Turducken Sale

It sounds fowl (heh) but legend has it the Thanksgiving 'treat' of a turkey/duck/chicken roasting hybrid is beyond delicious.

I on the other hand, not being of a Thanksgiving celebratory nationality, have decided to commemorate this long weekend instead with a mini sale of all the House of Socks patterns.  

Indeed.  You can get 10% off any and all House of Socks patterns from now until the end of Monday 26th of November by using the coupon code TURDUCKEN in the checkout page.  (You see - there was method in my title madness!) The patterns are in 2 different currencies - the latest ones are in euros, the earlier ones in dollars - so you need to check to see if you're mixing and matching as otherwise you'll get Bob's 'crappers' problem page.  If you need to go to the checkout more than once, don't worry - you can use the coupon code as many times as you wish!  :)

In other news, you may be thinking to yourselves 'what's all the sudden emphasise on 'House of Socks'?'.  Well, that's a very good question, and I thank you for asking it.

A few days ago I bowed to popular (more than 4 whole people) demand that I make a facebook page for the patterns.  I did, and saw that it was good.  I had been thinking about changing the name to something a little more grown-up, but decided in the end to stay true to my adult-but-not-grown-up persona.  What wasn't so good was, it must be said, the rather lame profile picture.  So, after looking online for sock fonts (more prolific that you'd imagine) but rejecting them as really just replacing one lame with another, I decided to get my socks and camera out for the boys.

This was the result:

I have to admit that I *may* have had a lot more fun than expected photographing the socks in these different letters.  I may, if I have some more spare time, (hah, if, she says!) do the rest of the alphabet! You never know when a TRUE sock font will be needed by the masses.  

Or just by me, even.

The Hippie Hippie...

...Socks

(earworm free of charge)

I've had this idea playing around in my head for a while now, thanks to owning some Noro Kureyon Sock yarn for which I couldn't quite find a place.  You know know how it is; they have great colourways, wonderful splashes of eclectically mixed hues (unless you get lucky and find one that's mostly all greens, or russets, or some such anomaly) that call holler your name in strangely hypnotic shrieks.  And so it was thus, with colourway 256.  A cheeky little number with what was originally thought to have a pleasant mixture of pinks, purples and blues, but with the discovery of a golden mustardy yellow and an altogether more in-your-face orangey-yellow, the cat was set amongst the pigeons.  Or the tigers amongst the macaws, if you will.  

But thus the paisley/60's-inspired Hippie Hippie Socks were brought into imagination.

Or, indeed, Flower Power, man! 

The Hippie Hippie Socks give you a daisy-chain coronet and a paisley frock, and, in keeping with the free-and-easy attitude of the 60's, you have a choice of four different paisley patterns for the main part of the sock!  You can use them all in any combination, or choose your favourite and just work that one for the whole sock!  But no matter how you make it up, this sock is absolutely perfect for those brighter shades of Noro or slow-colour-changing yarn! 

Psychedelic, dude!

Starting with Heidi Bear's 5-stitch picot cast-on, the base of the daisy chain is a simple 1x1 twisted rib.  I had originally started the sock with a turn-down cuff with a bed of daisy stitch, but  soon decided it was too fussy if I was going to add the bigger flowers on top.  A good move in the end as the i-cord daisies take all the attention anyway!

To try and imitate some of the paisley designs I've seen I decided to make four different paisley patterns for this sock - two with eyelets and two with teeny bobbles, to be used in any combination.

The heel is a peasant/afterthought heel, as when it comes to yarn like this, I like (if at all possible) to see fluency of colour from one end of the sock to the other.  Of course, as you can see, Noro does like to play tricks, the little scamp.  Using the 'Crayola 64' method of colour naming (circa 1958), we start with a warm Red-Orange, then slip daintily into Tickle-Me-Pink, touching on my very favourite, Periwinkle, then moving swiftly on to Magenta.  And then WHAM!  Goldenrod is in da house. Subtle as a brick to the temple.  There are hints of the yellow beforehand, but nothing really to prepare you for tactless  introduction of such disparate colours.  Yes, yes, I know the colours themselves are hardly shy and retiring, but at least one colour usually merges gracefully into the next without causing the need to administer emergency sunglasses.

But now, as I'm on a roll...  From Goldenrod, we smoothly transition into Salmon (see? SEE? Smooth transitions can be done with PINKS and YELLOWS!), which in turn melds into Orange-Red, Yellow-Orange, Vivid Violet (okay, so I cheated and used an un-hippie 1998 colour...), and finishing up the graft on the heel with a touch of Blue-Green. (You'll note that the second sock had a much kinder transition between the Magenta and Goldenrod.  Noro: the Mercury of the yarn world.)

(That was fun!)

Anyhoo...  The foot is worked the same way as the leg, with another couple of sets of paisleys and the toe is worked quite simply to continue the last part of the pattern of the foot.  Should you wish to do a plain foot, you need to add some stitches to bring the circumference stitches back to a usable 16 or 17 stitches per needle, as the beginning and end of each paisley block is a smaller 13 stitches per needle.

But go with the flow, man!

The daisies are very simply made, either using a hippie French knitting dolly (the method I used) or by working an i-cord.  Either way, you need approximately 15 inches of knitting per flower.  I waited until the end of both socks before continuing with the daisies, but you can very easily make half the flowers before the second sock, or even choose a contrasting yarn for the daisies, afterthought heel and toe, for example. They're made by pinning the cord out into a 5-petalled flower (as shown in the photo below) and joining up the edges with one of the cast-on/cast-off tails. They are simple to attach by sewing the tail onto the cuff in the configuration you prefer  Try five per sock, or ten, or even just one - the sock equivalent of a flower behind the ear!

You can find the Ravelry pattern page HERE (available to anyone, not just Ravelers) or you can click the button below to buy the pattern now for just €3 (or £2.40 or $3.87 at the current rate of exchange).

Right Angles Are So Passée

acute and oblique - new patterns by yours truly

According to the Oxford Dictionary, an acute angle is an angle less than 90°. The same source states that an oblique angle is one that it not a right angle, nor is a multiple of right angles.  

According to RedScot's Dictionary of Made-Up Words (OUP 2018), an Acute ankle sock is a very simple pattern that creates three very sharp less-than-90° angle points. An Oblique calf-length sock, on the other hand foot, uses the same basic pattern to create four very sharp angle points that aren't right angles, or multiples of the same...

My sister is again responsible, in kind, for the advent of these super-cute new patterns, as she keeps supplying me with DK wool in a myriad of colours and types for which I can never find a suitable sock pattern.   This time it was King Cole Riot DK in the 'Riot' colourway, a 'self-patterning' yarn that was crying out for some sharp zig-zags to show it off.  But there was nothing more pointy that my own Traffic Islands pattern to choose from, so I set about making a new and even spikier pattern.   And because I loved the first one with DK so much, I set about making a version for fingering-weight yarn, using Munchkin Knitworks String of Pearls Plus in 'Hodgeberry Stain'.

Thus Acute and then Oblique were born.   Instead of a nice, calm 2x2 ribbed cuff, I thought it much more interesting to start off with some sharp angles, and to keep it from rolling down, made sure that there were some purl rows thrown in the mix.  3 points for Acute, and 4 for Oblique.

The heel-flaps, once these sharp chevrons had continued down the leg, were at once calming for Acute - a simple eye-of-partridge heel stitch was all that was required, but Oblique intended to be a little more cunning and the angles continued through to the heel-turn...  Not just because the stitch count needed to be brought down to make sure the sole wasn't too wide.

Cunning?  Oh yes, I think so!  

The angles continued down the upper of each sock and they both finished in a simple star toe.

I made the small size of Acute, for they may just be for someone whose fault they came into existence anyway (and my medium sock blockers were a tad on the large size for them, really...) but I made the Oblique in large for myself, and was so pleased with them I had to wear them as soon as they were blocked.

Both these patterns are being sold together as a pair, so you can make some angled socks for your selves whatever type of sock yarn you have!

Click HERE (Oblique) and HERE (Acute)to find the pattern pages on Ravelry (you can access the same pattern set from each page), or just click below to buy them now!  Oh, how much?  well, dang, but because they're so fast to knit up, I couldn't ask for more than a euro the pair! (Or £0.79 or $1.29 or AUS$1.23 or ¥100 or ₪5.05.)

(It says just 'Oblique' in the invoice, but both patterns are there!)

The whole world needs this kind of cute!

Possibly The Best Music In The World

Well, there had to be some kind of reference to Carlsberg advertising, considering we were in Copenhagen. ('Carlsberg, possibly the best lager in the world'...)

But what brought me to wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen?  Brahms. Brahms and a smidgeon of Schubert.  And a (non music-) student orchestra that didn't play like (non music-) students, thanks to their excellent conductor, a very dear friend of mine.

Brahms with a mix of Sir Malcolm Sargent, I should say, as I got to sing Brahms in a wonderful new version (for mezzo-soprano) of Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), originally written for voice and piano, in a wonderful full orchestration by the afore-mentioned Sargent.  So very lush and multi-dimensional!  

The smidgeon of Schubert was Berlioz's orchestration of Die Erlkönig.  I have a beautiful cd of Ann Sofie von Otter singing some of these orchestrations, and I was thrilled to find out the encore would be one of these glorious arrangements!  Needless to say, I found all five songs so very different to sing with orchestra than with piano.  Of course, you can still be intimate when singing with an orchestra, but I find it's such a different kind of intimacy.  Piano and voice is quite stark in many ways, but is also very present.  Just two people and their instruments creating expression and colour and their own little world.  The palette is much more full with an orchestra, and it is always fun (and challenging) to try and create equally vibrant tones with the voice.  (I suspect you can tell I've had more experience singing with orchestras and ensembles than with just piano!)  But, needless to say, any given piece, on any given day, with any given singer, using any given accompaniment will create a myriad of different performances.  It is, after all, what live music (to me) is all about.

Copenhagen is full to the gunwales with strangely out-of-place architecture.  Their city hall (Københavns Rådhus, pictured above) looks like a northern European version of an Italian Renaissance palazzo, slightly clunkier and not having quite the right glowing red brick.  And the inside is even stranger - walls, ceilings staircases all in 15th century style covered in tiles and trompe l'oeil of the early 20th century Art Deco period.  

And if that wasn't enough, there was the rather splendid World Clock - an astronomical clock designed by Jens Olsen at the beginning of last century.

But, as much as it would have been wonderful, wonderful, Copenhagen itself was not one of the places we were performing. 

There was intimacy of a different kind when we did our first concert, not in Denmark, but in Germany.  (I would have mentioned this before, but it didn't go with the title of the post!)  The lovely town of Münster played host to our fair company for a few days, and (apart from hellishly sleepless nights due to noisy incumbents of the same hotel) it was an interesting visit.  

The town itself is lovely - the centre looks very old indeed and is surrounded by wonderful churches, but in reality 90% of the old town was destroyed in WWII.  The old city has been rebuilt to look the way it did pre-war, and it is very charming, although slightly melancholy when you think of how old the buildings were before they were bombed.

We didn't, sadly, get to sing in any of these wonderful buildings, but instead were given the great lecture theatre of the university.  Complete with the acoustics of a taxidermied donkey.  The dusty and air-conditioned (and, strangely, central-heated) stuffy air of both backstage and front of house gave the impression that you were singing and breathing into an ancient velvet curtain, letting no sound resonate but instead smother it to death in a surprisingly efficient manner.  This is the kind of intimate sound all performers can do quite happily without...

But back to Denmark, where we had acoustics in cathedral-loads. 

Århus Domkirke was very generous with its sound.  Perhaps a bit too generous, but after Münster anything was delightful!  (And there was the added bonus of seeing the exterior of the rather amazing-looking theatre - found at the bottom of these five photos.)  I shall always remember Århus, however, not for being a pretty town with lovely architectural features, but for supplying me with possibly the finest cappuccino I think I've ever had.

Finally we arrived at the Messiaskirken in Charlottenlund, on the outskirts of Copenhagen, but do I have photographic evidence of this? No, because I caught a stomach bug and spent most of the time I wasn't singing, hovering around the only loo...  (And let it be noted that it was due to very greasy pizza, and not copious amounts of Carlsberg!) But Mister Google is, as always, most helpful...

I have to say that although it was quite small, it was, in comparison to the other places, happily oh-so-acoustically perfect!  And like the ending in all traditional fairy tales, the last of the three was the 'just-right' setting in the story of Goldi-Redlocks and the Three Venues.  

Possibly the worst pizza in the world, though...

Cherry Ripe

cherry garni socks by yours truly

araucania ranco solid in pt 485

the yarn side walker merino in red lentil evenings

It's about time another cocktail sock pattern was added to the repertoire, so here's something a little fruity! Cherry Garni is a toe-up, heel-flapped, cherry-lace sock, with contrasting cocktail-skewer toe, heel and cuff.

Okay, these should really, technically, be called 'Cherry Garnish Socks', as 'garni' isn't foreign for garnish, but is only an attempt on my part to sound fancy!  I am nothing if not creative in the ways of language!  Or lazy...  Either or, the cherry is a massive part of cocktail dressing, and this new patterns is a natural progression from the Twist of Citrus homage to all things zesty in the cocktail world!

So, whether you're adding a rich red Maraschino cherry to a Manhattan, a green cherry to your Blue Lagoon, drinking a black cherry Mojito, or having your tequila sunrise adorned with a yellow ground cherry, I'm sure you'll agree that the cherry, no matter what colour, is truly a worthy addition to the cocktail sock theme!

The sock begins at the contrasting toe with a simple but effective cocktail-skewer rib pattern:

then moves on to the cherry-lace pattern (a rich, ripe cherry with its stalk and a leaves) :

and for something completely different, I've added a heel-flap.  I have to say I love the final appearance of this - the gusset pick-up is oh-so-very neat, but pay attention - you have to start the increases around 4 inches from the final edge of the heel.  (I've suggested adding a life-line if you aren't completely sure of the length you need - I measured 4 inches from a sock I had previously made and worked out where I needed to start the increases.)

Totally worth it - it looks fabulous!

And another plus: it looks great in different colours!  I asked my testers to use different colours - purples, greens, yellows for different coloured cherries, and they turned out looking fabulous - check out the pattern page for linked projects!  

So, what else do you need to know?  Oh yes indeed - the link to the pattern page and a lovely Ravelry button to click if you fancy investing in something fruity!

Cherry ripe, cherry ripe, 
Ripe I cry, Full and fair ones

Come and buy.

Cherry ripe, cherry ripe,

Ripe I cry,

Full and fair ones

Come and buy.