Will this work?

By dang, it does! My first embedded video... this is dangerous... nobody is safe now!

I saw this on the marvelous Mason Dixon Knitting blog, and wanted to a) remember it, and b) share it!

In Which Things Get Done

I have contracted a case of that rarest of Knitting Diseases: Finish-it-itis!

First there was Clogapalooza, but that doesn't count because it was gift knitting with a calendar-imposed deadline.

Then, right before Christmas I decided I NEEDED a pair of red and green socks. This is because at the Stow-Munroe Falls Public Library, where I work, we do this thing in December where we make a calendar with things on it like "Wear Green Day" and "Christmas Shirt or Sweater Day" and so on, and then all the staff tries to remember to wear whatever it is on that day. There are also games and drawings and so on, and it's a lot of fun. (It's just us; the patrons don't have to wear anything special.) Well, it happens that I was the one who put together the calendar this year, and it happens that I decided the Monday of Christmas Week should be "Wear Red And Green Day". And I decided that my red and green needed to be a new pair of socks.

Fortunately, this was right after the conclusion of Clogapalooza, and I had a leftover skein of green Knitpicks Wool of the Andes in Forest Heather (Dad's clogs) and one-and-a-bit skeins of Cranberry WOTA (my friend Jeannette's clogs). So I was all set. I dug out my Barbara Walker Treasuries and rummaged around until I found the fish-hook/candy cane lace pattern, diddled around with the repeats until I had a reasonable number, and cast on. Since they were worsted weight, they went fast.

To be strictly accurate, this one counts as both "startitis" and "finishitis", doesn't it?

Then, during Christmas week, I spent rather a lot of hours hanging out at my Dad's house with him and my brother from Chicago who was in for the week. There was food and fun and a bunch of movies from Netflix, and a great deal of football.

In the last two or three years, for various reasons, I increasingly find myself in the presence of football. Now, since they started using computers to paint the line of scrimmage and the first-down line on the field, this is all a lot more comprehensible - thank you, computer dudes, for that! However, I'm still not the kind of person who knows the players by name, or even the positions other than "quarterback", so I need some chemical assistance in getting through the games. My chemical of choice is called "wool".

Over the week my brother was here, I knit the second half of a pair of Cat Bordhi's Coriolis socks from her "New Pathways" book. I cast them on several months ago as my "walking around knitting" since they were being knit from my first hand-dyed KnitPicks Sock Blank, but they kept getting pushed back in the queue by more urgent projects. Well, now they came into their own, and aside from a little cursing when doing the slightly-unfamiliar-in-style heel, they were very easy and satisfying:

And I even had a few inches of my sock blank left!

And today - actually about ten minutes ago - I finished my modified Belle Epoque socks from Two At A Time Socks by Melissa Morgan-Oakes, although I did not use her two-at-a-time method. I have my own. I knit my socks using the magic loop method - I started using two circs, but the third or fourth time I forgot which needle I was supposed to be using and knitted all the stitches onto the same circ, I decided maybe the Lord wanted me to knit Magic Loop. I usually cast on a sock from each end of the ball onto its own circ and work on them in parallel, so I still remember my mods and don't suffer from second sock syndrome.

My friend Sarah gave me the lovely orchid-pink Opal yarn. It doesn't feel very soft when you're knitting it, but when I put the socks on they just hug my feet and give them a little elastic massage. I may never take them off. I modified the pattern by only doing the lace/"coin" pattern on the front of the sock (I continued the plain 1x1 rib across the back), which may have saved my sanity because I found out that I just detested knitting the columns of faggoting stitch on either side of the "coins".


This does not bode well for my desire to knit the Melon Shawl from Victorian Lace Today.

For those of you who may be wondering why you haven't seen me knitting my Mini Mochi Prize Yarn from Crystal Palace, the reason is this:

Mini Mochi seems to be a bit thicker than most of my sock yarn, so I think I need to use at least a 2.5 mm (US size 1.5) needle on it. However, a couple of weeks ago I had a Christmas party and so I cleaned up the house and put up the Christmas tree.

See the brown closet door behind the tree in my sock photos?

That's where all my sock needles are, except for the ones I've recovered from finishing up socks. These happen all to be 2.25 mm needles, so until I take down Christmas, I cannot knit Mini Mochi.

Don't think, however, that I am now sock-deprived:

That's more of my own hand-dyed Knitpicks Essential, in a self-striping pattern I refer to as "Autumn Stripes" in my head. I am in love with how this is knitting up! I think I'll try Cat Bordhi's "Sky" architecture on it.

Clogapalooza

This year I said it right out loud. I told my family and friends, "I'm not doing any Christmas knitting this year. The three pairs of socks last year took so much of my fall knitting time that I'm taking a year off."

Then I started thinking what to get for certain of my friends and I realized that one dear lady of my acquaintance would really go for a pair of those famous Fiber Trends Felt Clogs. I made a pair for myself last winter and I love them so much!

So I ordered two colors of yarn from elann.com and fortunately I got a cold that week, so I had a day off work to sit and knit on my sofa. The clogs were occasionally imperiled by a Nyquill-induced inability to count, but I ripped back when necessary and lo and behold, before I knew it they were all knitted up.

Well, that was the moment I drank the fatal Kool-Aid. I got a little crazed, and you know, those online yarn stores are so dangerous - they're open at night, when your resistance is low. Before I knew what I was doing,

BAM!

There were five pairs.

Now, I know that's not any kind of a world record, but it's pretty good for me! And all the recipients have seemed pleased:

I May Already Be a Winner

Yay! My "Mini Mochi" was here when I got home, and they sent me the colorway I loved best - Autumn Rainbow!

The yarn is a very soft single, and it's dyed with long color repeats like Noro, but it feels considerably softer than even the Silk Garden Sock, nevermind Kureyon Sock. The colorway I received contains such colors as dull purple, tan with olive green undertones, red brown, fern greens, teal blue - it is a thing of beauty.

See?

Also the balls are the cutest little lenticular shape. I keep petting them.

Now I'm only waiting for the library to get in its copy of "Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarn" to see if I need to buy a book to go with my yarn...

We Interrupt This Broadcast

I am taking a break from my China Vacation Retroblogging to type an entry related to Now (three days before Christmas, whee!), and I will leave it up top for a while but I'll have to move it down eventually to let China return to its rightful prominence. I promise I will eventually reset everything to its real date and the Order of the Universe Will Be Restored.

A wonderful thing happened to me: I actually WON a blog contest! The Crystal Palace Yarn Company sponsored a contest on their "Socks and More" blog - and the prize was two skeins of their NEW SOCK YARN THAT ISN'T EVEN OUT YET! It's called "Mini Mochi" and it comes in a rainbow of glorious colors. Or maybe that should be "a glory of rainbow colors". Could this be cooler? Merry Christmas to me!

I haven't gotten my shipment yet - hopefully today when I go home? so I don't know what color I will get. I love almost all of them, though. Squee!

A Moment of Clear and Shining Stupidity

Dear Diary,

Today I decided what i should give myself for Christmas this year.

A new garage door!

I did this Wednesday night, and spent Thursday and Friday calling around to get estimates. On Thursday evening the Sears guy left his estimate in the door:

$1585.00!!

I about passed out!

Then I got the estimate from the guys at Action Door.

$657.00

Now, here's the thing. When I was calling around for ballpark numbers, almost $700 seemed like a horrifying amount of money. Now, after the Sears estimate, it feels a lot better. I took it like a shot!

I can only assume the Sears people do not want my business.

Stormy the Dog, July 1993-November 15, 2009. RIP

Today I had to put to sleep one of the sweetest dogs ever made. He was a bucket of love in a fur wrapper (not too different from most dogs of my acquaintance), and he was my beloved baby boy.


Stormy was half Black Lab and half Passing Stranger. In later years I began to think the stranger was a Beagle because of his cute beagly face. My ex and I got him as a puppy when he was rescued from the side of the road by one of the guys where we worked, but rejected by the dog and wife this guy already had. So he came to live with us, where he settled to live with us and our other dog.


Stormy was an excellent cuddler and couch companion. You could even pose knitting on him for photography.

A couple of years ago he stopped being able to jump on the bed on his own, so for six months or so I hoisted him up there. After I threw my back out, I trained him to put his front feet up on the bed. I would then put my arm under his hips and sort of lever him up, which worked much better. He would stay all night most of the time, and if it was cold in the bedroom he would cuddle up closer and closer to my back. Sometimes I would wake up clinging to the side of the mattress!

By the way, when you throw your back out, they tell you to lie down on the floor with your behind up against a sofa and your legs up on the seat. When people with dogs lie down on the floor, the dogs are fascinated. "What's she doing down there? Does she have food? Maybe if we sniff really hard with our nose touching her face we can figure this out. If she's down there, she must have stopped knitting. That means she can pet us!"

Stormy started going gray early in life, at first just around his lips. A friend once called him the "Got Milk? dog.

He was a bit of a velcro dog. Not the really annoying kind who has to be touching you all the time, but whatever room I was in, Stormy wanted to be there too. If we were sitting on the sofa and I needed something from upstairs, I had to be really quick about it, because if I took more than sixty seconds Stormy would be halfway up the stairs when I was on my way down. Even when he got very old, he would still rather climb a staircase than let me be up there by myself. It's really flattering to have a creature just want to be near you that way! Makes me think of the joke about God creating Dog.

He was sweet and funny, and I miss him a lot. Fortunately, I still have Buster!