Green Socks

The first of the two pairs of socks to come out of my home dyed yarn. I improvised a simple toe-up pattern with two six-stitch cables on the front - the yarn is busy enough and any complicated texture would be lost in the colorful patches.

Pattern: Green Socks, 60 sts, toe-up
Yarn: Alize Superwash, 50 g, home dyed
Needle: 2.5 mm
Time to knit: one week

For the heel I used the instructions in this free general pattern by Wendy D. Johnson - she has so many wonderful and free sock patterns!
I like how it forms the heel, very neat and without holes and the pattern has the calculations for 7 different sock sizes, so it's very flexible and universal.

I finished the cuff with one row of double rib and Elizabeth Zimmerman's invisible bind-off, which is really stretchy and beautiful.

The socks are meant for Gaby, but as today the temperatures in Sofia exceeded 20C, she just posed with them for a couple of minutes and took them down, claiming it too hot for wool socks. Oh, well, there'll be other winters to come :)

Maluka

Everything about this project was about color. I wanted to test a theory I had about creating a slightly nuanced yarn with distribution of the color variations in advance before immersing the yarn into the hot water. To my satisfaction the experiment was very successful and I am eager to try it again with other colors and even to try to duplicate it on several skeins for a bigger project.

Out of this ball of yarn with very limited yardage - only 240 yards in 100 g, all I could hope for was a neckerchief. I chose a shawlette pattern that called for less than 300 m. Maluka is a very well written pattern, generously provided by Bea Schmidt as a free download from Ravelry. For me - certainly not a beginner in knitting, but a beginner in shawl knitting, it was very easy and understandable, and she has even included photos of how to make for some of the stitches.

Pattern: Maluka by Bea Schmidt
Yarn: Alize Ecolana 100 g, 220 m, hand dyed
Needle: 4.5 mm
Time to knit: 2 days

Wet blocking - spread the shawl took the whole bed. I'll have to buy blocking blocks.

As I didn't have enough yarn, I had to compromise between length and width. Above is my first version of the shawl with only 23 (of 33) repeats of the border chart. The balance between the border and the body was perfect, but the shawl was too short to be wrapped around the neck, as I wanted mine. So I unravelled the body and elongated the border. And of course, now I had to make the body much more shallow for the yarn to suffice. I made the short rows with a step of four instead of two stitches and the final rows were knitted with a step of six stitches. As a whole I spent more time calculating the number of stitches each version of the shawl would be, based on the arithmetic progression the rows represent, then turning this number into grams and meters, than on actually knitting the thing :))). It's a good thing I adore mathematics :)))

These photos were actually taken in front of our building in two sessions - yesterday evening, when the sun had set and the light was not sufficient, and today, when it started drizzling just when we went out to take the pictures. (I had almost given up on publishing the shawl, the photos are of poor quality.) To my amazement, in only a few hours the leaves of the tree had reduced at least by half :(
It's a cold and rainy autumn day and I was reminded of this beautiful song from my teen years:

"... листопаден идва вече дъждът"