04 January 2006

It's new year and I have new projects!

I hope you all had a lovely holiday season! Everyone loved their knitted gifts. My mom wore her cabled top to Christmas dinner at my aunt's house and Mike wore his flame sweater. It was beautiful. I love seeing people wearing things I made. The compliments are nice too, of course.
In the days before Christmes, when all my gifts were knitted and wrapped up, I thought I would want a short break from knitting since that's all I'd been doing. My break only lasted a day and then my sock yarn started calling and I really wanted to knit something for myself. So here is my 1st sock knitted for me! The pattern is the cascading leaves sock from the Townsend sock knitalong. That's a yahoo group that has a lot of free sock patterns . It's worth joining just for that. The yarn is knit picks sock garden in zinnia. I have yet to graft the toe but I'm waiting unti the second is finished so I can do all my grafting at once. I really don't like grafting. Once I finished that sock, I started feeling the pull of gift knitting again. My mon's birthday is in a few weeks and I really want to give her some knitted socks since she wanted socks for Christmas but I didn't get her any. I thought the jaywalker socks would be nice for her and it seems to work out well for so many of you out there in the blogging world. I started the forst sock for mom while waiting for my plane to come back to good old Portland. It was New Year's Eve and our plane was delayed by 4 hours! I was sick and it was storming outside (we went to N. California just in time for the flooding!) and it was pretty miserable (the airport, not the whoel trip) but luckily I had lots of yarn with me. A few rows into the sock I realized that I had horrible color pooling. See the pictures below and you'll see that it was unnacceptable.
I was forced to abandon that project. I'm still looking for another suitable pattern that hopefully will work better with the yarn. My ugly sock put me in a worse mood so to cheer me up, I started something else. That's right, 3 new projects in only a week. Project #3 is a baby sweater for my friend who's baby shower is this Saturday. I thought it was later in the month but, no, it's Saturday. So while I was in CA I had to make a quick trip to a yarn store. I decided to make the baby pullover from Last Minute Knitted Gifts because the corrected pattern is free on the web and it looked easy enough. So easy, in fact, that I had to go and make it more complicated. My first idea was to do a fair isle pattern around the bottom to make it more interesting but that turned in to stripes over the whole thing. It's really cute but I don't know what I was thinking. The book has it in the "4-6 hour projects" section but I think I'll be spending 4-6 hours just weaving in ends! See what I mean? The picture was even taken after I wove in about 5 of them AND I carried the yarn up the sides as much as possible so I WOULDN'T have so many ends to weave in. I don't know what happened.
I don't know when I'll ever get back to that second sock for me.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Leave it all there and call it the fringes of the rainbow! Then glue a littl pot of gold into the left armpit! The kid will be a hit at school. Impressive knitting by the way!

Stephanie said...

oooh! that sock is lovely - I'm thinking of doing cascading leaves as my next sock - but I haven't quite decided yet!

Thanks for popping by - I'm really liking crocheting little stuffed animals - they usually get parceled off as little gifts to people - but I think I'm growing attached to a couple of the birds and the sheep!

Brooklyn Handspun said...

I love your sock, and to think you just recently learned how to knit socks- very impressive! I can't stand pooling although sometimes I enjoy it if it happens on both socks.