Of Socks and Shawls

Life gets interesting sometimes. What was supposed to be a lovely day of shopping and girl stuff for my mom and I turned into a knitting marathon at Urgent Care on Saturday. I got quite a bit of my sock done, while mom wished the doctor would just hurry up and tell her she had the stomach flu so she could go home and sleep. It wasn't the flu, but half a sock, and X-ray, a CT, and other tests, we did have a diagnosis. I'll have more knitting time on the 22nd, because there's yet another test scheduled for then and I'm the designated driver. If the socks in the photo look familiar, it's because they're the second pair of socks made using the same yarn. First pair was a bit loose, and too long. So I tossed the pattern figuratively out the window, frogged both socks, dropped down a needle size, skipped a half-repeat at the toe, and reinvented the toe pattern to make the leaves line up. Plus, since I was at Urgent Care and away from my trusty scissors during heel time, I worked a short row heel rather than a flap. Um, I changed the cast-on too, so that it matches the description rather than the directions. I kept the lace pattern the same though, honest I did.

Stacy's lace shawl is unfortunately not growing very fast. In fact, it's gone nowhere since Friday, when I finished off the one ball of yarn I did have. More should be arriving soon. I quiz my husband, a trained postal professional, each time he comes home from the post office. Should he forget to bring it home after work, he has keys and can go right back to get it. I do know that I ordered enough yarn. One ball of Palette, with me knitting on size 8 needles, yields almost one complete pattern repeat plus a bottom edge. The pattern has 5 1/2 repeats, so six balls of yarn will do it. I did take a picture for Beth (Hi, Beth!). The bottom of the shawl is at the top of the photo, and my live stitches at the bottom. What you see is one full (give or take 3 rows out of 90-odd) repeat ... imagine 5 1/2 of them, and you'll have a 24x70 rectangular stole.

School continues, much to the chagrin of my children who would rather read and clean their rooms than work math problems or parse Latin anythings. The end is almost in sight. Our summer vacation will be in June, and it's Tradition to finish up the school year before vacation. (It's also Tradition to continue with some form of math, as well as vocabulary review, during summer break.) The editing for the Homer supplemental books is drawing to a close, or at the very least, seriously winding down while proof copies are being printed.

Still on my list of things to do today: renew my TKGA membership. I joined last year for the sole purpose of working on the Master Knitter classes (which were dangled before my eyes by the same Beth mentioned previously). Even though I've got the last level submitted, my husband tells me I should renew anyways. He also thinks there should be annual recertification required for Master Knitters.