CSM practice

This is the first pair of matching socks I've managed to knit.   It was with a fairly thick sock yarn, with only 150 yards per 50 g.  It was only $3 per 50g, and there was no choice in colour, and as you can see, the patterns don't actually match.  I first thought it was a tension issue, but I redid the one sock and it was the same.   This sock yarn though, is insanely soft. I've never wanted to just fondle a skein of yarn as much as I'd have liked to do this stuff.   They are too small for me but they'll fit my daughter, except that I think they may be too wide.   They are just sitting there waiting for me to decide whether to rip them out and redo them or finish them up for her.  Except of course that I changed to a different cylinder with more needles, so one way or the other, they'll have to wait.

I've started knitting several socks a day over the past week.   I've learned to remind myself to rehang the weight before cranking after starting to hang the hem.  I can't believe how many times I did this, only to have stitches drop and tangled yarn, leading to taking it off the machine, ripping it out and starting again.

Then I got the hem hung and the leg of the sock knitting and halfway through the heel, some stitches would drop, usually on the left side.   It turns out that sometimes the brake doesn't quite tighten the yarn up all the way, leaving a loop which is too large to make a stitch.   If I'm slow and watching carefully, it's avoidable.   

Then I realized that I was using cheap sock yarn and it had little recovery or stretch, which made for difficulties in itself.  I don't know if it was because I was reusing the same skein over and over, or if it's all the yarn from that company.  It was $5 /100g, so it's super cheap, but maybe not the best to practice with.   I bought a bunch to make practice socks for my kids, but I'm not so sure if it isn't yarn that I might need to wait a bit to use, until I have more experience.

socks are different heights - but otherwise good!

Today, after a false start, I made a whole sock.  I'd done the math to hopefully get it to fit.   When I got to the toe, I was a  little leary, because yesterday I also made a sock which made it to the end, and them my waste yarn didn't catch and I'd ended up casting off the whole sock.  No waste yarn means that stitches drop and you can't graft the toe together.   But the waste yarn was fine.  Then I put some crochet yarn in for a separator and knit the second sock.  Somewhere in there, hubby started talking to me and my brain, which was counting rows went AWOL.  The results is 2 socks which are almost the same.   Sock 2 is just a tad too long for my foot but it's also 1.5 inches longer than the first sock!

This yarn was mid priced, and I'd tried to hand knit a sock from it, but it wasn't my favourite because it's a bit splitty.  However, it knit up on the machine quite nicely.

There aren't quite enough hours in the day for all the things I'd like to accomplish sadly.   

This weekend we're doing a cooking class about hearth cooking.  I set the menu as Vegetable soup with forcemeat balls, waffles, carrot pie and lemonade.   Forcemeat is sausage, and little balls were made and either cooked separately or just popped into the soup to cook, to enrich it.   Waffles because I got a cast Iron waffle maker and haven't had a chance to use it yet, and carrot pie to show how to bake in a dutch oven.  Carrot pie is like a pumpkin pie, but using carrots instead.  It's surprisingly good.