Can you feel the tension?

I pulled Montse Stanley off the shelf recently and have been re-reading the first couple of chapters. And she's got some very nice pointers for how to address tension problems (which I suspected and she has confirmed I have.) And since Josephine has a fair amount of almost-stockinette in a detail-revealing yarn, I have been paying a good deal more attention than usual to my tension, and to what it is doing to my knitting. I have found that:

• my knit is tighter than my purl


• my tension gets tighter when I'm anxious or frustrated


• my tension is all over the place if the thing on TV is interesting
  

Ms. Stanley has some very nice pointers for correcting the first problem. For Jospehine, I'm double-wrapping the yarn around my pinkie on purl rows and I'm seeing the most even knitting I've ever done on cotton. For the other two, though, I'm going to try listening to engaging-but-not-exciting podcasts and see if I can "standardize" my mood. I'll keep you posted on whether this works.

Project updates: It was a good weekend of knitting. I'm up to the bodice-section of the back of Josephine:

Wonderful crinkly featherweight texture in the lace section, then adorable little eyelets for the future drawcord, then just a hint of texture in the bodice. Not as perfect as I'd like, though. In addition to the issues with tension already mentioned, I'm finding the knitted fabric has a slight bias to it -- I don't know if it's the stitch pattern, the yarn, or something I'm doing. But it definitely swings to the right. If a miracle doesn't occur when I block this baby, then I'll just have to rely on the fact that none of my friends know any better.


And the 3 hour round trip to the in-laws house was very productive time on the sock front. I finished the last 2" or so of leg, knit the heel flap, turned the heal, picked up the gusset stitches, and am well on my way through the decreases. But -- another annoyance -- the heels don't match! I was very careful -- using the self-striping color repeat as my guide, I started and ended the ribbing in the same place, and then started the heel flap in the same place. I carefully counted the heel rows. And I still ended up with one blue heel, one black heel:


The only difference I can think of is that one sock 1 I counted the "bars" from slip stitches, but on sock 2 I counted the slip stitches in the selvedge. So maybe I'm off by 2 rows on the #2 heel -- but I'm surprised that it makes such a big difference in the heels.



The visit to my in-laws was to celebrate M's birthday. I will leave you with this picture of the birthday cake. (No, it only looked like watermelon.)