Well, that was a busy week! Easter on Easter, a Passover Seder on Tuesday, flew to LA on Wednesday to see Springsteen, home on Thursday, 16 crafty moms celebrating spring birthdays Friday, worked a high school fund-raiser event on Saturday. Sunday starts all over again…
LA is different from the Pacific Northwet. They have flowers like these growing in hotel parking lots.
And funny looking trees.
The last time we saw Springsteen in LA, it was in 1985 with 90,000 of our nearest and dearest, here.
This time it was at the LA Sports Arena, right next door, with 20,000 of our closest friends. Here’s the obligatory crappy cell phone pic. We were to the right of the stage, pretty high up, but the venue is small enough that it didn’t feel like we were on Mars. Bruce was stupendous, as usual. Three hours of fun; the man knows how to put on a show.
I did take my knitting! I had just finished my Shur’tugal socks, and didn’t have any good airplane knitting on the needles. Although I want to knit with beads, and do Chrissy Gardner’s toe-up sock from Twisted’s Single Skein Club, both require either attention or charts or tiny things that don’t make for good airplane knitting. What’s a knitter to do? Cookie A to the rescue!
I love the Kai-Mei pattern in her new book, Sock Innovation. It’s written for fingering weight yarn, and I only had Louet Gems sport in my tiny stash. No problem; I adapt things all the time. But something about this pattern made me want to completely play with it and make it my own. Here’s the process so far.
I started with 48 stitches, because most of my sport weight socks are 48-52 stitches around. I decided on a 2×2 rib instead of the 3×3 in the pattern, because I like to put twists in my ribs so I can use them to count rows. My first attempt had a right twist on every rib every 6 rows, but that was boring. I decided to alternate columns of right twists with columns of left twists, and offset them so the right twists and left twists were 4 rounds apart. I used the twisted cast on edging that I used on my Leyburns, because I thought the twists would complement the twisted rib.
I was cruising along on the plane and later in the hotel, when I heard the 1 a.m. tiny voice say, “ribbing sucks in a lot. Sure that will go around your leg, but it would look prettier if it wasn’t stretched to the max…” Right-o. Let’s try 56 stitches instead.
Since I was ripping it all out anyway, I thought I’d play with the twisted cast on. What if I used stockinette stitch instead of garter stitch for those first four rows before the twist? I could take advantage of stockinette’s natural tendency to curl, and hopefully get a tighter, tidier edge. I like it better, and I like the not as stretched out ribbing better, too.
Here’s a better look. Garter edge first:
Stockinette edge:
Side by side! Garter on left, stockinette on right:
What do you think?
Almost done with the first sock; more soon!
PDXKnitterati 
