Socktober-YESt!

Well, almost. I finished the heel and wove the ends in on Sock2 this morning. I think I could've finished last night, but I decided to sleep instead. Considering how I slept, I might as well have stayed up and finished the socks, but that's neither here nor there. Here's a crappy picture of them, because all I have at work is my camera phone:



I am wearing them right now and they are super comfortable. Definitely house socks -- the stripey part (or "cheater yarn" as Chris calls it*) is 100% Alpaca and the solid green is 90% Alpaca, 10% Angora. My toes love it.

SP9
I am such a rotten spoilee, and I have such a fabulous spoiler. She should flog me with a skein of Red Heart. Instead, she sent me this fabulous package, which I got on Saturday and should have thanked her for long before now:



The yarn is a luscious blend of merino and Tencel from Ellen's Half Pint Farm in beautiful purples and blues. Later on Saturday I was at my LYS (Well, one of the four stores I consider a LYS. It's my favorite one of the two by my house.) to get something for my spoilee and I found some alpaca/angora blend in the absolute perfect color for the toes/heels/cuffs (because y'all know how I love the contrasty bits).



The book in the swag picture is a great little project diary -- I think I'm going to use it for designs that I'm submitting for publication. And the cards are a very handy deck of tips and tricks for new parents, which are definitely useful these days at Chez Knot. Finally, the greeting card is an adorable little girl with a dozen shopping bags who just looks so happy -- I'm going to put it up at work.

Becky Fix
We've entered Becky in the BabyGap contest -- hey, free clothes and $5,000 in scholarship money, why not? This is the picture I submitted:


That's her daddy she's smiling at like that.

This is the picture I didn't submit, even though I love it:



This is her Halloween costume, which she wore for all of 5 minutes, but really, how can you not have a first Halloween costume? That would just be Wrong.




Knitting
So, Laura, now that the Socks are done, what are you casting on next?

Christmas gifts! I do have a gift sock to start tonight on the train home (no, Chris, no cheater yarn* in this one), but I may just work on the Manly Muffler and see if I can get that off the needles. Even though it's got a bit of a pattern and is thus not as boring as 800 miles of plain stocking stitch would be, it's still starting to be a bit boring. And by "is starting to be a bit boring" I mean "is so boring I want to stick a dpn in my right eye." I would love to be done with it so I can move on to the next boring scarf. Which at least won't be boring for awhile. Oh, plus when I finish the Manly Muffler I'm going to post the pattern under Lauriginals so you can all want to poke yourselves in the eye, too! Fun for everyone! Seriously, it really is a great walking/subtitled movie watching pattern -- it's got enough going on that it's not 800 miles of stocking stitch, but is repetitive enough that you rarely have to look down at what you're doing.

*Cheater socks/yarn
I'm sitting on the couch knitting last night when this conversation takes place:
Chris: Do you have to change yarns every row?
Me: No, why? Oh, you mean because of the color changes? No, the yarn does that. Lifts the working yarn to show him
Silence
Chris: So it's like cheating. Those are cheater socks.
Me: confused, because I'm concentrating on the socks and have totally forgotten about the yarn conversation from 30 seconds ago, so I think he's talking about the Turkish heels, which I do kind of feel like are cheater heels, but how would he know that? He wouldn't know a gusset from a garter stitch. Finally it dawns on me that he means because of the self-striping yarn. No, no, honey -- they're not cheater socks. Lots of people do it this way. They dye the yarn just so it'll do that. In fact, people pay extra for yarn that does that.
Chris: Yeah, cheaters pay extra.

Finally
Because I'm insane, and I don't think Rabbitch should have a corner on insanity in knitting blogs, I've followed her lead and joined NaBloPoMo, the blogger's answer to NaNoWriMo (which I also want to do someday when I don't have a six month old and a crazy job and 46 gajillion Christmas presents to knit and a house that hasn't been really clean for over a year). I'm pledging to post every day during the month of November. See if I make it!

Seriously, I feel like I don't post enough, and I love hearing from people that I don't hear from or see very often (hi, Aunt Doris and Aunt Kathleen and Robynn and Ab!) and knowing that y'all enjoy reading the blog (and also thinking that maybe some of you out there are people who just stumbled across me and enjoy my wackiness). So I'm going to try this and see if I can get into a good posting rhythm. Try not to get sick of me. I am going to impose a one meme or fewer per week rule, and maybe institute some special Topic Days (like maybe Teaching Tuesdays, wherein I post some knitterly tidbits for Avy and Erica because I'm forever thinking of things to tell them and then forgetting). I think it'll be fun. And insane.

posted by Laura Y. @ 4:39 PM