The Comfort Zone

Thanks to Kaidy, who had the Snow Crystals Sock pattern marked as a favorite to make in the future, I am now able to give you this link to the pattern.  As for me, I have had an awakening. 

Winter Sunrise hat is a very complicated pattern.  Each row consists of six repeats of a chart that calls for odd color combinations that can’t be memorized.  That makes it slow and tedious!  Then there is the Sheep & Wool hat, cute and colorful and easy to breeze through the pattern without looking at the chart.  So which one am I knitting?  Well–both, but Sheep & Wool first.  I need to feel uplifted by a finished object and then I will go back to the more involved pattern.  NOTE to self:  do not let Winter Sunrise become a bottom-of-the-basket UFO!

Just a little bit of pink cashmere fluff!  Lately cashmere has been swirling through my mind.  Cashmere, cashmere, cashmere!  I can’t get enough of it.  So I had this pink cashmere fingering weight in stash and put two strands together to create a light worsted weight hat- knitting confection.  Working with such beautiful yarn, required a pattern that would make me sigh with every touch—seed stitch.  First you have the baby-bottom softness of the cashmere and then the sensory stimulus of the seed stitch and the effect is bliss—pure bliss!

Summer knitting actually started months ago here at chez Comfort Zone!  Summer knitting usually begins around May with the search for easy to carry projects that one does not swelter under in the summer sun.  I have finally had to set aside heavy sweater projects and pick up nothing-larger-than-a-sock projects like the pictured mini-bobble scrubby.  I recently saw a simple kitchen scrubby on one of the blogs and decided to spice it up a bit with a grime-grabbing bobbley pattern:  Cast on 26 stitches,
knit 3 rows for bottom edge, 
Knit 3 stitches for an edge,
Knit 3 stitches in the next stitch (k1, p1, k1),
Knit 3 together,
Repeat last four stitches five times to last 3 stitches,
Knit last 3 stitches for edge,
Knit across WS
Repeat for desired length and finish with 3 knit rows.  (Sometimes I make these twice as long as the scrubby square would dictate and fold them for extra strength.  Great for scrubbing cook tops.  I’m making a bunch of these!

Summer socks also change around here!  I notice that the legs of the socks I knit get shorter as the summer goes on, and begin to stretch out to seven or eight inches around October with the approach of fall.  This is the first of the Cherry Tree Hill Birches sock.  I am now turning the heel on the second sock.

I ordered some white Cash Soft DK, a wool-nylon-cashmere blend, for Snow Crystal socks with our once annual Texas snow in mind, but noticed that the pattern I chose also has short tops.  Just a summer related phenomenon produced by thinking cool.

I hope you are all enjoying summer and knitting lots of interesting mini-projects to stay cool. 

Okay, fess up are you all holding out on me?  Have you all known about Garn Studio’s Drops Designs all along and just not shared the link with me?  Look at the pattern here.  Just have to knit it!  All those wonderful patterns—you wanted to keep them to yourselves didn’t you?  It’s okay though, I forgive you, because now that I have found Drops I am living there and soaking up all those glorious patterns and the yummy yarn.  I have not ordered any of the yarn yet.  Can anyone tell me how it goes?  Will my yarn arrive in any reasonable amount of time?  Will it be as luscious as it appears on the website?  I’m dreaming cashmere and alpaca right now!

I finished the second Rose Trellis sock seen here hanging out on the ivy trellis, and immediately cast on for a new pair in Cherry Tree Hill’s Birches colorway.   Also, I started a grey merino top-down in-the-round sweater using Lion Brand’s little summer short sleeved sweater pattern, and am enjoying the mindless knitting it brings.   The Kauni Sweater was considered (shown here at Purlwise) but it requires the use of US#3-#4 needles!  Crazy, I know!  I never knit sweaters with anything smaller than size #7 or #8.  Also steeking is required.  I don’t steek!  Never!  Life is too short!

Don’t you love the challenge of doing something different?  I think that sometimes when I’m uninspired by something as essential as knitting is to my life the only thing required to get me out of my funk is to do something different.

I fell in love with the honeycomb cable stitch and the arrowhead lace stitch.  I think I could knit socks with either of them.  And then there is the horseshoe cable and the gingerbread cable—I don’t know which to use first.  Maybe I’ll do a sampler scarf or a throw using all of them.   I hope it will inspire me and transport me to a better place in my knitting nirvana!

Dare to be different!  Go ahead, open those stitch books and do some math.  Put those designs to work and make something out of the ordinary, something unlike anything you have ever done before.  Then send me all your pictures.  Please.  I need the stimulation!

The Alpaca scarf is coming along.  I’m calling it “Lost” because it was created when I “lost” the pattern for Spectrum Scarf from Knitting Daily.  What was I supposed to do?  I was riding a long distance in the car and was “lost” without my knitting.  So I just started knitting a design that I thought would give me an open weave with supportive edges and be loose and soft in the end.  The overall structure is similar to Spectrum, but the design itself is very different.

The knitting of Lost is very satisfying!  I can watch TV, read, chat, watch traffic while riding in the car, almost anything except type (not knitting now!) while continuing the easy pattern.  Also the alpaca is enchanting.  Alpaca is my favorite fiber and I have 10 more skeins of this yummy wine colorway.  I don’t know what I will do with the remaining skeins when I’m finished.  There will probably be eight of 139 yards each left.  It will remain in stash until something calls out to me.

My Mother loved scarves but hated to wear them.  She didn’t like anything close around her neck—summer or winter.  I, on the other hand, was always cold and a nice warm scarf was just what the Doctor Mother ordered.  So she bought me scarves and suggested interesting ways to wear them, and thus enjoyed them through me.  She was also directly responsible for my sock passion.  I love to wear socks summer or winter and I know that came right from the Mother source because she did the same!  After spending mega-bucks on designer socks that didn’t last, knitting them became the only logical solution.

Speaking of socks—I am finishing sock #2 of Rose Trellis socks and then moving on to gift socks in the Snow Crystal pattern in baby blue Soft Sea Wool.  The knitting goes on, a symbol of life to me, and reminds me that nothing can be wrong with a world that contains so much glorious yarn.  Life is good as we attempt to sample it all!

My favorite dpns are on the scene—front and center!  The early fall issue of Knitscene, for sale on July 5^th, will feature a review of Comfort Zone Needles.  If you haven’t bought Knitscene in the past you are missing a very trendy knitting magazine.  It is a sister publication to Interweave Knits, published by Interweave Press, and offering edgy, chic styles with panache! A new, larger CZ ad will be in the same issue.

I was astonished to read a post in a knit group a few days ago.  The writer was lamenting the fact that she disliked the plastic dpns she was using (not CZs) because the points were too blunt and they broke frequently.  She was talking about those all-white plastic needles that will remain nameless, and wondering why she continued to buy them except for the fact that they were flexible and easy on her hands.  I wanted to respond to the group and say “COMFORT ZONE LADIES!!!”  It amazes me that there are still people who don’t know about Comfort Zone needles.  So allow me to hijack this post to tell you a little about CZs.  They are flexible, colorful, and don’t break under normal circumstances!!! 

The flexible part allows you to knit for hours without any discomfort/pain in your hands.  Hallelujah!  Also, the points are narrow and slide easily through stitches.

The colorful part allows you to match or contrast your needles to your yarn, and for those of you who knit with black or other dark colors a lot, you can see the stitches on the needles because of the bright colors. 

And the pain, how can I tell those of you who are young and don’t experience hand pain from long knitting sessions how wonderful it is to knit without any discomfort.  It’s like going to the gym, working out, swimming for an hour, playing tennis, and running 3 miles all in one day, and walking away without any stiffness in your body.  CZs don’t hurt your hands!

Then there is the breakage part.  As I said, they don’t break under normal circumstances.  A customer contacted me yesterday and said that the tip broke on a needle she bought in November 2006.  Guess what—we replaced the whole set of six needles.  We offer that kind of customer service.  We did stop short of replacing the needles eaten by a customer’s Great Dane.  I’m sure he thought they were tasty, but you have to buy your own dog food!

Back to knitting in the next post (I promise), but I just had to get this one in while I had a reason to crow about Comfort Zone Needles.  Truly a case of “try them you’ll like them.”  Then tell everyone about them.  They really do need to know!

At first glance I felt that I didn’t get much knitting done last week, but on second review I was impressed.  I dragged Scrambled Eggs (Hemlock lap throw) around with me and when that was ready for bind off I started taking Spectrum Scarf with me.  That’s another story!  Scrambled Eggs is wet and blocking right now.  I schlepped it all over Illinois (Chicago, Elmhurst, Hanover Park, Winfield and Wheaton) for five days.  Then I used it around my shoulders to ward off the chill of the car air conditioner on the trip home.  It needed a good bath.  Also shown is the center of Hemlock–the part I screwed-up thus making Scrambled Eggs.