Alba sock is here!

Alba is next on my sock tour through the wonderful characters of Jane the Virgin. She took time to grow on me, given that her role in the first season was to encourage Jane (and, through flashbacks, Xiomara) to give birth to children they might not have wanted at the time. Of course, a show this woke and nuanced wouldn’t leave her a one-dimensional character, and as she grew on me her continued arguments just gave other characters in the show the chance to argue the opposite side of the issue, so it all worked out!

For this pattern, I thought of what kind of socks Alba might like to wear. Something sturdy and comfortable - hence the princess sole and EOP heel - with just a little bit of fun. Once I knew I wanted to do a princess sole, I knew I’d need a pattern worked on a field of purls so there wouldn’t be an abrupt change between the sole and instep of the sock. I also knew that I didn’t actually want to do all that purling.

I settled on a pattern that uses a “long stitch;” except, if you google instructions for “long stitch” you’ll get something different from what my stitch dictionary says. To further complicate matters, I flipped the pattern around, so you’re actually doing a “purl long stitch.” Not to worry, though! It’s not a difficult stitch to work, even purling it, and I have a photo tutorial in the pattern since I couldn’t find any existing source to link to.

The heel flap took some noodling to get it to look right, since I had to think about everything backwards in order to get the pillow-y textured side you’re accustomed to facing out once the knitting was done and the socks were turned right side out. My prototype sock experienced a LOT of ripping and reknitting!

I should also say that the original sample I made was in the color I’d really like to have used for the pattern photos - a deep teal reminiscent of Alba’s dressier outfits (Knit Picks Stroll Tweed - Marine Heather). But, it’s nearly impossible to get nice photos of dark yarn during a dark Seattle winter (plus, I made some mistakes on the leg of that sock…) so I ended up reknitting the pattern in a lighter yarn (Miss Babs Hot Shot - Ocean Breeze) so I could get photos more easily. At least I could get some deep stash on the needles!

Alba is 15% off, no code needed, for one week! Subscribers to my mailing list get a code for 30% off - scroll down to subscribe.

Xiomara sock is here!

I’ve been looking forward to this announcement for months! If you’ve never seen the show Jane the Virgin, first, you gotta check it out. (I watched it on Netflix.)

Not only is the show itself great, combining high-drama telenovela plot points with extremely relevant and social commentary, but the color palette is to die for (to dye for??). Every episode is a feast for the eyes with bright corals and oranges contrasted beautifully against a range of teals and blues.

I couldn’t stop thinking about all the different colors, and my natural inclination when trying to translate some inspiration into knitting design is to go to a sock pattern! Thus, the Jane the Virgin sock series was born.

The first sock in the series is inspired by Xiomara. She wears a lot of bright colors and geometric patterns and is no stranger to flirty dresses. I figured a sock design inspired by her would be in a loud color and have plenty of bling. It needed to be something as fun as her personality!

I went stash-diving and came up with some Scientific Sock from NanoStitch Labs in the red-orange colorway Rachel Carson. Thanks to a bead-buying blitz last year in preparation for Sock Madness, I already had some shiny silver seed beads on hand. I had originally planned to include a LOT more beads in the texture pattern on the instep, but had to abandon that idea when I realized…I love the look of beads don’t like beading that much! Thus, the beaded cuff was born. Once you get those beads done and out of the way, it’s just cables that flow into a point and some easy texture in between.

It’s important to me to provide both charts and written instructions, but as it turns out, having all those charts created a LOT of written text! With that in mind, please don’t panic when you see the page count on this pattern. I usually print my knitting patterns out so I can carry them around with me, and I have Opinions about what type of patterns are easiest to print, so I collected the written instructions for each size into their own sections rather than mixing them all together. Hopefully that makes it easier to decide which pages to print and saves you paper and ink.

Because of the many charts, adjusting the size of this pattern would be more complicated than simply adding X number of stitches for an additional repeat, so I created a spreadsheet that should do the math for you! It has the option of adding calf decreases should you need it. I created it in Google Sheets and tried to protect all of the cells except for the ones you need to enter your information in the hopes of avoiding any accidental editing. (As it turns out, you can’t upload Excel files to Ravelry.) I learned a lot about the limitations of Excel and Sheets this week.

Xiomara is 15% off for its first week, no code needed! If you’d like to find out about the rest of the socks in this series and get subscriber-only discounts, please join my mailing list.

Do swatches lie, or are they just telling an incomplete truth?

Swatches are supposed to help knitters identify their gauge with various yarn and needle combos and use that to create a finished object in the size they’re expecting. But, too often knitters complain that their swatch lied, as their WIP is working up to be too large or small. What’s the point of making a swatch if it will only let you down?

Much swatching advice has to do with the time of day, mental state, and knitting conditions. For example, if you typically do your knitting after dinner, beverage of choice in hand, while watching Netflix, so should you knit your swatch. And there’s the magical technique that allows you to swatch in the round without knitting an actual tube, which lets you avoid gauge differences in your knit vs purl rows when knitting flat.

But there are so many other factors besides these! Some of them require a certain amount of experience and experimenting with a variety of different types of projects, so the more types of projects you try out, the more data you can collect about how you personally knit. From here on out, I’ll be sharing some personal examples I’ve discovered while knitting a variety of different objects, which will hopefully help you identify your own gauge quirks even if the examples don’t exactly match your situation.

A big factor I’ve noticed causes major changes in gauge is the width of the project round or row. For example, for me, a stockinette hat knit on 16” circulars with US 7s will come out with a tighter gauge than a 300-stitch stockinette sweater body on a 32” circ with US 7s. Something about those hundreds of stitches just makes me relax! Taking that same sweater, when I move to the sleeves I have one of two things occur: I use magic loop, in which case my gauge is way tighter than the body, or I use a 12” circ and my gauge is only a little tighter than the body. If I knit the sweater in pieces (front and back), then seamed it, the lower stitch count (and needing to knit and purl to maintain stockinette) would result in a tighter gauge, so I might not need to size down a needle. What this has taught me is that in order to keep a consistent gauge across a project’s different elements, I need to use either smaller or larger needles depending on what part of the sweater I’m knitting. This is usually the case with ribbing vs not-ribbing, but for me it applies to parts beyond that.

And that’s just talking stockinette! Now let’s consider the different types of stitch patterns - ribbing, cables, lace and the like. Alternating knits and purls make me tighten up, so I rarely need to go down a needle size for the ribbing on a sweater or hat. The same goes for cables - being slowed down by the stitch pattern keeps my gauge from loosening up too much, so it’s less likely that I need to size down a needle.

Are you knitting two matching objects, one after the other, like socks or sleeves? If you’re like me, your gauge may loosen up on the second one as you get familiar with the pattern. If possible, you can mitigate this by knitting two-at-a-time, and if not, keep this in mind as you knit the second object, checking your gauge to make sure it isn’t too different, or consider using a different needle size.

Next, consider the type of needles you’re using. If you have a variety of types (circs vs straight needles, wood vs metal, or even 2 different brands of the same type of needle), differences in those might get you different gauge results. For example, I get a much tighter gauge on metal needles than the same size needle in wood or bamboo. If my swatch on a wooden needle just about got me gauge, I might knit the object with metal needles of the same size instead to help tighten up that last little bit. Or, I have bamboo needles with very long tapers, meaning I have to push the stitch far back onto the right needle for it to be the right size. Since I knit very close to the tips of my needles, using the bamboo tips can result in smaller stitches and change my stitch or row gauge. Knitting with massive needles and bulky yarn, I always get a snug gauge because I have to slow down or risk letting stitches slip off the needles!

Finally, let’s talk a little bit about the yarn you’ve chosen for the pattern. If you’re like me, you rarely use the exact yarn the designer used in the original pattern. But going with a different type or blend of fiber can affect your gauge too! The experience that really drove this home for me was knitting socks. My standard recipe is always: a 64 stitch sock on my trusty metal 0s...until that doesn’t work. I had been using extremely soft and squishy merino for most of my socks, so I could get a nice bulletproof fabric with this stitch/needle combo. Enter Knit Picks Hawthorne, which is a DENSE sock yarn that doesn’t squish down easily. Knitting it on 0s was awful, and once I sized up to a more appropriate needle, 64 stitches would no longer work or I’d end up with socks too large for me.

At this point, you may be ready to give up - with so many factors to take into account how could anyone possibly be able to knit anything that fits? Start with what you have - what projects have you completed that ended up with a different gauge or fit than you were expecting? Go and re-measure your gauge on those, and on projects that turned out perfectly. See if you got a different gauge on the sweater body, collar, or sleeve, and compare that to the stated gauge of the pattern (or the gauge you were aiming for, if different). Compare paired objects like socks and sleeves to each other - are they different gauges? Take stock of your available needles - if you have multiple options available, what are your preferred needles/cables for what types of projects? What kind of gauge can you expect with that combo?

Diana Headband is here!

Ever since seeing the most recent re-imagining of Wonder Woman (the 2018 Gal Gadot movie), I’ve been thinking about how cool her updated tiara and wrist cuffs looked. I became obsessed with the idea of making a headband/earwarmer pattern that would evoke the front plate of her tiara and spent a lot of time fooling around with fingering weight swatches until I realized that it would be much simpler to just do cables in worsted weight! Fortunately I had some lovely bronze-colored Wool of the Andes leftover from a previous project and was able to start designing right away.

One of the things that initially slowed me down was trying to be too faithful to the original tiara, at the cost of what would work best for the actual knitting. It took a lot of ripping and reknitting before I had a pattern that felt fun and intuitive to knit, while still evoking the original inspiration. I hope others think so too!

Now that I’ve got it out in the world, I’m back to noodling on a matching pair of wristers to complete the cold weather set. Get ready for…more i-cord.

Diana Headband is available in my ravelry store.