My recent love has been sock knitting. Until last year's issue of Knit It! I never even thought about making socks but after I made my first pair I was hooked. I have made a number of socks out of Magic Stripes yarn. The wool, however, itches my feet so I have recently purchased some Sock It to Me! Esprit yarn off the Elann.com website. This is a combination of cotton and elastic. I plan to use this knit a couple pairs of socks on sock knitalongs that I have discovered on yahoo groups.
Because of my recent obsession with sock knitting I have been looking for other ways to use sock yarn. I have discovered the book The Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns which lets you make about anything using any yarn. Last night I finished gloves using the glove pattern in the book with Magic Stripes yarn. I ended up frogging one finger of the glove to try to get the stripes of the gloves to match up but otherwise it was fairly smooth sailing. I used size 2 double pointed needles which enabled me to knit at 7 stitches per inch. The other thing that I learned during this process was to pick up a couple extra stitches at the base of each finger and to immediately decrease these stitches in the next row. That process eliminated any holes that previously sprung up between my glove fingers.
On a less glorious note, I had to frog almost an entire sock last night after I realized it was not going to fit over my heel. This was painful as the sock had a complicated cable pattern and was knit at a painstaking gauge of 9 1/2 stitches per inch. The gauge, of course, was the problem because I was aiming for 8 1/2 stitches per inch. (Sigh . . .) Apparently a gauge swatch worked in stockinette stitch does differ from a gauge swatch worked in the round. I had been warned. . .
