Look! I’m still here!

I can’t believe how busy I have been this week. I haven’t blogged. I haven’t read blogs. I haven’t even knit much, although the Moosecreek socks progress in tiny increments. Strangely enough, although they are starting to feel like the socks that never end, I still love them and I do feel like I make progress every time I knit them. The pattern is fairly simple, for all it looks relatively complex, and I only have to pay attention once every 4 rounds. So it is good for TV watching, etc. — if I had time to do that. But I do want to get them finished.

This is the April Rockin’ Sock Club yummy. It’s called Walk The Wild Tide, and it’s a brand new Blue Moon yarn called Silkie — both the name of a chicken, and an indication of the fiber content — 81 % superwash merino, 19% silk. And look at the color! Doesn’t it look like it’s blooming amongst my wisteria? The silk and the wool took the dye differently, causing multi-hued light/dark yarn. And the silk gives that nice silky glow.

The inside of the ball band on my skein said bladder fucus. That made me raise my eyebrows a bit — ‘scuse me? Bladder fu. . . ?!?!?!? But, thanks to Wikipedia, I know that bladder fucus is another name for bladder wrack, also known as that cool seaweedy stuff with the bubbles in the stems that you can pop and not, thankfully, either a swear word or a disease (as though the lovely Blue Moon ladies would either swear or toss diseases around willy nilly on their ball bands). Bladder fucus bears no resemblance to this yarn, however. None. I can positively state that I have never had the desire to fondle bladder wrack.

Once again, though, I don’t think I will be knitting the pattern that came with the yarn. It’s a standard toe-up, flap-and-gusset heel sock. But the stitch used is a YO, P2tog lace — a true lace that is worked on all rows. It makes a very nice bumpy netting that I think would look great with a solid-colored yarn. With this yarn, the lovely colors got lost inside the netting. I swatched it on US#2 and was way off on gauge and not loving it. So I swatched it again on US#1 and got gauge, but still didn’t love the stitch. So I frogged it again and knit a swatch in the same track of the turtle faux cable pattern as the Snake River Socks. This time the pattern got lost inside the colors.

Here I’ve swatched a simple basket-weave pattern I am sort of liking this one. It still has the nice bumpy purls, but there is enough smoothness that the colors pop instead of being lost in the netting holes. What do you think of this idea, gentle reader? I’ve knit basket weave socks, and was pretty happy with them.

The Silkie yarn has been wonderful to knit with. It’s very soft and squooshy. It’s not very tightly twisted, and I was concerned that it would be splitty, but that has not been the case. It slides right off the needles and there’s nary a split in sight. Tough, too. The yarn that I swatch and frogged out 4 times still looks like I just wound it off the hank.

The crocheted doily was made by my Great Aunt. It’s probably around 80 or 100 years old, but I don’t have any way to date it definitely. Nor do I know which of my Great Aunts actually made it. Several of them crocheted. I have quite a few doilies — crocheted, knitted and tatted — and I try to find uses for them here and there.

There won’t be much bloggage this coming week, either. I will be very busy at work — so busy that I will not have computer access because I won’t be actually in the office or at home much. #1 Son is off to parts north for a month, on tour again. They have booked a show on a ferry, and I am dying to hear about that one.

The Persistent Illusion blogiversary is coming up this week. I can’t believe I’ve been at this for 3 years. My first blog post was titled So What Do I Do With A Blog. Sometimes I still wonder. 😆 But I can also answer confidently: I make friends, I meet wonderful people, I learn new things, I join an amazing community of knitters all over the world. Blog content may be spotty at times, but I can’t imagine not doing it at all.