March 21, 2010

FO: Airplane Socks

Airplane Socks

According to Rav, I cast on for these socks on February 8th, but I only knit the cuff before the Ravelympics started and I was otherwise occupied. I didn't start to knit on these in earnest until February 27th. The first sock was largely knit on my plane to Korea (luckily the Seattle airport has Wifi and I was able to look up directions for turning a heel, or it would have been a disappointing flight) and the second sock gets the distinction of being the second sock I've knit in the Seoul immigration office.

The Specs
Rav Link: Airplane Socks
Pattern: basic sock recipe, loosely based on the sock tutorial at Silver's Place
Yarn: Lana Grossa Meilenweit 100g Uni/Solid in the romantic colorway 8501 (1 skein; 458 yards)
Needles: 2.5 mm (US 1½)
Size: CO 68 stitches, which was just a touch tight at the top and fit perfectly everywhere else
Notes: I'm pretty meh about the yarn. I like the colors in the skein, but wasn't nearly as big a fan of how it knit up. Also, I'm a yarn snob and after using primarily merino sock yarns, I was less than thrilled to be knitting with a regular wool/cotton blend. Still, the project accomplished its goal of being mindless knitting and now I'm ready for something a bit more complicated.

March 2, 2010

Socks on a Plane!

Airplane Socks
What you can accomplish during twenty hours on a plane (besides go crazy).

I spent some bastardized combination of Saturday/Sunday (fourteen hour time changes are confusing) on a plane. Turns out, I can knit a whole lot of sock during that time.

March 1, 2010

2010 Stash Down

I moved to South Korea this weekend, which was pretty much a non-event, since I've already spent one year here, was always planning on coming back for a second and was only home for a few months between contracts. I started packing with my yarn and spent an enjoyable afternoon going through my pretty pretty yarn and deciding which of my preciouses I couldn't bare to be parted from for a year. As I surveyed the results, I realized that when your hobby takes up a quarter of your luggage for a year long trip abroad, you might just have a stash problem.

Stashin' It
It is not physically possible for me to knit all that in a year.

Then I arrive in Korea and started to unpack in my shoebox of an apartment, and I realize that I don't know where I'm going to stash my stash. I currently have the Noro shoved into the shelves in the bedside table; the alpaca, Malabrigo and sock yarn are taking over the cupboard by the door that I think is suppose to be for shoes; and for lack of a better place, the cotton is stashed in the shelves above my sink in the kitchen. There are ten random skeins sitting on my couch because I haven't figure out where I'm going to be them (maybe I'll just turn the entire shelve over the sink into a yarn shelve?) and I still need to retrieve the huge bag of yarn I left with a friend when I went home in September.

My stash is out of control!

Over at the cold sheeping threads in the Stash Knit Down group on Ravelry, there's lots of talk about a yarn bank. If you knit a certain number of skeins, you allowed to buy more yarn. I think it's time for me to institute a yarn bank. For the next twelve months, I must knit five skeins of stash yarn for every one skein I buy. No exceptions, not even for sock yarn. I've added a yarn bank box to my sidebar to help me keep track of how much yarn I've used and to keep me honest. Maybe the next time I fly back to America, I'll have room for something besides yarn in my bags.