Hail, Yarnissima

The last two posts have been about sock patterns that have failed to capture my heart, but now I want to spread some love.

Yarnissima first came to my attention in a discussion on Ravelry about Cookie A's book Sock Innovation and it's exclusive cuff-down designs. Pinneguri put forth the idea that Cookie is a designer of patterns rather than architecture, contrasting her with Yarnissima, "a sock- architect, she makes socks differently, she builds them up." I made a note to check out this Yarnissima person, and I'm very happy that I did.


The pattern is called "brainless" and it highlights two very simple and very cool features that show up in Yarnissima's designs: a cable embellishment running along the sides of the foot, and a gusset triangle which is bordered by twisted stitches and emphasized with a purl background.

Isn't that cool? What a brilliant stroke of creativity to turn the gusset section into fixture of the sock design, rather than trying to hide it.

Yarnissima's designs are available from her website, and I encourage you to check them out. There are more designs that were exclusive to sock clubs, and I hope those eventually see the light of day.

Frontiers of Sock Construction 2: Personal Footprints

I was vaguely looking forward to Cat Bordhi's latest book Personal Footprints for Insouciant Sock Knitters, but when I saw the video overview she posted on YouTube, I got obsessed. I couldn't wait for my copy to arrive from Amazon; the week the book was launched, I called every yarn shop and bookstore in town, hoping they had a copy in.

So perhaps my expectations were a little too elevated.

The Personal Footprint sock is another of those simple and genius discoveries that Bordhi has become relatively famous for: socks on 2 circs, the Moebius cast-on, and the elegant math and "No Rules" gussets of the New Pathways sock. In "Personal Footprints," Bordhi presents us with the "afterthought cuff." As I said in my last post, this is a brilliant departure from common sense -- knitting the foot of the sock as a closed tube which is then cut open to knit the ankle portion of the sock.

This innovation let's Bordhi focus on customizing the fit of the sock to the individual owner. In a nutshell here's what you do:

• Cut out a tracing of the foot to serve as your guide. This is the eponymous "footprint."
  
• Knit a toe-up sock, trying it on as you go and increasing as needed to fit the wearer's foot. Along the way, make notes on your footprint (toe/heel length, arch increases, ankle point, etc.)
• After marking on your knitting where the leg will be, close off your tube by knitting a round heel.
• Thread needles through your knitting at the cuff point, snip the yarn, unravel, and proceed with your cuff.
  

Intriguing sock construction philosophy, but I’m not a convert.

My biggest problem is that you have to keep trying on the sock -- over and over and over and over. Inevitably, this means you have to keep ripping back and adjusting, because until knitted fabric has about an inch extra to give the stitches some integrity, you can't reliably check the fit.

I prefer to plan ahead: know my gauge, know my targets for making the sock fit.

So I turned to science; I measured my foot and marked the intervals where the circumference is 3/4 inch bigger (6 sts in my gauge), planning my increases for those points. That alleviated the need to keep ripping when I would later discover that I needed to increase an inch or so back.

In the end, round toes and heels don’t fit my foot well, and I wasn't happy enough with my Discovery Sock to finish it and make more. Maybe over the holidays I'll get some members of my family drunk, put pen marks all over their feet, and try making Personal Footprints for them. But ultimately I don't see this ever becoming more than a novelty side trip in my sock knitting career.

The book is a good production. The instructions are clear, and Bordhi's videos supplement the book well. There's a nice assortment of specific sock patterns included, although only a couple of them really grabbed my attention. Personally, I would have been much happier if the book had dispensed with the patterns altogether, focused on the technique, included better notes to improve fit, and retailed for half the price. But I'm glad I have it, and I expect I'll return to the technique a couple times when looking for departure from the routine.

Frontiers of Sock Construction 1: The Hat Heel

In September, two new frontiers opened up in the sock knitting world: Hat Heel and Personal Footprints. I'm certain that, for two months, you've been dying to know what I think of them.

Naturally, I was intrigued by both. Creative construction has always fascinated me. Mom taught me to knit so I could make a ski band, but a simple, wide loop would not do -- I wanted something with character and shape, something that got wider and narrower as needed. And duh: no sewing allowed.

These two sock-making methods are right up my alley. "Hat Heel" starts with the heel and builds the sock outwards from unusual gusset constructions. "Personal Footprints" is a brilliant departure from common sense, instructing you to knit the foot of the sock as a closed tube which is then cut and opened to knit the cuff.

I've tried both, and my world is unchanged. Probably. There may be something to "Personal Footprints," but more on that later. First up: the Hat Heel.

The pattern is wicked clever, and it starts off fun: you knit a round cup-shape for the heel, then make long, wing-like triangles that will wrap around your foot and join at the top. That's where things began to go badly for me. I had trouble making a smooth join with so few stitches at the points of the triangles. But then the next step was a nightmare. Picking up stitches isn't usually a deal-breaker for me, but it’s not my favorite knitting activity, and this requires you to be pretty good at it, picking up all around both sides of the loop you've made. I made a dog’s breakfast out of it.

In the end, I won the battle but surrendered the campaign (the war goes on). No matter how skilled you might be at neatly picking up stitches, you're creating inflexible seams in your sock, right at the point that your foot needs the most flexibility. A lot of hard, messy work for a sock you're destined to hate wearing.

Tomorrow: Personal Footprints for Insouciant Sock Knitters.

PS: Click the picture to embiggen, and check out that gorgeous yarn. It's "Tesla" from Gaslight Dyeworks.

Slight Delay

There will be a short delay before the next Arch-Villain sock post. I apologize for the interruption. I'm participating in this month's Sock Innovation knit-along, so I'm under a deadline to finish the pair.

I like the book; lots of beautiful stitch patterns, and Cookie A's notes about design are worth reading. While the stitches are innovative, the architectures are not, and like others, I'm disappointed in the decidedly non-innovative parade of standard cuff-down constructions. But like Nancy Bush's Knitting Vintage Socks, many of these patterns can be flipped and constructed correctly toe-up. But you'll want to pay close attention to the "give" of the fabric; the designs are beautiful, but many are not very elastic, and you could discover too late that the sock won't stretch to be pulled on over the ankle and heel.

I should finish these socks in a couple days, and I'll have time to write up my notes on the gusset section of the Arch-Villain socks.

2007 in review

Knitting
My best guess is that I knit 17 pairs of socks in 2007 (and the 3 single socks pictured here which probably will not get mates). While that's fewer than in 2006, they show a lot of experimentation. I figured out how to add gussets to improve the fit of short-row socks, and I worked out a modification that I really like for Judy Gibson's You're Putting Me On socks. I find myself turning more and more often to Bordhi and Beattie's books for inspiration. And ever since Mel wrote those bang-up instructions for the Sherman Heel, my devotion to the Priscilla Gibson-Roberts method has ebbed.

More notably, I made two successful sweaters: the red, seamless hybrid EPS and the green Cobblestone. And this is the year that I finally began to build a stash. (Damn you, Knitters' Market).

Books
I read 48 books last year, a 65% improvement over last year. That's still far from my high point in 1999, when I recorded 92 books for the year (I learned to knit Thanksgiving 1999; the drop-off in reading has a clear explanation). The combination of working around books again and the continued presence of the LibraryThing widget shaming me from over there on the right keeps my numbers high. Still, they'd be higher if it weren't for knitting, Sudoku/Kakuro, and the Nintendo DS.

Notables:

• Two delightful novels from Michael Chabon. My affection for Yiddish Policemen's Union has faded over the months, but that only means I'll enjoy re-reading sometime.
• A close second for the best book I read last year is The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party by M. T. Anderson.
  
• A few fantastic graphic novels: Pride of Baghdad, American Born Chinese, and The Plot. All three of these I re-read immediately upon finishing them.
• Best audiobook I listened to this year was Acceleration, although right now I'm listening to The Book Thief, and it's even better.
• A good pairing: I read Hero at the same time I was listening to Evil Genius.
• Some things I gave 4 stars to in my LibraryThing ratings are among my favorites from the year: Arthur Phillips' Angelica, Reza Aslan's No god but God, and Kenneth Oppel's Skybreaker. Skybreaker is one of several good sequels/series entries I caught this year.
  

Movies
I saw 23 movies in theaters last year. My favorites were:

• Breach. I love me some Laura Linney.
  
• Grindhouse. Mike and I argued for weeks. He said the Quentin Tarantino half was better; I argued that there is no such thing as "half." But he was right.
• Ratatouille. I love Brad Bird's work. Iron Giant is one of my favorite films. Bird's themes tread a thin path through Ayn Rand territory, but he makes it work for me.
• No Country for Old Men. The story arc is flawed and unsatisfying, but the Coen brothers are at that the top of their game. They play the tension in a scene like it's a piece of music. It's just a shame that that tension has nowhere to go.
• I saw one movie in a theater twice: The Simpsons Movie.
  

My best theater experiences of the year were for the Vamp and Camp Double Feature of "Cobra Woman" and "She Done Him Wrong," and for the documentary ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway. The double feature was held in the crowded Ohio Theater, while "ShowBusiness" was shown at the Frontier Cafe, in a small, digital theater that my sister and I had all to ourselves.

Further along the New Pathways

I had better success following a particular pattern in New Pathways for Sock Knitters. This is Bordhi's Dove Sock, knit with Bearfoot in the Pheasant colorway. ("Dove?" Pheasant?" The hilarity continues). Note: Dodger wanted his foot in the picture too.

Overall, I recommend the book, with the caveat that I think the socks are a little weird-lookin'. As ingenious and innovative as Bordhi's new pathways are, the socks seem fat, because some of the overall allowance for the heel is created in the arch expansion. When the socks aren't on a foot, they don't look like feet. I prefer the shape (and fit) of socks with just a short-row heel cup and no heel flap.

Still, this book has forever changed how I manage the wrapped short-rows, and made me a bigger fan of the method of increasing she uses, which will probably henceforth be widely known as La-Link and La-Rink. (Check out Bordhi's video demo on YouTube). I expect I'll be experimenting with some arch increases in my socks for a long time.

First Impressions of "New Pathways"

I hear that the first printing of Cat Bordhi's "New Pathways for Sock Knitters" is sold out. I got mine because KnittingBrow yanked a copy out of a customer's hand and put it on reserve for me.

My first impression was that this was the best sock book ever written. I thought that this book was going to replace Simple Socks, Plain and Fancy as the Sock Bible, or expand the scriptures (Simple Socks = Old Testament; New Pathways = New Testament).

"New Pathways" has great photographs and illustrations, an engaging style, clear instructions, and beautiful page layout. The eureka moment of the book is Bordhi's discovery that increases for a sock can go anywhere in the arch -- just distribute 2 increases every 3 rounds. Bordhi runs with this idea, finding an incredible variety of design inspirations. Names are important, and she has attached wonderful labels to her different styles of sock architecture: Ridgeline, Riverbed, Upstream, etc.

I was most impressed with her formula for figuring out the length of the toe section of a sock: stitch circumference ÷ rounds-per-inch, subtracted from the total length of the foot. Awesome, right? And it worked!

Sort of.

For this sock, I tried her"Riverbed" architecture, made in the "Rainbow Trout" colorway. (Get it? "Trout?" "Riverbed?" I slay me). Bordhi says, "Riverbed architecture seems to fit many people exceptionally well, perhaps because it hugs the contours of the foot so naturally...." I like the theory, but as you can see, when I tried the Riverbed Master Pattern, I ended up with a pretty fat sock. The length is perfect, exactly what I was shooting for, but the sock is easily an inch too big around across the instep.

I'm not giving up. It could be that I've loused it up with inconsistent gauge -- I noticed that my gauge did change once I began increasing, and I ripped back a dozen rows to correct that with smaller needles. Bordhi has a great track record for successful innovation in knitting techniques, and there's so much great stuff in here. I hope I'm able to resolve my issues and bring the innovations of this book into my sock knitting toolkit.

2006 in review

Knitting
Scanning through the pictures on my hard drive, it looks like I finished about 2 dozen pairs of socks this year, plus seven hats, six scarves, one clapotis, three pair of felted clogs (one pair a disaster), and one sweater. Most of which I've already talked about endlessly here (in the 89 blog posts I made in 2006).

Books
I read fewer books in 2006 than in any of the years I've been keeping track. In fact, I only read one book between the end of March and the beginning of September. Knitting did cut into my reading time, as did sudoku and kakuro -- I got in the habit of doing number puzzles rather than reading before falling asleep. I started off the year as usual, with lots of new books lined up on my shelf to be read, but I found it difficult to get into any of them. I just wasn't enjoying them, and I'd had such high hopes, so I put them down and hoped I would be in a more receptive mood later.

In September, I put the LibraryThing sidebar on my blog, on the theory that public exposure would cure my aliteracy. Since 60% of this year's reading was done since September, that might have worked.

Notables:

• Totally Joe. Not spectacular, but a plausible coming out story for teens in a post-Will & Grace world.
• Big Over Easy and Fourth Bear. Dumb jokes in an endless succession. I loved it. Chapter epigraphs are like Onion stories.
• Two series came to satisfying ends: Stroud's Bartimaeus Trilogy and Westerfield's Midnighters.
• The 2006 Best American Science & Nature Writing was the best I've read since 2003.
• Anansi Boys. This was one I had trouble getting into at the beginning of the year. But the audiobook was amazing. With a 30-40 minute commute to and from work, I predict 2007 will be the Year of Audiobooks for me.

Movies
Mike and I only made it out to see movies in theaters about 20 times last year. Favorites:

• Munich
• A Prairie Home Companion
• The Illusionist
• Little Miss Sunshine
  
• The Queen

I'd watch any of those again. And of the movies I saw for the first time on DVD this year, my favorite was probably 40-Year-Old Virgin.