WIP Wednesday, snowy Valentines

It's WIP Wednesday, folks, and I am here to tell you that I have finished the second blue sock! Yay for me! I can't show you a picture, because Arthur is wearing them to school today.

I also can't show you a picture of the 20 cm of new snow, because Stephen took the camera to work, complete with pics of the cool wind-blown look of our front yard this morning, and then I shoveled the walk and messed things up, so a picture of our front yard right now would just look like a plain old picture of snow.

I can show you these limeade green mitts I made some time ago. Just as I was finishing them I got a note about a publisher looking for mitten patterns, and since I'd fudged up this particular pattern myself, I sent it off to them. But guess what, they didn't want it. They're quite good mitts, but the insides are slowly pilling up and I take out a little ball of fluff every so often!

And in non-knitting news, I took Geoffrey Chaucer's quiz about medieval times. I got 24%. This is what old Geoff had to say to me:
Grant merci for taking my quiz of medievale trivia. Ich hope that yt hath delited yow and peraventure shewn yow sum interestinge thinges. Yf ye haue scored low, ye kan comfort yowerself wyth the fact that yower brain is probably full of useful craft. Yf ye haue done wel, ye kan be grateful for yower lerninge.

You, too, can be humbled, at this site. At least he recognized that my brain is full of useful craft, and I can comfort myself with the knowledge that I am, after all, supposed to be a classicist, not a medievalist.

So here we are in February

Wasn't that poetry day great! Spend some time skimming around and following links and you will be richly rewarded. I especially liked this one.


While reading lots of poetry, I finished up the scarf and hat for charity.

Things I learned: Mistake rib pulls in enormously, and while it makes a nice, thick, reversible scarf, it also takes a lot of yarn to make a nice, thick, wide, reversible scarf!

The hat is a tad large; it even fits over Bunny's ears... Perhaps one day I'll follow a pattern for a hat... That's an idea!

I told Arthur, my colour consultant, about the three colours for February and March in Project Spectrum, and he said, "Boring."

I was thinking they are the colours we see all around us these days. We are getting more and more grey and less white, as the old snow gets dirty. By the end of February there will be frozen heaps of filthy slush all over the place. As long as the sky tends more towards the blue than the grey, we'll manage, but unfortunately, it's all grey out there today! But you can have a picture of the sock in progress to cheer you up.

I also have (drumroll, please!) begun the denim handles! You know, it is not so bad!

Once again I learn the old lesson: if you do it, it'll get done. And if you don't, it won't. Terrible that one has to learn these things over and over. I realised I started this bag in March last year!

The handle is 13 stitches wide, with a 9-stitch braid up it. So far, so good.

I have, as you can see, several buttons in the sidebar that link to things. However, I tried and tried to get a PS button to work. It just wouldn't show up. I'll give it another go...

The last day of January

It's the day before Project Spectrum kicks off.


I have already got my blue(ish) socks on the go, and am working on the heel flap. So those will be out of the way soon.

I was planning on a pair of socks for each PS colour segment, and though these were mostly done beforehand, I'm counting them! (Yeah, okay, I started them in October...)

The bright pink will be next on the sock needles, even though pink doesn't come up till April.

(When I started knitting socks for Arthur, I could get all but the second toe out of one 50 g ball, but this time I only got one sock and most of a leg before I had to bring in the second ball.)


And I've got a scarf and hat on the go for Streetknit. I had four balls of this wool -- I paused the scarf after two, to make the hat, and then I'll use whatever's left to finish the scarf.

I hope the hat will be extra warm, with a strand of sock yarn knitted along with the main yarn. It's fun and fast, though the mistake rib scarf is dragging a bit!

This hardly counts as blue, but I'll finish it asap and move on to something that does.

I am itching to make a bigger project. I made an 8-inch square the other day for the school blanket, with cables! Got out my Alice Starmore book, set to work in earnest on a piece with a couple of different cables... and got completely bamboozled. Gauge goes right out the window, for one thing. There's been a rash of mis-crossed cables in the blogosphere lately, and I did my little part in that, too, though since it was just a wee square, it got ripped before being documented! In any case, it put me off cables for a while and the thought of a sweater full of them now fills me with dread. But I managed this square of three identical braids, and it looks so nice, that my present grand scheme for the blasted denim handles is to make a long thin braid! We'll see how many inches I can get before cracking.

And the plan for the bigger project will just simmer a bit longer.

33 and still handsome -- now closer to 50

How many times do you think I'll change my mind between now and the end of September, when I can buy more yarn? What will be the new project, once all the little projects are finished off?

This is my present pick. I've actually liked this sweater since 1989, when Vogue Knitting published it as a Then and Now pattern; the original is from 1956. I want to do some cabled something or other, but don't want a big bulky sweater. (This 1989 version calls for some yarn with golden nubs in it -- I'm all for tweed, but not glittery tweed!)

I could show you a dozen more, but let's not get overwhelmed with choices! And my Knitting from Stash means lots of little projects, since my stash is not full of sweaters-worth of yarn.

And the present projects are coming along:

Branching Out, with the patch of brown/ grey/ black in the forest of green. I like it.

Now I'm torn about how long to make it. Finish the ball, and make a quite long scarf, or have that little bit left over, making a scarf just long enough to tuck in? It doesn't seem right to make a long skinny lacy scarf...


And Arthur's second sock.

It gets carried around a lot, but not knitted on too much!

I've got banana bread in the oven, preparing for the Knitting Ladies to pop over this afternoon. Must get the clean laundry off the living room couch, and make room in the front hall for snowboots and big coats. It seems we're getting a bit of winter, after all. The thrill will wear off soon, but this morning the kids were up and ready to go early enough that they got the walk shoveled before going to school!