I have a habit of stashing WIPs and found objects amongst the yarn, and one of the things I dug out of the cedar chest was this pair of hand-knit socks (click any of these pictures to embiggen):

I found them at a farmer’s market in Springville NY; there was a vendor in the flea market with a table full of old textiles. I’m not much of a textile collector, but these Victorian stockings utterly blew my mind, so I shelled out the handsome sum of $5 to acquire them.

They’re knit from fine white cotton. The gauge is tight and firm: 57 stitches over 4″ (14.25 SPI) and 79 rows over 4″ (19.75 RPI). I needed a magnifying glass.

It took me a little time and careful examination to appreciate the finer points of their construction. They’re knit from the cuff down, with a pretty picot edge – this gives the top hem the maximum amount of stretch possible, which is never very much with cotton… the knitter made a clever choice. The combination of lace and cables in the cuff is lovely. The beginning of each round is marked with a purl stitch on alternate rows, forming a graceful seam down the back and showing the knitter where to place her decreases.

There is a decorative column of garter stitch on the edges of the heel flap; I don’t know if it serves a practical purpose or was a strictly decorative touch. The toe is round and seamless, ending with 8 tiny stitches drawn up tightly.

The cuff is marked with a pair of initials in pink cross stitch: these stockings were knit for M.E., and the letters are oriented so that they are right-side up when the wearer looks down at them, as is customary with socks of this era. And we can tell that they were knitted by somebody else for M.E. – because on one of the stockings, worked in a very subtle mix of purls and knits, you can see the initial E.

Who was M.E.? The stockings are for a small-footed person, and unlike kilt hose, the tops are not meant to be folded down; this tells us they were for a woman or girl. The knitter was highly skilled, and spent a great amount of time making these fine stockings – they would have been a special gift indeed, and they show very little wear. Perhaps they were a wedding gift? At this great remove of time and history, the only thing we can know is that E. cared enough for M.E. to create something so beautiful and intricate, and M.E. treasured them enough to carefully put them away and save them.

They may look like stockings to the rest of the world… but knitters will know what they really are: thousands of tiny stitches of love, frozen in time.

Yesterday we had to make that last, kindest decision for our dog. We’d known since November about the cancer, but the end came more suddenly than we expected when an infection set in around the tumour.

Fourteen years ago, I found her at the SPCA. She was the only dog not barking and throwing herself at the gates; she just sat there, looking at me steadily. I was her person from the very beginning. Where I was, there she was.

The house feels very empty and silent without the tickety-tick of toenails on wooden floors. I washed all of her blankets, folded them and put them away. The sofa seems so much bigger; the living room darker without the blinds pulled up so she can see outside. I will not have to prune the shrubbery for her viewing convenience this year.

I get random little stabs in the heart. Last night I wept into the dishwater as I washed her food dish for the last time. This morning I opened the kitchen curtains and cried again when I looked out at the backyard snow… pawprints everywhere, melting softly as the day warms up.

Oh, I will miss her so.

I’m happy to wait until they think they’ve got it right before they sell it to me.

Thank you Ellen! Nice job. This pattern is fairly pithy – short, sweet, and not overly burdened with details.

Ravelry link

Direct download from Google docs

Today, “knit some rows on sock” includes this lovely thing:

Yarn: Malabrigo Sock – Piedras
Pattern: Cat Bordhi – Coriolis

As Opal guessed in the comments on the last post, it’s Malabrigo Sock. (Good eye, Opal! if you’re not a Malabrigo Junkie already, you’re on the way there.) It’s the newest yarn in the shop, so I naturally had to hold back a skein for research and development purposes – it’s a grim job, being forced to knit with shmooshily beautiful yarns, but I’ll buckle down and do it for my customers’ sake. (Don’t you all feel sorry for me?) I picked out Piedras, one of the colours I thought would be less likely to sell; frankly, it seemed sort of muddy and ugly in the skein. But – quelle surprise! – it knits up looking completely different, and utterly lovely. I am totally gobsmacked.

And I’m barely holding myself back from stealing some more and casting on a random shawl. Only The Magic Power Of The List is holding me back.

Arriving next week:

It’ll be bringing along a whole bunch of little friends, in 15 more shades.

I’ve been a commercial printer for 15 years, and it looks like the company I work for will soon cease to exist. I could go into a long, depressing explanation of how hedge funds and other financial service companies loot, pillage and destroy manufacturing businesses for the benefit of their shareholders, pocketing their profits and wiping out jobs… but it’s a sadly familiar story and commercial printing is a dying business anyway, so it’s not surprising that the vultures have landed to pick over our corpse. The death knell of paper and ink sounded the day the internet was invented; it’s just taken this long to catch up with us. We now live in the Information Age; some business models won’t survive; other ones will be born and thrive. Such is the evolution of economics and human endeavour.

It will leave me not so much unemployed, as self-employed, as I plan to take the opportunity to grow and expand ACME Fibres. The business has always been limited by the amount of hours I’ve had available to dedicate to it; I’m pretty sure that soon those limitations will be swept away, leaving me in a position to do lots of things I’ve had to put off through lack of time. It will fun and exciting and scary, and I’m so looking forward to it.

The Internet giveth, and it taketh away. I am a journeyman printer, with years of hard-won knowledge and skill that is about to become totally obsolete. But I am also a wool merchant, and I have access to the whole world to find fantastic fibres and yarns and tools. And I have wonderful customers, brought to me by the magic of modern communication. So, I think I’m going to come out ahead in this deal, even though the changes are going to be frightening.

2013 begins with a fresh pot of coffee and a pile of paperwork – New Year’s Day is for inventory, of course; to see where you’ve been, and where you’re going, and how many skeins of yarn you have on hand.

I hope your new year brings you everything you hope for. Keep calm, and knit on.

Old & lovely

It’s a distaff, for spinning wool. (Or flax, but I’d've thought it would have a comb on top if it was for bast fibres.) You’re looking at the public side of it; the spinner sits on the flat part, and spins from the other side. It’s likely Russian, though I’m not going to rule out any of the Baltic countries; they have a great many textile traditions in common. I couldn’t even guess at its age; it does show a fair amount of use wear and there’s a few bits broken off.

For more than a year, the distaff has been waiting quietly in a corner of my living room, just perched on a shelf being beautiful. And then a thread came up on the Spindle Lore board on Ravelry, asking if anyone used a distaff… and I felt ashamed that I had this marvellous thing right here, and had never even tried it out.

So I did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFSdZdHCh40

I’m not very good at it yet, but I can already see how incredibly useful this tool is – I can spin fine yarns faster and more productively. I have no idea why distaffs never migrated to North America, and why they’ve never found a place in modern spindle spinning. My mind is blown by this wonderful, useful, gorgeous thing.

PS: There’s no sound in that video, but the only thing you’d hear is the dog snoring anyway. And me swearing softly.

PPS: See that basket sitting on the cheese box beside my chair? There’s an Athabasca sleeve in there. But more on that in another post.

I have a soft spot for Twist; I like their philosophy. It’s less like a magazine and more like a showcase – designers retain the rights for their patterns after they’re published on Twist, and are free to sell them on their own websites or do whatever they want with them. Magazines and books, of course, keep the pattern rights themselves – designers get huge exposure, but lose the opportunity to profit directly further down the road by taking back an out-of-print pattern and re-publishing it themselves. I like knitting magazines – there’s a shamefully high stack of them in my workroom – but it’s always made me a little uncomfortable that the designers have to give up the rights to their pattern in perpetuity in order to get it published; it seems like an unfair deal for the designer, and it certainly doesn’t pay well. Twist Collective’s business model aims to change that, and gives designers a chance to put more money in their own pockets. This can only lead to more good things being designed.

I’d like to say I vote with my wallet and buy Twist patterns for philosophical reasons, in order to encourage business models that support designers. But I’d be lying – I buy the patterns because they’re beautiful, and well-written, and wearable by normal human beings. I’ve been wanting to make another pullover, and I don’t need another cabled one – cable sweaters are my default, when I can’t think of anything else to make. Still, I was on the verge of casting one on anyway – luckily, Fiona Ellis came along just in time to save me with Athabasca:

I’m loving the buttony goodness of this sweater. Have I ever told you how much I love buttons? oh yes, I do. I have jars and jars of buttons – biscuit tins of buttons, chocolate boxes of buttons. I buy them at yard sales and flea markets, in box lots at auctions. I’m mad for buttons. Here’s my chance to sew some onto something!

Of course I won’t be using the yarn that’s called for. I’ve no idea what I’m going to use. Maybe… maybe I’ll spin some…? In soft natural greys and browns maybe?

Time to toss the stash and see what falls out!

Warm & toasty toes

I like fancy hand-dyed luxury sock yarns just as much as the next knitter… but when it comes functional boot socks for a Canadian winter, nothing that can beat the sheer comfort and indestructibility of good old Paton’s Kroy. Stuff wears like iron.