Here it is Memorial Day weekend and it is cold and raining outside. Hannah and I have been hanging out indoors knitting, reading a book, and cleaning the stash. Oh, boy. There sure is a lot of yarn in the stash… let’s talk about that another day. Good thing it is raining, because I have a lot of knitting to do!
It is going to rain again tomorrow and when this is all over the outside gardens and lawn will be looking great. In the meantime, I have lots to keep me busy indoors.
Knitting
I finished up the first of the assigned pooling socks that I’m working on.
I had a skein of yarn from Chasing Rabbits Fiber Co. in the Colorful Yarns colorway designed for my favorite LYS, Colorful Yarns. The skein is mostly grey with short rainbow strips that are about 1/6 of the length of the skein. I started knitting the yarn in my usual ribbed sock pattern and was not happy with the way the colors were just stacking on top of each other. I ripped the sock out and started again with a K2P2 ribbed section at the top of the sock with smooth stockinette after that. I purled the rainbow sections when I came to them and threw in random PSS stitches in the rainbow purl strips in an effort to create some randomness in the colored sections on the sock. You can see in my second picture that I put in 1-3 PSS bumps into the purled/color strips or sometimes didn’t add a PSS at all.
What is PSS? It’s a stitch that I learned while knitting The Sharon Show in section 21 (called Catnip Garden) that is simple, added a little bump to the knitting and was sure to alter the length of the rainbow strips. Basically you purl two stitches together but leave them on the left needle. You then knit the same two stitches together, and then purl them together again before you pull them to the right needle: three stitches are made from two. You then pass the middle of these three stitches over the stitch next to it (closest to the tip) and there is the bump! If that doesn’t make sense, here is a swell video to show the stitch. On the next round I slipped the two stitches from the PSS and then finally knitted them on the next round after that. You can see the little colored slipped stitches below the purled sections in my second picture. I knit the sock from the top down; if you knit one from the toe up the little colored stitches will be above the purled sections. (Hint: because of the slipped stitches put a purl or two between PSS stitches.)
Once I got through the heel section I stopped inserting the PSS stitches in the knitting on the foot of the sock: I purled on the top of the foot while sticking to smooth stockinette on the bottom of the sock (3rd picture). I lost some of the randomness in the line up of the colored strips but that part of the sock will be in my shoe so I’m good with it. The final picture shows the finished sock with its contrast heel and toe; kind of wish now that I had make the top ribbing that hot pink too. I’m now working on the second sock now and should eventually get the pair completed.
The other knitting that is still going on is the Noncho (Casapinka) that I kind of wish was already done because it is cool with all of the rain… Hannah has been a great help.
Garden
It is raining outside!! Here are the cool pictures from the week of my indoor plants.
I’ve taken to spraying my African violets every week and they seem to like it. The leaves have lifted up and the plants are blooming like crazy. Not what I expected to happen, but the plants are responding so well I spray them down weekly now.
Books
I was struggling with this book a little and wasn’t sure if I would complete it because… almost 700 pages! I don’t know how much I should say because of spoilers, but the plot involves sleepwalkers who are unresponsive to any efforts to wake them up. They never eat, never stop walking, and it is impossible to get a needle into them to draw blood. “Maybe they have scleroderma,” hypothesizes the CDC personnel attempting to understand what is happening with this flock of wanderers. Scleroderma! They had me at scleroderma. I kept reading.
Of course the wanderers don’t have scleroderma. This book is big, complicated, and pulls in lots of situational elements that are obviously based on actual people and events in the US. Amazingly, the book, which was published in mid-2019, also features a pandemic. I remember looking at the book when it was first published during those happy days when I could just head off to the book store to meet my friends; now things are changed and the impact of the book was that much more. I did like the book, but then I’m a biogeek who reads books about the CDC and outbreaks even before it became our lives.
Have a great week everyone!
Read a little, knit a little, and garden like your heart can’t live without it.
Yarn, Books & Roses 
Your socks and noncho are looking great! So nice to see Miss Hannah looking lovely and keeping your company too 🙂 Your plants are all doing so well!
We have had so much rain this May that we are now in the record books here; my plants have really benefited from all the water and weed pulling is a snap! It is also good motivation to keep knitting away on the socks and Noncho. 🙂 Lucky for me Hannah is the best little space heater ever.
🙂 Lots of good rain is helpful is a lot of ways! It definitely helps with plants, and is an excellent excuse to stay inside and knit. She looks like a good space heater and also an excellent helper 🙂
I went out and pulled up three bags full of weeds this afternoon and they came out of the ground lickity-split because of all of the rain. I discovered that the garden plants were growing like crazy in the middle of the weeds so all of that water was a good thing! I still have more to pull but it started to rain again and I had to stop… more knitting!! Hannah is the best little helper ever. She just hangs out with me keeping my legs warm and almost never messes with the yarn.
I love it when weeding goes easy! And yay for the rain helping your plants, too 🙂
And she’s adorable to boot!
My orchid flower still hasn’t opened, I was wondering if it was dead but the leaves are looking healthy. I may look for another spot in the house for it. The bathroom is great during the winter but maybe it needs a sunnier spot? I love the socks, I was awake at 4am and couldn’t get back to sleep so I’m not quite following the PSS so will watch the video. I love the splashes of rainbows though.
Those dang orchid plants are really slow movers! They don’t like strong sunlight but you are so far north maybe there is no such thing if you are an orchid. 🙂 I watch the buds to see if they are growing… if they turn yellow then they are toast in my experience, but if they are still growing you are good.
That PSS stitch is kind of a nice one to have in the knitting arsenal. Casapinka used a version of it to do the stitch increases in the Noncho; if you don’t pass a stitch over you have an increase. I hope that you got good sleep eventually.
I suppose it would need to be a swell video to demonstrate how to knit bumps 🙂
Oh, it is!
🙂
Sounds like a good week – I really love the colors on your Noncho and the socks are so fun. It’s grey and rainy here as well, I’m enjoying starting a new sweater in this weather that is perfect for knitting
I worked on the yarn stash yesterday and have kitted together the yarn for four more sweaters. This weather makes that seem really reasonable…
Your socks look great!
Thank you! They are fun to knit and they make me think that I should be more adventurous in my sock knitting. My next yarn is called “Troublemaker” and I think that it should have some cat paw Fair Isle sections.
Oh those sound like great fun!
Oh gosh, those socks!! I love them!! I have some gray sock yarn with random rainbow patches and now I definitely need to do something like this!
It is a ton of fun! I bet there are other fun stitches that you can just throw into the colored areas too.
Hannah is such a beauty. She’s really grown, hasn’t she? I’m sorry about the rainy weekend. We’re enduring a heatwave in the nineties, so we’re inside too but for different reasons. I love your socks. I’m trying too reconcile the idea of slipping and skipping stitches, only to recover them on the other side. You make it look easy. The colors are so cheering. I hope the sun comes out soon.
Hannah is all grown up now and suddenly has dropped some of her crazy kitten behaviors, but she still wants to play. I keep thinking that I should get her a kitten…
A heatwave! That does kind of sound good but I hate them when they really arrive. I learned a lot of crazy stitches doing the Casapinka/Sharon from Security knits and now I’m adding them into other stuff. I thought about popcorns, but that would look too strange, don’t you think?