Arrivederci!

I am leaving for Italy this afternoon!

At the last minute, I decided not to bring any knitting, and while I'm already sort of kicking myself for that, I know it will be for the best. It will give me time to draw and to learn French for a very important exam (upon which the rest of my degree and the next year or more of my life depends).

I hope you all enjoy the rest of your summer, and I'll see you in September! Ciao!

Keeping Busy

I feel bad doing these drive-by posts where I slap up a few photos and scurry back to what I've been doing, but I am exceedingly busy with work, getting ready for my trip, sorting out a mess with my student loans, and figuring out where I'm going to live once this lease ends.

I guess the good thing is that the prevalence of anxiety and insomnia lately results in lots of knitting.

While I sort out what to do with my Eleanor socks (I am going to knit a third one to match the more open eyelets of the second sock, I think), I have continued working on my self-designed socks. Look - they're actually looking like socks!



I've decided to name these Springtide socks. In designing them, I was going for something that evoked the new life of spring growth, delicate chutes emerging from the soggy ground and vibrant leaf tips glowing in the sunlight. I hope to have these finished soon, as the deadline for their particular Sockdown contest is rapidly approaching.

I also cast on a really cool pattern for July, Scrolls Socks (Ravelry link) by Charlene Schurch from her book More Sensational Knitted Socks.



I love the swooping movement in this pattern, which is deceptively easy to knit.



It's amazing to me how such different patterns can emerge from simple combinations of knit, purl, increases, decreases, and YOs. I am utterly charmed by these.

I'm planning to bring the Scrolls socks and a few other small projects with me to work on in Italy. I am also planning to bring my newly-finished Jellyfish shrug (which we will talk about in all kinds of depth soon).

For now, a peek...



Yeah, I'm pretty happy about that.

Almost Eleanor

Well this has never happened before.

I made a pair of socks, in a pattern and a yarn I absolutely adore, but I am not happy with the socks. I finished these on June 30th, and I've been unhappily thinking about them since then.



(Please excuse the lousy photo - I was rushing to submit it for a Sockdown entry.)

I love almost everything about these socks, but I made one big error. I tried to make the eyelets mirror images of one another, so they would cascade from the center down to each foot. Unfortunately, the way the pattern progressed, it made one set of eyelets (at left) very open and well-formed, the way they were intended. The second (at right) are smaller and tighter, more like a squinting aperture than a true eyelet.

I knit the smaller eyelets first, and as I saw the pattern changing on the second sock, I liked it so much that I figured I'd deal with the difference and try to compensate for it with a severe blocking of the first. Nothing doing. If I want these socks to match (and I do), I have to re-knit one of them.

As much as I love knitting socks, three of a kind may be too much for me.