Friday, December 7, 2007

Busy Learning

First, I'd like to take a moment to remember my fish, Coltrane, who passed away peacefully in his bowl last night. Coltrane, you were a good fish. *Bows head*


To answer your question, Mom, I did not cast on for the Buccaneer Socks on Monday. I cast on this:


Yesterday, however, I came to accept that it was just going to be too small, so I frogged it. I then spent an hour untangling the mess that happened when I tried to find the end (seen above).

Then I cast on the Buccaneer Socks.

Look! Stripes! I made stripes! (I know that I've made stripes before and wasn't nearly as proud as I am now, but these stripes are somehow better.)

I saw for myself what all those bloggers were talking about when they said there was a jog on their stripes.

Not that I doubted their wisdom--it was just kind of cool (in an extremely nerdy way) to make it happen myself.

I started the chart for the skulls and got three rows into it. Then I thought, "I'd better try to this on to make sure that my floats are loose enough."

Well, shit. Not loose enough.

I plan to frog those three rounds and give it another shot.

In the meantime, though, I put on my brave hat and did some surgery.

I unwove the end, pulled out about 5 rounds, repeated the decrease round, and voila!

A glove whose size has a reasonable relationship to the size of my own hand!

It was a very productive and satisfying evening. Unfortunately, though, it left me without a portable project. So I cast on a Slightly Clerical scarf from Mason Dixon Knitting.

This is yarn I got when I was home in October: Sensations Fever in purple. I picked it up because it's beaded--you can see the lighter dots in the picture above, kinda--and because I like the way this looks with the green I also grabbed. I can make beaded knitting without having thread beads or, y'know, learn a new technique! But the beads are getting lost in the yarn's extreme fluffiness! So I'm going to frog this and give it another try with significantly bigger needles, to make a looser, more bead-friendly fabric. This project needs some fiddling, and I also neglected to wind the skein into a ball (because I'm lazy), so I was still without a portable project!

So I cast on Calorimetry.

Is there a 12-step program for this?

2 comments:

Barbara said...

Now Coltrane sleeps with the fishes. Rest in peace, little fin-y officemate. *sniff*

Wow, a festival of casting on and frogging. Nice stripes, very cool looking. And how brave of you to frog and fix the glove thumb. Nice use of your big-girl pants.

I didn't cast on a silk hat last night after all. I had left my knitting in the van all day and the needles were just too cold to handle. It never got about 10 degrees yesterday. Plus I'm not letting myself cast on the hat until the last Christmas knit is knit (which should be later today!).

Love you.

Barbara said...

If I'd been there, I'd have whistled "Twinkle, twinkle..." for Coltrane's funeral.