I’ve been meaning to blog more, but not doing a good job of it for the past several (read 6-9) months. I’m attempting to fix that now, and get back on my Monday blogging schedule again. I have been busy in my off time. If by off time you allow that I’m running a hand dyeing business, branching into designing, teaching dyeing, and prepping to vend at Sock Summit.
I do have pretties to show you. Maybe I won’t post them all now, but snippets….to entice you to come back. (Some of these links will direct you to Ravelry.com. If you’re not a member there yet, you need to be. Don’t fuss, just sign up. You’ll be glad you did!)
I’m going to start with the most recent pattern added to the Katie Franceschi collection. It’s available for purchase (Immediate download, no less! Yay, instant gratification!)
Winding Path Socks
Yarn Love's Elizabeth Bennet yarn in Awakening Earth
Designed especially to accentuate the particular beauty of hand-dyed yarns. No more knitting with the most gorgeous skein ever only to discover that it does wicked, wicked things when you actually knit it. The pattern contains specific guidance for choosing an appropriate yarn. Both examples are knit with high contrast, multi-color yarns. Generally speaking highly saturated colors with high contrast to each other present the largest challenge when knitting with hand dyed/ painted yarns. Ironically, the multi-color skeins are often the ones that catch your eye and draw you in!
The socks are worked toe up, with a generous gusset for a great fit. (The gusset is that triangle along the side of the foot.) The stitch pattern does a great job of breaking up and re-distributing the bold colors – which gives the sock an over all even sprinkling of color. Notice how there aren’t large blotches of any single color anywhere. Those blotches are referred to as pooling or flashing and are usually very distracting. Then I finished off the sock with a simple cable. It’s eye catching and keeps you interested as the knitting progresses. Yes, the pair is asymmetrical. The cable travels up the outside of each sock. You could place the cable on same side for each sock, but it looks….very odd when you wear them!
As a bonus, there are four widths included in the pattern. And instructions for using both fingering weight and sport weight yarns. You can knit these up for practically any adult foot size! The sport weight option makes these a good choice for a fast gift!
Extras
When I’m designing, I usually knit up more than one version of the sock. The first pair is the design template, and the second pair is polished and pristine (Well, mostly pristine.) for photography. You can see the prototype pair for this pattern in my Ravelry Projects. If you keep tabs on my projects at Ravlery, you’ll most likely see my design projects in progress.
Yarn Love's Elizabeth Bennet yarn in Nostalgia
time to pursue new product development. Nothing beats holiday stress like a huge amount of work that may or may not pan out. In my defense, I started working on this project 2 months ago. I need to contract out some very specific, custom fiber work in order to make this venture successful. I found one contractor on the West coast and proceeded to ship yarn with them so they could get a sample worked up and firm pricing. It took 3 weeks for them to acknowledge receipt of the yarn. Then 2 1/2 more to work up a sample. We are currently sitting at 4+ weeks that they’ve had the sample but won’t ship it.
Since work is moving right along in our old office space – soon to be the NewGuestBedroom/Office, I’m starting to get busy planning the decor. Now strictly speaking, I am not terribly good at interior decorating. Our house is pretty much cobbled together over the 6 years of our marriage. An odd assemblage of new furniture, mixed in with thrift store finds and hand me downs. We do have quite a nice art collection on the walls, and a stylish paint job throughout the house, but really we lack a firm hold on style. Plus, we’re kind of a cluttery family. Every spare surface is always covered with clutter. For instance, my very clean desk from a few posts below is now covered with the detritus of everyday life and the yarn business. I wish I could claim it was that well plotted, beautifully executed magazine photo type of clutter, but it’s not. On my desk right now are:
I absolutely fell in love with back in February when the magazine appeared. I think we’ll go with this theme, if I can get Nick to approve. We may have to make the walls cream, with an accent wall of blue. That will keep our space nice and airy and bright – there is only one window and the room is half under the ground. I love the use of light pink, light blue and chocolate brown in the photo. There’s also lots of texture via the floor and the pillows. Plus, the bird theme is just plain cool. Sigh. I wonder if I’ll be able to pull it off. I found the company that did the rug – it’s high quality carpet tiles, but they no longer have the bird carpet tiles. And a 4 x 4 rug runs between $200-250. Ouch. Maybe some other substitute would be good.
It’s been busy around the Franceschi ranch this week. Lots of partying, dyeing, and storms. We’ve had storms and rain off and on all week resulting in very humid, sticky and oppressive conditions. Welcome to the wettest summer I can remember folks. Let me tell you it’s not so great for the hairstyling. Luckily, I have a new flat iron that’s keeping my 3″ tresses in shape!
is a smaller order poundage wise, but considering it takes 3-4 times as long to dye roving as yarn means that I’m a genius of a workaholic. And it’s only Thursday. Not only that, but I’ve also been working up new semi-solid colorways for the Fall 2008 line. And I’m not talking one or two semi-solids, I’m talking a whole range. Right now, I have 9 colors that I’m happy with and are definitely in, but there are more colors that need attending to. Like red. And purple. And black. Red and purple and black are completely absent from the line up.
We had a fun 4th. We started the day by taking all three kiddos to see Wall E. They really liked it – especially X. He’s into robots, currently. Yes, the last 30 minutes of the film, myself, my husband and all the seats in between us were his jungle gym, but all in all, it was a good outing. Promptly after the film, we adjourned to my parents for a very decadent lunch, followed by slip and sliding. I was in my suit because pushing three toddlers down the slip and slide water sprinkled slide for 3 hours tends to result in wet clothing. I even went down one of the slip and slides myself. (Don’t tell!) After the slip and sliding, it was home for a nap (only X slept) and then we did fireworks over at the cousin’s house. By the time we got to bed we were pretty well exhausted. It only took us three days to recover from the revelry.
There is a point, where once reached, my hair turns from something decent into untractable Homely Hair. The critical mass of Homely Hair was reached within the past two weeks, directly coinciding with a staph infection in my left eye which forces me to wear my glasses instead of my usual contacts. So in the throws of Homely Hair and Forced Glasses Wearing, I had a slight fit. I just couldn’t take it. So I made an emergency hair appointment and promptly chopped off 60% of the length of my hair. Of course, this meant that I did lose the pink ends, but it’s so nice not to be tethered to Homely Hair anymore….and my glasses look nearly trendy again.
Last night, Nick had a meeting to attend and we decided before he left that I should prep the office (And when you see the word office, please insert a mental image of “junk room”) for the impending demolition. We’re going to be updating most of thelower level (600+ square feet of living space in bad need of a makeover!) of our house. This includes nearly a full remodel of the office – which was originally an unfinished room in the house. I hardly know why – it’s on the lower level of our split level and not the basement, and to make things more interesting the entire rest of that space was finished when the house was built….it’s a mystery. Anyway, whomever came in to finish the space did a crappy job. It’s got the thinnest, cheapest OUTDOOR carpeting in the world, which doesn’t even properly reach the walls. A drop ceiling – the kind with the metal grid and drop in tiles and fluorescent lights, and it was painted a horrible bright orange color when we moved in. Not trendy orange, but nearly hunter orange. Somewhere between Make You Want to Puke and Make You Go Blind orange.
elsewhere in the house have taken up residence making it an eyesore. And since the computer was there, we spend a lot of time in that room. We spent even more time in that room while my winding equipment was in there, but it’s been moved and now we simply spend a lot of time and not most of our time there. 
