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?