Big Black Sock

Here's my first 20 minutes of work on a Big Black Sock for Socks for Soldiers:

That's 80 sts cast on, and 3 rows of K2P2 ribbing. This is going to take awhile.

I looped the ginormous skein of yarn around the back of a kitchen chair, and I'm just unwinding as I go.







Another hour's worth of knitting while listening to a podcast yielded half a diamond. Today I was listening to About Time, which has, unfortunately, been discontinued. She did do 6 episodes, which are still available to download & listen to at the podcast website.

Hmm? Wot is zis?

It's a dishcloth! Started it last night (only the cast-on and part of the 1st row) and finished it a couple of minutes ago. It's the ballband dishcloth from Mason-Dixon Knitting; if you don't have the book, the pattern is also printed inside the label on Peaches & Creme cotton yarn, available at your local Wal-Mart. Obviously, a very quick little project. Why did I do it? I started it thinking I could work on it at my son's baseball game without looking too weird, then didn't even touch it -- not that the game was that fascinating.



This is 2 lb. 13 oz. of sportweight superwash black wool/nylon for socks. I joined Socks for Soldiers last week, and this is what I'm going to use. It just came in today's mail, ordered from Chamomile Connection. Now I have to figure out what size needles to use, and how on earth to handle this huge honkin' skein. I'm thinking I'll see if it will fit on my swift, and just knit one sock with the yarn on the swift. Weigh the sock, then wind off balls of yarn about that weight. I'll let you know how that goes. The group's founder is a mom with a son in the Air Force, and she has set a goal of getting 100,000 pair of hand-knit socks to our military members overseas. She's asking everyone to spend 20 minutes a day working on a Big Black Sock -- I'm thinking about actually timing myself to see how many 20 minute sessions it will take to make a sock.


Yesterday I was listening to Cast On, blithely knitting away on the Manos block. At the end of the podcast, I measured my square, and I had made it too long! I had to rip out only two rows, though, and started the next square. Le voila:

Mmmmmanos!

So I dug out a WOOP (work out of progress, thank you Sheri, for the new acronym), and started to work on it. The yarn is Manos del Uruguay. Here's the pattern:
It was copyrighted in 1997, written by Anne Simpson. I can't find any links to it where it might be currently available. I probably bought it about the time it came out, and started working on it. As you can see, it was intended to be a block of the month. The patterns for the 12 squares are on colored cardstock. I have them all in a neat little envelope:

The first 4 squares have been done for years.
I'm not really sure why I stopped, why this project has been in time-out so long. I have all the remaining colors. Each square takes most of a skein of Manos. I think I was having gauge issues. I do remember having to re-do the square with the staghorn cables, and running out of yarn before I got to the required length on one of the other squares. They're supposed to be 13" squares. They are 13" wide, but only about 12" tall. I'm hoping they'll block out ok.
The new square has cable panels:

I just wanted to work on something different, and hadn't done anything like this in a long time. So we'll see how this goes.
And just because I know you were biting your nails, worrying about the yarn from the previous post, I did get the tangles out, and rewound it. Lost only about 10 yards, all from the outside of the ball. The "lost" yarn is in 5 pieces of varying lengths.

Now, go check out Sheri's new online sock yarn store, The Loopy Ewe. She's got some great stuff!

A Mystery

I found this when I got up this morning. It had been on the coffee table, and didn't have crunchy knots attached to it when I went to bed last night.














I'm pretty sure this is the culprit:

She doesn't even try to look angelic! She has lived with us for about a year and a half, since someone abandoned her at the end of our road. In all that time, she has shown no interest in knitting. Never once asked for lessons. She did snatch a wad of roving and try to run off with it once, though,with the other end of it still attached to the spinning wheel.

A couple of nights ago, however, she hopped up into my lap and tried to sample the ball of yarn I was knitting from (Manos del Uruguay). So I carefully put all of that yarn away before I went to bed. I never thought she'd try to knit socks. I guess I should be glad she didn't find any needles. It would be hard to work them without opposable thumbs, so I'm sure teeth would have been employed, and the needles just wouldn't have survived, I'm afraid. 

Colorado pictures

I have tried twice to post this; I'm hoping 3rd time's the charm.
The mountains are so beautiful. We took a little hike up to Hanging Lake on Sunday, after we'd arrived on Friday evening. No problem -- just 1.2 miles each way. Except that you're starting at something over 6000 feet above sea level, and gaining over 1000 feet over that 1.2 mile hike. I thought they were trying to kill me! The lake & waterfalls are gorgeous ... I'm just not sure I'd be willing to do that again. Afterward, we drove over Independence Pass -- that was a snaky road, sometimes narrowing to one lane wide! We did have quite a bit of stormy weather during the week, so we didn't get to go white water rafting, but we did stay busy and had a lot of fun. We went with my husband's brother and his 2 kids.

Back in the real world, today is the first day of school for my husband (a teacher, the tall guy standing in the center picture) and son (a high school freshman). We'll be taking the Princess to school this weekend (college freshman).

On the knitting front, not much is happening. Just a few rows here & there. I even went & got an old "unfinished object" out of storage, thinking that's what I might want to work on, but it remains in its box. I think I just have too many UFOs, and I'm whirling around trying to figure out which one I feel like working on, instead of just doing something.

I'm back!

Didja miss me? Probably didn't even know I was gone...

Thanks to the generosity of my mother-in-law, we had a week's vacation in Colorado.
A bit of hiking (which felt more like climbing), tours of a gold mine & some caves, a day at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and above all, a lovely break from the heat here at home.

I took some knitting with me, of course. I decided my big project would be Mom's stole (Leda's Dream). Unfortunately, the only time I touched it was to move it out of the way so I could find something at the bottom of my knitting bag.



I brought along some sock yarn, and started the Mermaid Socks from Cool Socks, Warm Feet. I finished the leg and the heel, then tried it on -- too tight! So now I have to decide whether to rip it all out & do over with more stitches, or to see whether someone (like my niece, J.S.) with skinnier legs, might like these.

The new Six Sox Knitalong pattern was posted August 1st, and I was able to find a computer to download & print the pattern. I started it on the way home. This yarn seems to be working really well with the pattern.