A study in stripes...

Long time no post. It's been a busy little household the past few weeks with a deluge of visitor (ok, well 4 lots of visitors, but that's a lot for us!), and the continuing problem of a horribly shaky internet connection (methinks it's time for a change of ISP).

There has been much knitting going on, although nothing of an earth shattering nature, although I was very proud of this little cardigan. It was made from Bendigo Rustic 12 ply in the pattern "Max" by Debbie Bliss. I love, love, love it - it was so much fun and quick and easy and looks just too cute.
I also have managed to knock off a couple of long outstanding UFO's which has been lovely. One of them are these socks, started back in June. Notice something odd about them? Yep, they don't yet have a heel. I'm doing an afterthought heel ala Elizabeth Zimmerman. I couldn't decide (and still can't for that matter) who they were destined for, so decided to do them heeless so I could decide the length of the foot later on. The concept of an afterthought heel is really very simple, you snip out a section of yarn where you want the heel to be, pick up the stitches that are now loose, and knit a toe into it. Well it sounds simple, I'm yet to try it out. I will report back on success or failure in the next week or two.

The other interesting thing about these socks is that I've tried two different methods of jogless stripes (who needs a matching pair?) The white lines in the picture represent the direction of the yarn carried up the back when changing colours. You can see in the left sock that the jogs are all in a line, whereas the sock on the right has a rotating jog. A jogless join is achieved by knitting into the stitch below the first stitch of the new colour after the first round has been knit. The reason the sock on the right has the seam moving, is that knitting into the stitch below essentially 'loses' a stitch, and knitting an extra stitch gets it back, but also moves the start of the round (hmm, that makes sense in my mind....doesn't translate well to text though). Anyway, I am now in a dilemma. Where am I going to put the heel so I don't have to cut across that float running up the seam? As much as I don't need another pair of socks for myself, these are so dodgy that I don't think I could inflict them on anyone else!