Reduced.

My time for knitting is at an all time low. Graduate school has gotten much better but that means that I'm working much, much harder. I felt pretty much gobsmacked for most of my last semester, for a number of reasons, but mainly because I felt so behind in so many ways. The body of theoretical knowledge I was expected to be conversant in was just vast and the tactics of being a graduate student don't reveal themselves easily. Anyhow, I'm finally in my element doing work on consumer culture and though I'm pretty much working (reading, writing, grading, holding office hours or attending lecture) around the clock I'm happy. It probably has something to do with the massive amount of online shopping I do during my breaks! Mostly, I window shop and make carts that I abandon, but I have made a jusssst a few sock yarn purchases.

Since so many of them come in 100g hanks I started to worry about running out. I followed the lead of a very inspiring fellow scholar and got scientific. I bought a little scale! My finished Jaywalker weighed in a 52g.


I put my OTHER set of Knitpicks DPNs and a duplicate "stitch marker" onto the scale to set my tare for the other sock in progress. Why do I have a stand-in set of needles? I love the Knitpicks needles so much that I bought a second set of all the sizes I'll use for socks. Those suckers get lost, and with all the sock yarn I'm buying I didn't want to risk not having a full set at any given moment. The needles are just as pointy as Inox needles but they have a much smoother finish. I've always felt that the Inox needles were almost gritty. To borrow from Grumperina, Blunti Stumpos had a much faster finish until I met the Knitpicks needles. Because the points are so sharp I've started to break my habit of tapping/pushing the top of the needle to move stitches forward! I win. Anyhow, the metal parts of my sock in progress weighed 17g:


I hit tare to bring it to zero:


And then plopped my second sock and alarmingly teeny ball of yarn onto the scale. Guess what? I'm fine! I would have never been able to 'eyeball' this on my own. I highly recommend this for nervous knitters.


Oh, and did I mention? I'm finally at the fun part of Enid! Sleeve island wasn't so bad, but I did have a slight mishap. I'm knitting the body is knit on size 3 Addis. Everyone at the Knitalong was complaining that the sleeves were coming out far too large, they were changing stitch counts and all sorts of mess...I decided to be lazy and just drop my needle size! I ended up magic looping with Inox, 2.5mm, that size that is basically 1.5 US. It was perfect until I fell in love with the Knitpicks needles and switched to those. I wish I had a picture to show you how dramatic the difference was. They were the same exact size so I'm guessing the texture alone changed my gauge and the appearance of the stitches, too. I knit almost a whole sleeve figuring the difference wouldn't be noticeable after blocking but Eric convinced me to rip it out and start again with the Inox. I'm glad I did, it was hilariously 'before and after' looking and even non-knitters would've spotted the weird demarcation.


Wow--that was a ton of actual knitting content! Who knew I had it in me?! I promise the next post will be a return to the tangential...we'll be talking diets and Montreal! See you soon.

CR