Discos and Fibonacci Stripes

Happy 2007, everyone!

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season. I know I did. I was so busy there was not much time left for knitting, but I'm not complaining

We finally got a little snow on Dec 30th and Daughter#2 managed to scrape enough together to make this cute little snowman.

too cute

Unfortunately, he melted yesterday in the rain, but he did survive long enough to help us ring in the new year, which we did disco style. We set up a little discotheque at Chez Persnickety and had a dance extravaganza. In fact, I'm still sore from all the dancing.

I forgot to get a picture that night (too many Cosmopolitans?), but here's a picture the next morning, looking up at he ceiling of our "disco". Just imagine it with more balloons, strobe lights, and the disco ball going...

I just love to hang stuff from the ceiling.

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I did manage to get a few knitted items finished in December. One of them was a pair of socks that I made for myself with some leftover Yarn for Sox.

I usually hate stripes, but after reading an article on Fibonacci stripes in the Fall 2003 issue of Cast On I decided to give them a try. [The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers that starts with 0, 1, and then every following number is the sum of the two previous numbers. So the sequence is: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.]

Apparently, there are many, many ways you can make use of this sequence in knitting. I decided to use just two alternating colored stripes, but to let the sequence determine how many rows of each color to knit (up to a max of 5 rows). So my pattern went: 1 red, 1 blue, 2 red, 3 blue, 5 red, 1 blue, 1 red, 2 blue, 3 red, 5 blue (repeated).

Fibonacci-striped socks

To add even more interest, I used a two-color corrugated ribbing at the cuff, and I made one sock with a red cuff and toe and the other with a blue cuff and toe. Here are the specs:

Pattern:

my own

Yarn:

Accessories Unlimited Yarn for Sox [80% wool, 20% nylon],
color: Red Mix and Blue Jean (<1 skein of each)

Needles:

US 4?

Gauge:

4.25 sts/inch at ankle, 5 sts/inch on foot (hmmm)

Finished:

December 2006

Comments:

I loosely carried the yarn along the "seam" for the narrow stripes, but cut the yarn when I got to the widest stripes. There were still plenty of ends to weave in, believe me.
I used this technique to try to camouflage the color jogs at the end of the rounds. I've used this method successfully several times before, but it didn't work as well with such thick, rough yarn. Well, I think it still looks better than not doing anything, and it's at the back of my ankle and the bottom of the foot so it doesn't really matter.
I'm not a big fan of this yarn. I like that it is a worsted weight yarn that is made with some nylon content so it will wear well when made into socks, but it's just too rough and "au naturel" for me. It has bits of vegetation still in it that must be picked out (but not as much as a Noro yarn). It sure makes really thick socks though.

I like funky socks.

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I'm still working on updating my gallery. I'll let you know when it is up and running. I'm focusing mostly on the socks for now. It's taking me a long time because a) I am anal and want to have every project properly documented and b) I have knit a lot of socks.