One Tree Short Of A Forest

I have some good knitting news and some bad knitting news. Let's start with the good. I finished my Joyeux Noel socks early for next Christmas! Ok... so I didn't finish in time for this past Christmas, but that's ok. They came out great and now I get to look forward to wearing them during the next holiday season.

Stray Cat Socks in Joyeux Noel and a special-ordered contrasting brown

The bad news... well... I made a big boo boo. It might be hard to see in the picture, but last night as I was doing the decreases for the second sock to go from 72 to 64 stitches, I couldn't get the stitch count to come out right. Finally I counted out my stitches... and I already had 64 stitches. I turned a little grey. There are 9 repeats of the tree pattern on the first sock; there are only 8 on the second one. Sigh. I held off ripping until today.

It's probably better not to rip when you are angry

Of course with no knitting to work on, I cheered myself up with casting on something new. I've been meaning to knit my skein of Canon Hand Dyes in "A Rose By Any Other Name" for a while now. Every time I get to it Valentine's Day has passed and I lose my motivation. Not this year though! Maybe with enough of a head start I'll be able to wear these puppies in time for the pinkest holiday of the year.

What kinds of things have you all had to rip out lately? Has anyone else been one tree short of a forest?

I've Run Out Of Row Counters

For those of you who have followed this blog for a bit, you may know that I rarely let my WIP (work in progress) pile go above three projects. That seems to be the magic number for me. Any more than that, and I find that progress gets slowed to a snails pace. The other reason, I have discovered, is because I don't have enough round counters to maintain more than that. Despite the lack of round counters, I have found myself with six projects going. Four of those projects are socks. The bottom two are for the same test knit that needed two socks to test properly. The top left was my usual stockinette sock I like to have for car knitting. The top right is the Haleakala sock that I stalled out on.

Starting in the top left and going clockwise: Opal's Little Prince in Die Rose, Malabrigo Sock in Pocion, Canon Hand Dyes in Etude 120 and Yoga For Elephants

Beyond the socks, I've continued on with my sweater, which is inching closer to completion. When I last posted about it, I had finished four repeats of the leaf pattern. Now I only need four more repeats before going to the next section.

The wide bit at the end was blocked. The rest of the sweater will match once I block it all out.

And finally, I have a hat. It's an important hat with a deadline. I bumped into a knit worthy friend I hadn't seen in a decade. He no longer has the last hat I made him, so I offered to make a new one. It's got some writing on the inside of the turned brim that required intarsia in the round. Turns out intarsia in the round is a bit fiddly, so it took me a couple goes to get it right. Luckily for him, he is an intarsia-in-the-round-worthy friend. Now it's just smooth sailing with nine out of ten rounds of the repeat being in stockinette.

However, there is a deadline to finish it up before he sails to the next city. It's rather hard to mail a hat to someone when they work on a ship.

Even though I am excited to make the hat, I really am itching to get back to my sweater... and maybe a sock as well.

Knitting Basket Full Of Socks

It has been raining buckets all month. I think we've had maybe four days of sun. What has that all added up to? Lots of knitting time of course! At the moment, I only have socks in my knitting basket.

I've been diligently working away on my Hieroglyphic Socks that I started in September. I only have to knit the toe on one of the socks. But, like all my other recent socks, this one has the potential to misbehave.

Yarn is Lisa Souza Hardtwist Merino Petite in the Coachella and St. Louis Blues color ways 

The stitches are a bit loose where I picked up along the heel flap. I have a plan on how to fix it, but I'm not sure how the fix will affect the length of the sock. So until I'm sure that I got the length of the first sock's toe correct, I'm going to hold off on knitting the second sock's toe.

The other two socks pairs I have in my basket I had cast on just before we left for Hawaii. I've knit the Haleakala socks before, although they have since been gifted to my Mum. I thought that since we were going to Haleakala, it made perfect sense to knit a new pair. Well, after casting on and knitting a round and a half, I realized that I probably wasn't going to work on anything with a cabled pattern while on vacation. Although, I still took them to Haleakala. They sat in the car while we hiked. Now that we are back, I've started to knit on them again.

Yarn is Malabrigo Yarn Sock in the Pocion color way

I still wanted some knitting for the airports. Since Haleakala socks were out, I also ended up casting on a pair of vanilla socks. They might look familiar because I have knit the exact same pair of socks before. The yarn washed out and the rainbows aren't as bright anymore on the old pair. I've since learned how to better maintain my socks, so I'm knitting this pair again.

Yarn is Canon Hand Dyes Charles Self Striping Sock in the Yoga For Elephants and Silver color ways

I've also kept up at my embroidery. After sewing most of one side, I realized that I'd done it really crooked. I ripped it all back out, took some deep breaths, and started again. It's ready to be sewn into a sachet, although I think I might wait to have a few more ready before I break out the sewing machine again.

Well, that's what I've been working on for the last 2 1/2 weeks. I hope to have the Hieroglyphic Socks finished up soon so I can cast on a sweater. What has everyone else been working on? And what do you hope to start?

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.