I had quite a discussion with my socks. I asked them where the heck they’d been and what they were doing hiding under my unmentionables.

They were silent and have crept to their place in the sock drawer, where they are sulking.

I do hope that I’m not going to find a swarm of little baby anklets in that drawer any time soon.

On Monday, the very day that the socks returned, PI had a huge spike in visitors that doubled the average (yeah, yeah… 20 instead of 10 🙄 ). All of the new visitors came from one country. I wonder where that sock has been…

OK. It’s not spring yet and there are no holidays coming up (at least in the USA) and I think it’s time for a contest. The picture is of three skeins of yarn that I am offering as prizes. From top to bottom, they are:

• Socks That Rock in a no-longer available colorway: Kryptonite
• Mountain colors Weavers Wool Quarters (this is the 100% wool yarn) in colorway Mountain Twilight.
• A Fleece Artist Merino Sock Kit that comes with a sock pattern on the label. It’s a little vague about the colorway, but it’s a very nice mix of green, blue, pink and gold.

Contest rules:

Leave a comment on this post with:
1) The country you think the Monday visitors came from.
2) What you think my socks were doing in that country. (tie breaker)

If more than three people guess the correct country, the explanation that I find most amusing will determine the winners. Yes, this will be purely subjective.

If less than three people guess the correct country, those who do will win the top prizes and I’ll pick the remaining winners from amongst the best explanations of sock travel.

If nobody gets the country right, winners will be determined solely by which explanations most tickled me.

Winner #1 can choose which skein he/she wants, Winner #2 can pick from the remaining two skeins, and Winner #3 gets the remaining skein.

Contest ends… midnight on this coming Saturday, 03/17. I’ll contact the winners some time in the following week, depending on how crazy my life is. 😆

I’ll give y’all one little hint: You can look at the little clustermaps thingy in the right-hand sidebar, gentle reader, but it won’t help you any.

Have fun. Let’s bring a little joy to our lives.

It’s been a long time since this project last saw the light of day. It was one of my unfinished projects of 2005 (yes, you read that correctly), and I don’t recall working on it much at all last year. But you can see that it’s grown quite a bit since the last time it was in the public eye.

This is Clapotis #2 in Elsebeth Lavold Silky Tweed color #13 (Cool Blue). It rather resembles faded denim in real life.

Since I’ve made it a resolution to knit socks only with my classes until I deal with some of my UFOs, and since the sock class was postponed due to inclement weather, I was forced into a non-sock project (hence the reason for the resolution). This was the only UFO that really could be considered mindless knitting.

And why was mindless knitting required?

Well… there’s this thing about technology. I like technology. It brings light and warmth to my house, lets me talk to friends and loved ones that are far away, brings the world in the form of the internet right into my house, enables my self-indulgence in the form of this little blog. So I like technology. But…

… it also lets me work from home.

That means that a concept like snow day which means a day off for many people, means that I get to do the same work as I usually do every day, except in my sweats and with knitting in hand (and usually a cat in my lap). But, since I am working, knitting must not interfere with my ability to produce the desired outcome, and therefore must be mindless.

Plus… By Thursday afternoon when the snow finally melted enough that I could drive, I had succumbed to the cold that #1 Son was so helpful in sharing with me — and with all his friends and coworkers, apparently.

Oh, you got my cold, Mom? That sucks. Yeah… everybody is getting the same cold I had. Does your throat hurt? Are you coughing? Aches? Chills? It’s a really horrid cold.

Oh really? I never noticed.

But, by the magic of technology, on Friday when there were meetings to attend and work to be done… I could do it from home. Sick day? Pshaw

So Clapotis #2 has gotten quite a bit of attention the last few days. It’s almost up to the 40% finished that I optimistically estimated when I added it to the progress bars in the right-hand sidebar. In reality, it was probably closer to 15% complete. I did do something smart when I started this project (wonders will never cease). I bought 6 skeins of yarn. The increases were worked with one skein. The plan is to work the straight part using 4 skeins. Then, when there is just one skein left, I’ll work the decrease section. So I have no idea how many repeats of the pattern I’ll actually do, but I know I’ll have enough yarn.

Based on the length of the 2-1/2 skeins I’ve currently knit into it, I’m estimating that it’s going to be between 66″ and 72″ when complete. I wanted a big wrap to take to work, where sometimes it’s just as cold in summer as it is in winter. Looks like this is going to be big enough!

Maybe 5 skeins would have been sufficient? 🙄

Actually, I didn’t do too badly in Las Vegas. I have a fairly low tolerance for feeding my hard earned cash to the one-armed bandit, and I’m fairly good at sticking to my vacation budget which includes a line item for how much I am willing to lose. You don’t go to Vegas and expect to win. Well… maybe there are some out there who do, but I’m not playing with the high rollers.

The pic is the view from my window at the Aladdin. Not bad, eh? What this picture doesn’t show is the daylight view. Everything from the Bellagio down to the Monte Carlo is now a big hole in the ground, soon to be filled by a high-rise casino/shopping/condo/timeshare thingy. Every time I got off the elevator, some joe tried to sell me a timeshare. Or, if I wanted, they’d be happy to sell me the whole condo. Sure… I have a few spare millions just lying around. On Thursday morning, sick and in need of coffee, I told one sorry, I’d rather knit. He looked rather startled, and I have to admit it makes no sense to me either. But afterwards, that particular salesman backed away whenever I entered the casino by his assigned station.

I took that picture the first night after I had checked into my room and settled in. Not much sleep came my way that night, and I finally got up at around 5:00 AM with a splitting headache and a pouring nose. Yep. The cold that I had been holding at bay for days and days finally got me. With no energy and flagging spirit, I never made it outside the casino. Ah well. Them’s the breaks.

The Aladdin is undergoing renovation on its way to becoming a Hard Rock Hotel. Part of the casino is walled off while the renovations proceed and a lot of the games have been moved up to the mezzanine level. The better restaurants are closed, also. A few new ones have opened off the mall, but I didn’t try them out. I found that the mezzanine is very quiet because hardly anyone plays up there, and the slots looser than on the main floor. I found a slot machine that payed enough that I could play for a long, long time on $20. I will have Walk Like An Egyptian going through my head for days now, but the quiet and repetitive button-pushing suited my cold-addled brain quite well. The casino nicely comped me some free slot play, and I almost won enough back to break even. Not quite, but close. I consider that a successful casino visit.

The Aladdin has one of the better casino malls, in my opinion. So, a little shopping was done. OK… a lot of shopping, but very little buying.

So now I am home and feeling a little better. I slept last night in my own bed with my own cats piled around me, and life was good.

I’m still fighting the cold thing, and the work thing, and the other distract-Judy-from-knitting things. How many pictures of half-finished socks and crumpled sweater pieces and long-forgotten UFOs can I show you, gentle reader, before you run screaming from this blog?

So, in stead of not-much-has-happened pics, I offer you this little video of the snow falling on my back yard last Monday. It was so pretty! I wish I had taken a longer shot. The thing that looks like a weird rope hanging on the left is one of my grape vines. I didn’t have shoes on, so shot this while leaning out the back door. Yeah… that’s how big my back yard is. I have tablecloths that are larger. But that’s OK.

PoliticalCritic (do you knit, too?) asks:

How is the weather normally in Portland? I’m on the east coast, but am considering a job out there? Does it rain as much as Seattle?

Personally, I love the Portland area and can’t imagine living anywhere else. But that’s just me. Does it rain as much… you know, I’m not sure. I think it might rain a little more in inches in our fair neighbor to the north. But we certainly have as many gloomy days. It’s a little warmer here in Portland. Seattle gets more snow, but snow here is a rare occasion as is freezing rain. December and January are hard to slog through. But we usually have some lovely spring-ish weather in February. September is glorious. And the rain? You don’t have to shovel it…

In other, non-knitting news, you will recall that #1 Son and I usually head to Las Vegas for a few days over the Christmas holidays. We see a show, take a tour, I do a little gambling, #1 Son does a little sleeping. It’s quite an enjoyable interlude.

This year, #1 Son has informed me that a tour has been booked for the time between Christmas and New Years because that is the only time that they can all go, and so he will not be available to go to Vegas. But maybe we could do something before or after the tour? I pointed out that the time between Christmas and New Years is all of the time that I have off, too.

I admit to being in a snit for a few days.

How dare he? How dare he grow up and act like a responsible adult and have a life and make plans that didn’t include his mom? How dare he?

Then I realized how stupid that sounded. I mean really.

So I will go to Vegas by myself. Why not? Vegas is lots of fun… it will mean more gambling time, right? Hopefully my pocket book will hold out!

I can report that the class socks are nearing completion. I’m almost out of yarn, so the end will come most likely today. Nothing else has progressed past the point you last saw it.

~Kristie opines:

I guess the stripe effect on your socks looks different because there is NO pooling!! LUCKY LUCKY!

I will try and post a finished pic tomorrow, and you will see that the socks never pooled. On the gussets the stripes changed a bit, but still didn’t pool. Ever.

I can’t take credit for it because pooling / not pooling is always, for me, completely beyond my control. I am open to any/all suggestions because, believe me, I don’t like things to be beyond my control. Just ask #1 Son (see above).

hpny knits offers:

striping socks- hmmm, some stripes depend on # of st per round, and changing that just a bit- can get it right.

So right! But I hate to choose between the correct stitch number for the yarn and having socks that fit.

One of my challenges is that my feet are skinny, so when making socks for myself I use a small number of stitches per round than average for my size of sock. That throws the pattern off sometimes. There’s not much I can do about the width of my feet, as much as I would like to!

I also like to knit a flap-and-gusset heel. Increasing for the gusset offers another challenge in that the number of stitches changes and throws off the yarn colors again. I could alleviate this by knitting a short-row heel. But short-row heels don’t fit my feet as well because I have high arches. So, again, I could have well-fitting socks or socks that stripe nicely.

It’s a conundrum, gentle reader.

When I arrived at the regular Thursday Tangle knitting night, the first thing my fellow knitsters asked me was are they done yet?

No, gentle reader, they are not done. Yet. I have about 10 more rounds of pattern and then an inch of ribbing, and then they’ll be done. Pics tomorrow, I hope. Because I still need to knit at least 4 inches (preferably 6-1/2″) on the class socks by next Tuesday, and I have all of about, oh… two rounds knit. Yeah.

Deadlines + Judy = not a happy combination.

In the rest of my life I can meet deadlines. But knitting? It’s just not happening.

KarenK from OR suggests:

It looks like you’re using two circs – try using one size smaller needle for the heel and sole stitches than for the instep stitches – it makes for a firmer and longer-wearing fabric on the bottom of the foot. There is a slight difference in row gauge but I make a couple of short rows on the sole as it’s worked, and it makes up for that.

Thanks for the suggestion, KarenK. I usually try for a firm fabric all the way around. I’m a fairly tight knitter, so the sizes I mentioned in my last post give me a pretty firm gauge. But I can see that if I needed to use a looser gauge on the instep for some reason, that knitting with a smaller needle on the sole would work well. I’ll definitely store that away in the hint book!

I hope that your part of Oregon isn’t too wet. I see that the next storms in line are coming today and Sunday.

~Kristie asks:

If I want to knit a pair of socks as a gift, & I only know the recipients shoe size, is their a “tried-and-true” pattern that works for all feet?

I don’t know of a “universal” pattern. You can find patterns out on the web that have instructions for multiple sizes. Also on the web, if you google something like shoe sizes in inches you’ll find a chart that tells you how long a shoe size is in inches. An average foot is approximately square – i.e. if the shoe size is 9-1/2″ long, then the person’s foot is probably about 9-1/2″ in circumference. Of course, nobody’s feet are average. But that’s why ribbing was invented. 😆 If I’m knitting for a man, I usually go for a subtle rib, like a K3P1 or something similar. Just enough to give some stretch, but not enough to yell ribbing. If I’m knitting for a woman, I might try for something a little bit fancier, like a traveling rib. But I’d keep to a pattern that had a lot of stretch in it and make sure that I had some negative ease in the width. Hope that helped!

Of course, I’m ignoring my own advice by knitting Jaywalkers – a not-very-stretchy pattern – for someone whose feet I have only a vague idea of sizing for. Yeah. Do as I say, gentle readers, and not as I do. 😉

Sometimes a particular skein of yarn just doesn’t want to be knit in the pattern that one had planned. I don’t know why this is so, but I know from experience that it is. And I know that trying to force the yarn to conform to a pattern it obviously doesn’t want to be knit in is an exercise in both futility and frustration.

It doesn’t pay to argue with the yarn.

After frogging out the Socktober Socks #1 toes for the gazillionth time, I looked at the poor, tattered shreds of toe yarn that remained and said to myself, Self, you need to try something else. The yarn is not happy.

Since I always sometimes listen to my own advice, I started knitting my standard, no-frills, this is a sock toe without rules, sock toe. Two of them, of course.

The yarn is now happily winding itself around my needles, without complaint and without argument. I don’t know what I’ll do when I reach the foot. I’m totally winging it.

I’m hoping that the yarn tells me what it wants before I end up frogging the foot out a gazillion times, too. (Maybe I should put in a lifeline at the top of the toe, eh?)

I have no pictures. The % completed on SS#1 has not change.

I have 9 days left to finish these socks.