten repeats of these ten rows.

Here are a few pictures of the lattice work in progress.

This was pretty cool to do, Unlike a cable stitch, where the crossed stitches are held on a separate cable needle and held either in front or behind, these stitches were actually pulled through the crossing stitches.

The total length of the cuff is now finished.

Now it's time to join the two ends together in the round using the three needle bind off method.

This is what the wrong side looks like at the seam. The next picture is of the right side.

As you can see the seam is barely visible.

Here is the finished cuff!

This KAL is a lot of fun and I don't think it's too late to join if you want to give it a try. Just head on over to the Ravelry site and search the forums for knitters brewing co. sock-aholics to get started.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this installment of my progress. Till next time, stay warm.

Wow, where does the time go. I suppose during my long hiatus from the blogging sphere I have lost readers I previously might have had. Well, I guess that's ok and I'll just have to deal with it but hay, I blog mainly for myself anyway as a way to journal my crafting activities. I have been crafting, just not blogging. Sometimes the necessities in life take up a little more time than one expects and takes away from the things one really loves to do, as is in my case. At any rate, here is what I'm doing now, I won't go into all the things that have been keeping me from blogging like, finding facebook (spend way too much time there), my handspun yarn business, homeschooling, wait, I said I wouldn't go there, so where was I.... oh yeah what I'm doing now.

Over on the Ravelry site I joined a Lord of the Rings Mystery Shawl KAL (Knit-A-Long) and I am having a lot of fun with that. Here is what I have done so far without giving to much away, I don't want to spoil the mystery for those who might not be as far along.

Clue number one came out on February 12th, By the way it is not to late to sign up for this project and you can find all the details you need here

This particular shawl is only one in a Lord of the Rings series so if your a LOTR fan like me you might want to check this out.

This project is called the Evenstar, the pendant worn by Arwen Evenstar in the movie played by Liv Tyler.

I have spun up a light lace weight yarn from a 50/50 blend of Mulberry silk/Merino for this project, the silk gives off a beautiful shine that I think will be perfect for this shawl.

I have also knit up the swatch but I didn't use the good yarn for the swatch, I used crochet thread instead.
I had a couple of reasons for doing this. This swatch was my 4th attempt to get it right so I didn't want to mess up the good yarn. Also the crochet thread is the same WPI as my handspun so it would work for obtaining the gauge. I will be using size 4 needles instead of the size 3 prescribed. I also wanted to play around with bead placement to see if I even wanted beads. My real camera is not working so I had to use my camera phone and it doesn't get close enough for you see the beads in this picture but they are there, trust me.

The flower on the bottom has 4 beads, one in the center of each flower section, (don't like this at all). The two flowers on the upper right and left each have one single bead right in the center where a hole is but I placed these beads on different stitches to see what the difference would be and here is what I found.

The one on the left- I placed the bead in the 4th increase stitch on the pearl side prior to purling the stitch, now the bead wound up on the purl side so I had to push it through the hole in order for it to be on the front but the bead is directly in the center of the hole.

The one on the right-I placed the bead on the 5th increase stitch on the purl side prior the purling the stitch and the bead wound up on the front side not the purl side, however it is not perfectly centered and has a rightward slant which I don't like.

I have not yet decided if I like any beads at all at this point but I hope that if anyone else out there is doing this KAL that wanted to place beads that this post is somewhat helpful to you.

Cheers