Travel Knits

Okay, so before I run away again (this time for vacation up to my parents cabin), I thought I'd post some finished objects and progress pictures from the things I was working on while I was traveling the last couple of weeks.

First up are the finished Lorna's Laces toe up socks in Bucks Bar:



I bound off the second one a little too tight, but since I'd already cut the thread and woven in the ends, I haven't decided yet if I'm going to try to go back and fix it or not. They come up almost to my knees as they are, though, so I could also just choose to fold them down or something. For some reason I'm really not in love with these socks, though, so I might also just hang onto them for a gift or donation. *shrug*



And there's the second washcloth I made from the Euroflax Linen. It ended up being a fraternal twin to the first because I wasn't paying as much attention to the pattern when I started knitting on it and made the first row of squares a couple rows too short and ended up having to improvise a bit to get it to come out the right size.



That's the toe of my first Sockapalooza sock. I'm actually almost to the heel turn on it now, but forgot to take a new progress picture this morning when I was out taking pictures with Gnorm.



And finally I brought the Foxfire Baby Camel and Tussah Silk with me so I could participate in the Spindler's Spin-in-Public day (first Friday of every month) at the airport in Minneapolis during my layover. I think I'm doing okay with it, but it isn't quite as even as I'd like and I think it might be underspun, but it could just be that it needs to be livened again. I still have more than half the original bag to spin and it's already quite a bit of yarn, so I'm hoping to get enough out of it to do as a two-ply that will end up about fingering weight for a shawl or scarf.

While we were in Kansas City, Cate and Sara invited me along to go to Cottage Fiber with them, which was well, well worth the trip. Cate got some pictures that I'm hoping she'll get a chance to post soon. It's a great, great little shop tucked in an out of the way studio space and it has undoubtedly the best selection of spinning fibers of any shop I've ever been to (which admittedly is not many, but even Cate and Sara were impressed and they've been to that most holy of fiber events - Rhinebeck!) and some really beautiful old wheels. I really can't recommend this shop enough - if you ever find yourself in Kansas City you really really need to check them out and pet all the gorgeousness yourself!

I managed to escape with only a very small stash enhancement (modeled below with Gnorm):



The ball of roving is about 2.5 ounces of cashgora in a really rich red/orange/copper colorway (Cate got the other half of the ball) and the little packet has 4-5 beautifully dyed silk hankies with some amazing copper accents. I've never spun silk from a hankie, but the owner of the shop (who's name I didn't get; terribly bad manners, especially since she opened her shop up special just for us!) gave me some quick instruction and I'm looking forward to getting it started. Maybe if I end up with enough of it I can ply some if it up with the Foxfire.. I realized after we left that I forgot to get some of the amazingly soft angora bunny roving she had, though, so I will have to call and see if she'll mail me some.

Oh, and my fiber swap pal - Elsje - got her package and appears to like it, so that makes me very happy! It was really hard not to hang on to all that fiber, but I'm glad she likes it. The fiber swap packages were all supposed to be sent off by the 5th, so I'm really hopeful that mine will show up today before we hit the road for the cabin!

In one last bit of mailing news, I'm shipping Gnorm off today to his next destination and all the goodies that I've picked out for my next pal are neatly tucked into his box awaiting delivery to the post office. If you missed what I got from Stephanie, I posted about it all over on the Knitting Gnome Swap blog a couple days ago. I really really love everything she sent - especially the tea which is really honestly truly my favorite and she had no way of knowing I even knew about Market Spice (I lived in Seattle for three years between college and grad school) - and I'm bringing the Yarn Pirate yarn with me to the cabin just in case I finish my Sockapalooza pal's socks so I can start right in on some lusciousness for me!

Connected to: WestinLobby

Just a quick update before I dash off to facilitate two back-to-back sessions this morning: I'm better now, not that I wasn't before, but being here this week has reminded me not only that I *do* accomplish quite enough for a single person office, *and* that I know a lot more people in this field than I realize. Those are both reassuring salve to a crispy IR director!

In other news, conference knitting proceeds apace: the toe up socks are complete, as is the second linen washcloth (even if it is a fraternal twin to the first). I even cast on last night for my first Sockapalooza pal's sock! I'll try to snag some pictures between sessions today, but no promises! I am running off for a bit of a yarn crawl with Sara & Cate this evening, and that might just mean there will be no time left to post them today.

Plans for the long weekend.

I've been traveling most of this week - Denver Sunday evening through late Tuesday and then Madison Wednesday and Thursday - and while it's been a productive and useful week, I'm very glad not to be traveling again this weekend (especially because I only get seven days at home before I'm off again to Kansas City for six!).

Sometime today I need to run into town to deliver some games to our Garden Gurus, the male half of which will be chaperoning a class of pre-teens on a trip to our nation's capital next week. They're taking the train and, knowing how hard it can be to keep preteens occupied for a long trip, MGG (Male Garden Guru) asked if we could loan them some of our board games. We've sort of collected quite a few, thanks in large part to some friends who have come to spend the last three New Year's Eves with us playing games, and this is just a sampling of what we're sending along for their trip:



Starting on the top left and going what will end up being more or less counter-clockwise: Phase 10, Peasantry, Queen's Necklace, Rook, Carcassonne: The Castle, Carcassonne (original with a couple expansions), Ticket to Ride, Tsuro, double 12 dominoes, the 1910 expansion for Ticket to Ride, and Monkeys!. I tried to pull a selection that would allow for some smaller groups (The Castle, Tsuro, and dominoes can be played with two people) as well as larger groups (Tsuro can go to 8, but most of the rest top out around 5 or 6). I'm contemplating sending Mystery of the Abbey, but I'm a bit worried it might just be a bit too complex for the average pre-teen. And while we have Settlers of Catan and two of the larger expansions, as well as the expansion for 5-6 players, I think it just has too many little pieces that could too easily get lost on a train (and technically, so does Ticket to Ride, but I can't resist sending game about trains along on a train trip!). Similarly, the Catan card game and Jambo (both two player games) are staying home (though I admit that the Catan card game is staying mostly because we just picked up the expansions from Pegasus Games while we were in Madison and haven't had a chance to play it ourselves yet; we also just got Guillotine, which is also staying here for the same reason.) Yes.. we like good games and our friends know it. *smile*

When I drop off the games, I've been invited to peruse the GG's garden for anything that I'd like to add to my own. I already know that I want to get some balloon flower from them, and hopefully some of the small Japanese irises. And some garlic chives (which I think Jack actually already got and just need to be planted). If the weather clears up tomorrow or Monday, I'll likely go plant the seeds for the vegetable garden (I don't want to plant them and then have a thunderstorm roll in right away for fear the seeds will flood out and all clump in one place).

I also plan to round out the packages for the summer swaps I'm doing. I sat down last Saturday before I left and ordered a bunch of stuff for my spoilees and was quite pleased that it all arrived by the time I got home:



I won't go into detail on what's all there just in case one of my spoilees happens to drop by and figure things out (and there are some things that were intentionally kept out of this picture because I was worried they'd be too easily identified by their intended recipients!), but I will say that it's going to be hard to let some of this stuff go! There are just a few finishing touches needed for each of them, and of course, I still need to knit my sockapalooza pal's socks, but I have a couple months for that still.

In the meantime, I finished the first of the toe up socks:



I didn't really use a pattern, but the yarn is Lorna's Laces in Buck's Bar and I just worked the leg until I ran out of yarn. As I realized how tall these were going to be, I added in some calf shaping, which I think turned out pretty well considering I made it up as I went along!



(Thank goodness for Blogger's new auto-save feature! I just accidentally clicked on a shortcut in my menu bar and thought I'd lost this entire post.. Whew!)

And as long as the weather stays chilly and storm-threatening, I snuck a skein of Louet Euroflax in Lilac in with the orders for my spoilees so I can snuggle in and watch a movie (we got both Babel and Pan's Labyrinth from Netflix while I was gone) while making a couple washcloths (modified from the hand towel pattern from Mason-Dixon Knitting) for the upstairs bathroom.



I'm admittedly a bit torn because I'd really love to make hand towels for the new bathroom as well, but the Euroflax is a bit spendy. I've checked out KnitPicks new CotLin, though, and I think I could make a couple hand towels with the Linen colorway using the Royal Plum for accents that would work well and would come in around $7.50 per towel instead of the $20 it would be if I used Euroflax. And if they turn out well, I might just make some for gifts, too.. I know at least a couple folks who have done bathroom remodels lately!

Oh, and sometime soon I need to do a book post. I finished Eat, Pray, Love a few weeks ago, and since have also finished The Life of Pi and started Middlesex. And I picked up a couple new books while in Madison as well - Tayari Jones's The Untelling (you knew this one was coming, right?) and Gabriel Garcia Marques's One Hundred Years of Solitude. The stack on my bedside table doesn't seem to be getting smaller, but I couldn't be happier at having so much good literature to read!

Almost Random Wednesday

In no particular order..

I finished Ghost Map tonight. I have to say that the historical bits were getting a little tiring toward the end, but he caught my interest and attention again in the last two chapters. Quite a bit to think about with on that front, especially in terms of the environmental impact of cities per capita. It brought me back around to thinking about trying to pick up an undergrad course in Epidemiology so that I can go back at some point for a Masters in Public Health.

It caught my attention as I started Leaving Atlanta that the Acknowledgements in Ghost Map are at the end, but in Leaving Atlanta they're at the beginning. I may be a bit off in this, but I usually read the author's acknowledgements which is why I noticed this. The names aren't ever anyone I know, but I feel somehow that reading them is important. I guess it's somehow related to the idea that we all, no matter what endeavors we undertake, owe acknowledgement for love and laughter and support and assistance to those around us but it seems we rarely remember how important all of it is until we get to the end of something.. or.. well, maybe the beginning of something.

Today was Bad Politics(tm) day at work. Nothing that I was directly involved with, but it seemed that lots of folks around me were caught up in some sort of bad juju. Here's hoping that tomorrow will be better.

I've started working on the Blue Willow Cardigan again and have (finally) divided for the front and back. This means that for the first time since I started knitting this one, I was able to stretch it all out and realize just how long the rows for that first 12 inches were:



It's too long for a single picture and I wasn't feeling quite motivated enough to try to figure out how to graft the two pictures together. *shrug* The ruler is there for scale, but also in a (mostly vain) attempt to unroll the bottom edge. Here's a slightly more detailed shot of just the back:



This is also the first opportunity I've had to more or less wrap the body around me to see if it's going to fit - I've been plagued with sweaters that end up .. off. The raglan I made a couple years ago has sleeves just a touch too short; Rogue is slightly too small; and my Fair Isle 101 is slightly too loose, especially around the neck, etc. This one will have a 3 inch Fair Isle border added all around the front edge and the bottom, and I think that once that's in place, this one will fit well enough. I may not be able to button it, but in truth I so rarely button cardigans that I doubt it will matter.

I'm in meetings at work for the next three days pretty much solid. Tomorrow I have some reprieve in the late afternoon, but Thursday and Friday are booked straight through with back-to-back demos of several of the PeopleSoft functional unit components for their student information system. I'm .. cautiously optimistic at the moment that the living hell we'll endure over the next 2-ish years during conversion and initial implementation will be worth it in the end. At least, I am most of the time.

We have not done any additional work in the upstairs bathroom. I alternate between feeling guilty about this and knowing that our lives our busy and the bathroom can wait. I feel quite a bit more guilty about the dust, which just accentuates the fact that I haven't vacuumed in.. longer than I care to admit. Maybe tomorrow.

Wilcoxon has a hat..

Okay, so really it's the start of my next pair of socks - just a plain stockinette foot so far, but my first every toe up sock. I used the Magic Cast On, which took me a bit to wrap my head around, but now that I have it, I have it, you know? I looked for patterns to use for the foot and decided that cables would get lost in the color changes and lace would be too busy, so this pair will pr'bly just be straight stockinette with maybe a ribbed ankle. I've wanted to learn to do toe-up socks for awhile because I never seem to make the ankles long enough to wear comfortably under boots when I do them top down.

Unfortunately, now I need to go practice my drum for a while. We have a sort of big performance next week and it'll be my first time performing all four of our pieces. Two of them I'm really comfortable with, the third I'm mostly set for, but the fourth I manage to get lost in the middle of almost every time. :/

A quickie before moving on to other things..

The pansy Jaywalkers are finished!



They're.. well, not my favorite socks. :/ Even though I knit the ribbing on needles a size smaller than the leg, the ribbing is loose and the leg is still a bit snug at the top, due to my shapely calves. The foot is a bit loose as well, because the stockinette for the sole should also likely have been done on a smaller needle size but switching between two different sized needles for each round would have driven me to distraction. *shrug* I'll wear them, I just won't likely make another pair.

In other areas of productivity, we've been back at the remodeling this weekend. Dad came to help us finish hanging the rest of the drywall:



That's Dad hamming it up as he paused before mudding the last corner so I could take the picture. *smile* You may also remember that there was a heating vent over the large hole in the wall on the right that was painted that lovely (*choke*) green; that was picked up this morning, along with the hardware from the door, by a man who lives just outside of town who does sandblasting. We should get them back all nice and clean later this week. We won't be painting them. Ever.

Hanging the rest of the drywall also meant that I could dig the door out from under the tarp (where it had been stored with the drywall to keep it from getting rained on - really an extra cautious step since it takes a very hard blowing wind to get rain back to the porch wall!). Now, before you look at the next set of pictures, remember that this door had been painted over completely at least four times, on top of a coat of varnish...



The worst part, not surprisingly, were the bits around the panels - they're rounded, or concave or however you describe them; the paint stripped out pretty clean thanks to the varnish underneath, but getting the varnish out required quite a bit of hand detail sanding and at least an entire pack of medium grain sandpaper. It looks infinitely better, but in truth, we still need to strip the varnish off the other side. :(

In a fit of.. something.. not quite sure what.. we also decided that it was time to make the stairs not quite so squeaky. At the moment, each and every stair creaks when you step on it. And this morning, there were rectangles of what used to be an off-white, rather thick nap carpet on each step that was *impossible* to clean - the vacuum couldn't quite get to the back corners, it was nearly impossible to clean the area up to the edge of the carpet without a toothbrush, etc. So the first step was to rip out all the little carpet pieces. Fortunately, they weren't glued down, just nailed, so while dad was mudding corners upstairs, I pulled nails out of the stairs, swept and mopped:



They're still rough - they really need to be properly refinished, but that's a bigger project than we're ready to undertake at the moment, so we're doing what we can with the knowledge that we'll need to undo it at some later time to do it all properly.

Tomorrow, Jack will nail the steps all down again, which dad tells us should stop the squeaking. Once that's done, we'll put in the carpet runner I picked up this evening:



(You can really see how bad the stairs are in this shot.. *cringe*) I think it will look really nice with the woodwork, but it does somewhat limit our options for painting the wall in the stairwell. *shrug*

If only all things were this easy to undo..

My husband had oral surgery on Tuesday. It was not terrible, but it was a bit more invasive than your typical tooth extraction. I'll spare you the details of the surgery and instead show you what I started to occupy myself while waiting:



Yup, it's a Jaywalker done in KnitPicks Memories in the Pansy colorway. It's a quick little pattern, easy to memorize, and therefore just about perfect for waiting rooms. I have to admit,though, that I wasn't thrilled with the striping - I didn't like that the colors *always& pooled in pairs, so that the black and dark purple were always striping and the yellow and magenta were always striping - so I wasn't too terribly upset to discover that the sock was much to tight when knit on US 1 needles.



So I ripped it out and started over, doing the ribbing on US 1s and then switching to US 2s for the chevron pattern. So far, I like it much better - the striping seems to be more mixed up and it's definitely not as dense as the first time.

This will likely be my plane knitting for my trip to South Carolina this weekend, but I'm also bringing some newly acquired Lorna's Laces (my first time ever using this yarn!) just in case I finish this pair before I get home.

Blue Willow Cardigan update

I feel like I've not made very much progress on this one, but I did finish the first of six skeins of the grey yarn this evening, so I thought I'd post a photo or two:



The photo doesn't show the full width of the piece - it's the full girth of the sweater, less about 6 inches which will be added with the edging, knit flat because it's a cardigan. I've decided to make it longer than the pattern calls for - if I left it at the length called for, I think it would feel too short. The pattern says that if you lengthen it, you need to lengthen it by 3 inches due to the length of the pattern repeats on the boder, so I have four more inches of the body to go until I divide for the front and back. At that point the bulk of the body will be finished, so things should go a little faster.

In the meantime, I may switch for a bit to tablet weaving and/or bobbin lace and/or spinning for a bit. My knitting mojo seems to be errant of late, so maybe something else will hold my attention better.

Peek a boo! I see you!

All done! (Sorry the photos suck; the modeled ones even moreso.)



The first picture is blurry, but more color accurate; the second is not blurry, but completely washed out.

*sigh*

I'm a little worried that the arms will be a bit too small - I have fat arms, though, so maybe it won't be quite so tight on the recipient. I need to remember to include a note with care instructions, though. It's cotton/modal and I don't want her to wash and dry it and have it be too small. In any case, I'm giving in one more blocking round now that the seams are in, so it pr'bly won't get sent until later this week.

Teapots, part three!

It came!



It's bigger than I expected (the pictures below help with scale), which is neat. And holy "samples" man! The little box on the right contains four not-so-sample-sized tins of flavored tea - oriental spice, vanilla, mango, and strawberry. There's pr'bly enough for 10-12 cups of each flavor in the tins! Having been on a chai kick lately, I decided to try the oriental spice first.



It took me a few minutes to figure out how it works because I thought the little video on the website showed a lever that you slide to make it pour, but you just set it on the cup to make it pour (there's a little piece that slips down to block the water from pouring, but the edge of the cup pushes it up out of the way).



And I was almost stymied in my quest to try it Right. Now. because the sewer pipe for my building has apparently decided to back up which means not only do we all have to trek out to another building to go to the bathroom, but also that we aren't allowed to run any water or pour anything down the drain. Fortunately, I bring in water every day from home (the water here has a chemical/cholorine taste), so I just needed to decide it would be okay if I drank tea out of my unwashed cup from yesterday.

MMmmm.. I need to learn more about how much tea is enough - the oriental spice was tasty, but not quite strong enough.. or something. Maybe it just needed a little milk. I guess I'll have to make another cup and try that out. *grin*

In other news, do you know about the DeStash blog?! Evil thing. I've added it to my blogroll just in case something irresistable comes up (because, you know, between several pairs of socks, at least three sweaters for myself, and at least one more bucket hat, I don't have enough projects).

Speaking of projects, though, I finished the second sleeve for Peek a boo in the car this morning (all but the last cast off because I think this one ended up a row shorter than the other and I want them to match; the other sleeve is at home so I'll have to check tonight). I'll try to get the pieces blocked tonight, but I have a planning meeting with the Board officers for HCWR from 6 until about 8, so I may be wiped out by the time I get home.

So that means I need to figure out a commuting project to start tomorrow. I need to make another bucket hat, but since I'm stubborn and didn't want to buy a 16 inch circular when I could make five dpns work just as well, it's not really a good project to toss in a bag until it gets past the brim part. I have yarn for Celtic Icon (but not the yarn used in this picture; I have Knit One Crochet Too Angora Soft in Light Moss & Moss from Webs) from Inspired Cable Knits, a sweater kit from Blackberry Ridge, and the Easy Lace Jacket kit (which I was a bit surprised to find included Cascade 220 for the yarn) from White Lies Designs, all for me. I feel sort of obligated to do the Blackberry Ridge kit first, both since it's the oldest of them but also because it's going to quickly be too warm to wear it comfortably. But the Lace Jacket is whispering things like "but I'll be quicker", so I'm a little torn.

Teapots, part two.

As promised, here's a picture of my other teapot:



This one is a bit more conventional - but rather uneven. The knob on the top isn't properly centered, the ridge is a little crooked. It's also somewhat considerably smaller:



(The tea bag steeping is actual a variety of Chai, not the Lipton Green Tea, but I left in the Lipton package to show scale a little better.)

It is just about the right size for a single cup, which works well at work because I can heat water in a mug and in the teapot at the same time, steep a tea bag in both and have one cup ready made in my mug and a second already steeped when I'm finished with the first. It's also a useful vessel for heating water for other uses - like instant oatmeal or those noodle cup things - because it's easier to pour out of than a coffee mug.

Not as exciting as the other, but still suits its purpose rather well. I'm hoping that by tomorrow I'll be able to round out my little teapots series with my latest acquisition (thanks again to Sara for pointing this one out)!

I made more progress on the Peek a boo sleeve last night and this morning in the car and I've only got a couple inches left to go.

Today is just flying by, though, pr'bly because I had a dentist appointment this morning to get the permanent crown I lost a couple weeks ago replaced permanently. Despite past dental trauma (yes, even for somthing as "easy" as placing a permanent crown), this morning's appointment was a cinch, so I'm in a much better mood than I expected I would be!

Teapots, part one

I've had a cold that seems determined to stay squarely in my throat for the past couple of weeks. While this is all sorts of annoying, especially the first week when it made my throat so sore I could hardly swallow (yes, I was cultured, no it wasn't strep), it has forced me to reacquaint myself with tea.

I am generally a coffee drinker, but I can't drink coffee - usually not even decaf - after noon or I don't sleep well. With this cold, I needed something hot to drink in the afternoons that wasn't cocoa, which is usually far too sweet. I am what could only be described as an occassional tea drinker, but I do appreciate good teas. What's more, I'm also an occassional potter and as such, have made a couple of teapots on my time, some as gifts, but two that I've kept.

This is the larger of the two and one of the pieces I'm proudest of.



A couple of general comments on teapot construction to start with. First, teapots are generally heavy and somewhat thicker than other pieces. This is so that they hold in the heat a little longer. A tea cozy will also help with this, but I've never been motivated to make one.

Second, they're typically thrown on a wheel in three pieces - the main body, the spout, and the lid - with a pulled handle attached at the leatherhard stage. Putting together the pieces can be tricky, so usually when throwing a teapot, it's recommended that you throw at least one main body and matching lid, but two or three potential spouts. When you put the teapot together, you identify where you want to attach the spout to the main body and then cut the appropriate slant out of the spout so that it matches the point of the body where it needs to attach. This is not necessarily as easy as it sounds, which is why you usually throw more than one spout. When you have the spout ready, you outline it on the main body and then carve holes out of the main body where the inside of the spout will be so the tea will pour through. You can just carve out the whole spout area, but I usually carve out smaller drain holes so that I can leave the tea bag in the pot and not worry about it getting stuck in the spout.

Third, it's important to remember physics. Because the spout and the body of the teapot are essentially one vessel, the water/tea level will be equal in both parts when you fill it. In other words, you can only fill the teapot to a level equal or lower than the bottom of the opening of the spout. You'll notice in the above teapot that this means that the actual capacity of the teapot does not include the tall neck. Even with this limitation, this teapot holds at least two decent cups of tea.

However, the reason this particular teapot is one of my favorite pieces is because I was somewhat clever in designing it. The lid is also a tea cup, you see.



So, I can make tea in the teapot, leaving the lid on while it steeps and then just flip the lid over and have my tea cup ready to go. The steam from the steeping tea warms the cup so the tea in the cup stays warmer a little longer. As an added bonus, the lid fits over the top of the teapot "upside down" as well - which allows the tea in the pot to stay warmer longer, and keeps the tea cup warm at the same time.



So, while this is one of my favorite pieces, it hasn't been used much until this past week when I found myself craving a warm beverage I could drink at any time. The larger capacity makes it ideal for home when I'm unlikely to be too distracted by other things to finish the pot while it's still warm.

My other teapot has migrated to work in the last week, and I'll try to remember to take pictures of it and talk about it tomorrow. It's not nearly as clever, but it's better suited for use in the office.

And lest you think I've been a complete slacker since finishing the stockings last week, here's a picture of the Peek a boo sleeves in process:



The first sleeve is finished and the second is a little more than half complete. Because the sides of both sleeves are all reverse stockinette, they roll in pretty terribly; the finished sleeve is much wider than it appears in this picture. As this is a gift, it has a deadline of later this month, which I don't think I'll have trouble meeting. I'll need to block each of the pieces separately before seaming, which will take a couple of days, but if I get it seamed next weekend that's still plenty of time to get it off to the recipient.

Then I need to decide what to start next..!

Get it right the first time, that's the main thing!

As mentioned, I missed a pattern modification to add three inches of length to the Stockings with Clocks before the calf decreases and didn't figure it out until after the first stocking was completed. Rather than rip back something on the order of 18 inches of completed knitting, I decided to insert the extra three inches into the leg instead. I figured I had a decent enough understanding of the structure of knitting that snipping a stitch, putting stitches back on needles, and then grafting it all together again wouldn't be beyond my skills.

1) The first step was to work in "life lines" so that as I began unraveling the line of stitches that would be removed, I wouldn't have to worry about dropping any stitches. I chose a row two rows above the first calf decrease for the lower life line, and then left one row to unravel and worked a second life line the row above that. I used a smooth cotton yarn in a contrasting color and knotted the ends of each loop together so they wouldn't get accidentally pulled out.

I didn't try to figure out getting the stitches on the life line without twisting them, but instead picked one "leg" of each stitch and ran the life line through the same leg for all stitches in the round. The hardest part was not jumping up or down a row and I often had to pull the life line back out a few stitches to adjust accordingly.



2) The moment of truth was in snipping the yarn to begin unraveling the sacrificial row. I selected a stitch at the center of the front of the stocking, which meant I'd have to unravel it half a round in each direction to get the two pieces separated and ready for the next step. To be sure that I only cut the piece of yarn I wanted, I pulled the loop of the stitch out slightly with an extra needle.



3) Once the stitch was snipped, I used the extra needle to unravel the sacrificial row. Unlike when you rip stitches back, you can't just grab the yarn and unravel it because there are still stitches holding the yarn on both sides, so each stitch has to be pulled out separately; it turned out that snipping a stitch half way through the round meant that I didn't end up having to pull a whole round of knitting's worth of yarn through the last few stitches. As the stitches are unraveled, the life lines catch and hold the stitches on the two resulting pieces and prevent them from unraveling further.



4) Once the unraveling is finished, you'll have two separate pieces, each with live stitches held by live lines, and each with a tail of yarn connecting to those live stitches.



5) These stockings were knit from the top down, so in order to make sure that the stitches all line up without jogging, I wanted to add the extra length to the cuff piece. Using the life line as a guide, I placed the live cuff-side stitches back on the same needles I used to knit the stockings and knit an extra three inches, maintaining the seam stitch patterning through every round. Because the seam pattern is two rows and I'd be adding a row in when I grafted the two pieces back together, I ended on the same pattern row as the next piece begins with. To be sure that the two stockings would end up the same length, I laid the pieces of the first stocking over the completed second stocking.



6) The trickiest part with the patterned seam stitches was lining them up so that when I grafted everything together the seam wouldn't jog. The first time I did this, I was off a stitch and had to pull out the entire row of grafted stitches and re-do them! Learn from my mistake and pay attention as you start grafting to make sure the stitches on the two pieces will line up.



(You'll also notice in the second picture above the "indented" row - that's where the original stitches were "picked up" to start the added section; washing and blocking will make that go away.)

7) When you're ready to start grafting, you'll need to put the stitches from the second piece on to a needle and make sure they're not twisted. You can leave the rest of the stitches on the life line yarn until you need them.



8) Using instructions from any of a variety of places - Interweave Knits usually has grafting or kitchener stitch instructions in the back, as will most sock pattern books; I used the instructions from The Knitter's Book of Finishing Techniques by Nancie Wiseman - graft the two rows of live stitches together; when you need to work a purl stitch, you'll want to work the grafting "backwards" from the instructions. As you work, gently tug the working yarn after every stitch to avoid leaving the stitches too loose; you can monitor this as you work to be sure you're not grafting too tightly or too loosely. When you're finished grafting, work in all the ends securely.



9) Washing and blocking the finished piece after you're finished grafting will help remove any unevenness left from picking up stitches and grafting. As I mentioned, the first time I grafted the two pieces together, I was off a stitch and had to pull out the row of grafting. When I re-worked the row, I must have picked up some dust on the yarn that darkened the row slightly. The stockings are mostly dry now and the darkened part is still noticeable, so I'll have to wash them again using some wool wash to try to get it out.