A Very Kiwi Christmas

I might have missed my Christmas deadline with these socks... luckily Christmas comes around every year. I really enjoyed knitting this pair. The pattern, Geek Socks, by Wei Siew is completely potato chip knitting. I just had to have another round, another stripe, another another another. 

I did make an edit to the pattern: I knit heel flaps rather than an afterthought heel as recommended in the pattern. I have gotten reasonably good at getting my stripes to look nice in heel flaps, so I went for it. I only had to rip once because I decided I didn't want the red stripe surrounding the heel.

This pair is so cozy, too! I bought Stray Cat Sock's Essential Deluxe base, which is a 80/10/10 Merino/Cashmere/Nylon base. And I'm just in love with the Kiwi Christmas color way. It reminds me of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

I'm pleased to report that I was able to enable friends at knit night. When I had ordered all my yarn, I'd offered to tack on anyone else's order to help save on shipping from New Zealand. No one took me up on it. But after I started knitting these socks... well. I'm pretty sure Stray Cat won't be going out of business any time soon.

I'm not the only one to have finished up some knitting. Connor knit me a pair of Lambing Mitts out of Stansborough's Mithril (also a New Zealand yarn) in the Kokako color way. 

When he knit himself a pair, he left out the extra bit that can fold up over the hands. I insisted on having that part added.

Connor even joined me in watching Netflix while knitting. We watched Versailles while he knit the second mitt and it ended up too small! The plot was pretty stressful at times; he must have been knitting much tighter. Connor ripped it out and knit a third one and that one fit just fine.

So now I have warm hands and feet. It's been pretty cold, so I'm sure they are both going to get lots of use.

The Impatient Knitter

It feels like an age since I was able to get something off of the needles. Although after looking at my ravelry page, each of my projects are only 2-3 weeks old.

Pucker: a bit harder than I expected. This is the first sock of the pair.

Logically, if I stick to one project, I will get it done faster. This isn't how "knitting brain" works. Knitting brain says, "You should cast on a new project. All your projects will come off the needles sooner if you do." Knitting brain is dumb and should be ignored.

The first plain vanilla sock in the pair. See those shadowy bars in the image? It's knitting prison. I will be knitting this forever.

Not helping all of this is that the project I've been most diligently knitting on, and was a quarter of the way through, had to be ripped out and redone because my numbers were not coming out right. In this case I added an extra increase in a mysterious location. The pattern is still correct. (Yay!) I still have to be precise when testing my own patterns, so ripping was the only way to go. (Boo!)

This shawl has been in the works for 2 years. If this iteration works out, I will high five myself.