Sock, Sock, Sweater

The weather has just turned warm, which means the two new pairs of socks I finished will have to wait to be enjoyed. Luckily I have my socks out on display, so I can enjoy looking at them while I wait to wear them. 

The first pair is my Hieroglyphic Socks. I started these in September and have been working on them on and off until now. They required quite a bit of attention when I started, but I found that once I got my rhythm, I could knit them at knit night or while semi-distracted. They never quite got to car-knitting level, though. I didn't like putting them down mid-round.

I did make some edits to the pattern. I didn't care for the recommended heel, so I put a heel flap in. And rather than leave it plain blue, I took a page from Stickfia's book and kept the stripes going. I did find that the golden stripe on either edge of the sock got a little gappy, so I sewed through the blue loops on the heel flap and anchored them with duplicate stitching to the blue stripes on the gusset. I was pleased to find that it worked just like I had hoped.

I'm also quite happy with my replacement rainbow socks. It sort of looks like a trick of the camera, but the sock on the left is the old, washed out sock. The one on the right is the new one.

I had hoped to finish while it was still raining, but wasn't quite able to make it. I thought it would be delightful to wear rainbows in the rain. Honestly, I would have been happy wearing rainbows in the sun, but I'm not so happy sweating in rainbows.

Now that both pairs of socks are entirely off my plate, I have been devoting all my knitting time to my Iceland sweater. I'm not quite done with the first sleeve, but I'm getting there. The recommended sizing would have the sweater fall off of my shoulders, so I am entirely ignoring the recommended sleeve/body width and am blocking my progress after every 20 rows or so to make it match my own measurements instead.

So far, so good. The pattern is pretty intuitive and has paired well with Netflix watching. Speaking of which, I have been watching Greenleaf. Or, I should say, Connor and I have been watching Greenleaf. After watching a few episodes by myself and talking about it, Connor thought he would watch an episode with me. We are both sucked in and now I need to find a different show to watch when he isn't around. 

Has anyone else got a show that has just sucked them in? I'd love to hear some recommendations.

Catching Up On Crafting

I've been pretty productive with my various projects as of late. After realizing that I was not quite starting or finishing anything, I knew that I needed to make a list of what was causing each project to stagnate. It seems silly, but every project just had one step that needed to be worked on before I could go full steam ahead. 

For the Iceland sweater, I needed to swatch, so swatch I did. The swatch wasn't very helpful though. Since the pattern doesn't have a very good schematic, it was difficult to know how to successfully make the adjustments I wanted to. Eventually I decided that maybe I should just cast on. If it goes badly, I'll just rip it out and try again.

Next up is this test knit on my to do list for a while. It doesn't have a solid deadline, so I've waited until I had some brain power to put to it. I did my swatch, got confused over the stitch pattern directions, got clarification from the designer, and cast on. Of course after I got past the cuff, I realized that I had another question. This project will sit for a little while longer, but I'm glad to have gotten it started.

I recently wove in the ends to two different pairs of socks, but they still weren't being added to my sock rotation. I've mentioned in the past that I like to re-fix the color in all my socks before wearing them. If I have several pairs of socks close to completion, I'll wait until they are all done so I can do them together. I wasn't getting around to re-fixing the color and I realized it was because the Hieroglyphic Socks were a little too long in the toes. I wanted to fix the toes before re-fixing all the color. I don't know about the rest of you, but I wasn't really motivated to unweave in the ends and rip back color work. I finally caved and am pleased to say that both the Hieroglyphic and Rainbow socks are now re-fixed and drying.

My lavender sachet project also had been languishing. I often thought about embroidering, but kept putting it off because I needed to set up the fabric. After having a good think, I worked out the spacing I needed between each sachet. (2.25 inches) And to prevent myself from putting it off again, I'm sewing all the bag boundaries before I keep embroidering. It's going pretty well.

The last project that I'd been putting off was catching up on my comics. After Hawai'i, I was nearly two weeks behind. I've been slowly catching up by doing two comics a day: the previous days' comic and one from when we were in Hawai'i. Eventually I'll be up to date.

How has everyone else dealt with stagnating projects? Do you find a list helps or do you have a different method?