Knitting Catch-Up and Father’s Day Socks

I’ve been really into knitting these days. I know it’s a little weird – who takes up knitting as you approach summer? But I can make significant progress on my bus ride home.  It’s social too – no whir of the machine growing out conversation.  Lately, I’ve even been knitting while I sing my kids lullabies… of course when I drop a stitch I start to hum, and P has to remind me of the words.  Sewing can, of course, be social too, but there’s something about just knitting for 5 minutes here and there that makes it very appealing.

I have knit before, but I’ve knit more in the last month than I have in years.  Knitting has changed a bit, with the availability of gourmet yarn, and the fact that everyone is knitting on circulars now. Sewaholic features some beautiful knitted garments on her site, which were inspiring too, and she has a great post on how knitting can improve your sewing.

I have a few projects going on right now – socks for J and a short-sleeved summer sweater for me, and I have even more on my agenda. So far I have only finished one item – Joelle Hoverson’s Placket Sweater from her book Last-Minute Knitted Gifts. It took me several weeks, from about mid-April until the start of June to finish it, but I find things are going much more quickly now. It was a bit of a challenging sweater to start with and I relied on many youtube videos… Only one major issue cropped up, which was that the underarms were a wee bit holy even after I joined them as per the pattern, so I sewed them up with some yarn. But at least that part of the sweater is not visible. If I were to do it again, I’d just pick up an extra stitch at each end and the join to avoid the holes, but I only learned that technique after finishing the sweater. Also, I was definitely doing some weird knitting – I was corrupted by one of those Youtube videos – gotta be careful with that. So the stitches are kind of weird and wonky, and then get corrected about 2/3 of the way up. I’m taking a sock-making class at my local knit store and she showed us that when picking up stitches for the heel.

Here’s my next project – the Purl Bee Cap Sleeve Lattice Top, which looks perfect for a Northwest Summer.

And of course, just in time for Father’s Day, the Churchmouse Basic Sock.  Poor J gets pretty neglected in the made-by-me category, so here was something to make-up for it.

If any of you are on Ravelry you find me there with username lookingatstars and I’d love to see what you made.