Pictureless Knitting News

I am almost done with the main body of the sweater, a mere ten rows away – but it’s the part where you go back and forth instead of around and around. There is purling. I have become thoroughly spoiled by the ‘straight knitting in the round’ color-work, and am whining vigorously because of the dreadful horror that is stranded purling.

However shall I survive another ten rows of it? Sigh, sob, moan, groan, complain.

I’d show you but hey, guess what? This is really surprising, but, the camera has gone AWOL again! Given how often this happens in the best of times, you can imagine the combination of resignation and irritation I have right now. Hmmm, lessee, in addition to the usual twelve piles and/or baskets of crap it might be hidden in or under, there are now an extra four hundred and eleventy new ones…

ANYWAY. I’m sure I’ll find it before I finish the thing. Because if I finish this thing before Thanksgiving, it will be a miracle (or, it will be because I have really done myself damage trying to fix my back and am bed-ridden with absolutely nothing else to keep me from ending it all but my knitting) (people, can I do the drama or what?!). And I have been promised that All This will be put back together before Thanksgiving. (Stop laughing. He was serious.)

Meanwhile, of course, I’m also working on socks! I did a pair in Zitron Life Style, color 1860 (eh, why can’t they call it something more descriptive, like, “orangy-yellow-green-fallish-color”?) (oh, I think I just answered my own question). The link is the color I actually used; I did the sock in a K3/P1 rib all the way from the cuff to the heel, then continued the K3/P1 on the top of the sock while leaving the sole stockinette, then charged into straight stockinette at the toe decreases.

I am going to do many more socks this way. It works for “brainless, highly interrupted” knitting, but oh! Do they love my feet!! It’s like slipping into a pair of hugs, and they don’t sag as much as many of my other handmade socks do (mostly because I get lazy about the ribbing at the top and say that one inch is plenty dammit and can we please start makin’ some time here?).

The Zitron variegation has a really long repeat (meaning, the entire sock was more than half done before the colors began repeating), so the socks are fraternal twins rather than identical. I’m OK with that – but if you’re the type who is bothered by a pair of socks that aren’t exactly alike, give the Zitron a miss.

Currently getting all tangled up in my purse is the first of a pair of men’s socks made from the Regia Design Line: Landscape Earth. I am on the toe of the first sock and in dire peril of (gasp!) running out before I finish. Seriously, I’ve got nothing left over from this sock. It may be another pair of fraternal twins. The colors are fabulous (there’s a surprise, Kaffe Fassett put together some awesome colors), the yarn itself is ‘fine but not awesome’ (I’ve been spoiled absolutely rotten by things like Lisa Souza’s Sock!), and the socks are going really, really fast.

Well, I say that. But I think I underestimate just how much time I have to work on them each week; I’m finishing about a sock a week, and they aren’t my main project. They’re what I do while I’m waiting for Captain Adventure’s speech therapy sessions, while I’m waiting for that forty minutes between when Danger Mouse gets out and Eldest shuffles to the van (Lord, that child is the slowest moving kid in the world!) (other children come pelting out of school, but my kid? Shuffle…shuffle…dawdle…dawdle…oh, were you waiting for moi?), while I’m waiting for the physical therapist or the doctor or whatever-all-else, during the weekly gymnastics lesson…apparently, I do a lot of sitting around.

At gymnastics the other night, another mom turned to me and said, “I can’t believe you can do that – I’m just way too impatient to do that! I’d never get past the first row!!”

I hear that a lot, and it always makes me laugh. I don’t knit because I am a paragon of patience. I do it because I am twitchy and impatient. If I didn’t have my knitting, I would probably be pacing around the waiting area glancing at my watch every eight seconds and muttering, “C’mon, c’mon, how long can an hour TAKE?!” (Uh…sixty minutes, Tama, just like it always does…)

I wouldn’t be able to sit through a TV show, or handle long drives, or standing in line at a theme park (brace yourselves, ladies, there will be sock knitting in lines), or darn near anything else. It amazes me that people can just sit there, staring into space or twiddling with their cell phone or organizing their purse. How? How do they DO that? I’m way too impatient for that! I’d rather build a sock, stitch by stitch…

OK, so there’s the knitting news. Pictureless, but not wordless anyway.

And now, it is Denizen bedtime. With any luck, I won’t have to use the duct tape this time…