Pictures galore!

Finally we have the last round of pictures before I head off to no-digital-camera land. I uploaded them to Blogger yesterday, but didn't get a chance to write anything about them because it was so late at night.

First up, we have a picture of me and the Chairwoman at the Taiwanese restaurant where she and I ate with LawSchoolKatie two weeks ago. Yes, I know the picture is somewhat dated. But I think that it's actually a nice photograph. You can see all the carnage remaining from our meal in front of us. LawSchoolKatie is taking the picture, so you can't see her. I have another picture of all three of us together, but I wasn't sure if she minded me posting her face up on the Internet or not. So she's not up here.


Next, we have a whole bunch of knitting pictures to show you some of the things I've finished or am working on. First are the "glittens" I made out of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sport yarn. I think the colorway is "Tuscany." Below are the glittens-as-mittens, palms facing up:

And below are the glittens-as-mittens, backs facing up. You can see the seams where I picked up stitches on the back of the hand to create the mitten flap:

And here is what they look like on my hands, as fingerless gloves. The top hand shows the palm and the bottom hand shows the back with the mitten flap. I still haven't added a loop to the top of the flap and a button to the wrist to secure the flap when I want to use my fingers.

Anyway, I'm really happy with the way they turned out. I used the glove pattern in Ann Budd's Handy Book of Patterns, but then winged the mitten flap based on instructions for the Broad Street glittens on Knitty. Why didn't I just use the Broad Street pattern, you might ask? Because, as Jessica of Fig and Plum notes, that pattern is for people with giganta-hands. Now I have something to keep my much smaller hands warm while I'm waiting for the bus in the winter! But I will still be able to remove the mitten flap and knit on the bus without taking off the whole glitten! I'm very happy about the prospect.

Below are some socks that I finished right before starting on the glittens. They are made out of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock, colorway "Seaside" (I think). They are supposed to be a Christmas present for one of my friends, but I think it's safe to show them here. One, the recipient doesn't know who she is; and two, I don't think she knows about this blog, anyway.

And here's a picture of it on my foot:

I sort of cobbled the pattern together from my own memories of a sock pattern from a Vogue book that I left in my apartment at school and from certain portions (namely, the heel and the toe) of the Retro Rib Sock pattern from the Winter 2004 Interweave Knits.

As you may have surmised, there was a big sale on yarn a while ago where I got a lot of Lorna's Laces. I had never knit with LL before, and now I find that I generally like the yarn quite a lot, especially the sock yarn. I find Shepherd Sock much more tightly spun than other hand-dyed sock yarns, like Cherry Tree Hill, which makes it easier to work with, in my opinion. However, I must admit that I am not a fan of the pooling colors. The pooling effect is most apparent on the socks, where you can see the tan stripes, but you can also see it in the glittens, where there are some large sections of only orange and blue and other sections of only red and green.

I had hoped to avoid the pooling effect in my next pair of socks, which I'm making out of Shepherd Sock "Tahoe" (I think. I'm terrible at remembering the colorways because I bought the yarn so long ago. Really, the colors remind me of hydrangea flowers). I'm following the Retro Rib pattern, and I had hoped that the pattern of the ribbing would help break up the colors. But, as you can see below, there's still a bit of color-clustering going on.

Oh, well. That's the way the cookie crumbles. I haven't found a yarn that consistently doesn't pool yet; even Koigu sometimes pools.

Anyway, those are the pictures. Hopefully I'll be able to post some more every now and then during the semester!