Blah

That's my opinion about the results of the German general elections. Despite the yellow sock frenzy I'm no fan of yellow politics; I really do not like the FDP (*shudder*). My country's moving farther to the right, from an already right-leaning centrist position. There is a little comfort in the fact that the Green Party, too, gained a couple of points.

Nuff said. I didn't go to the election party hosted by the German Consul General but stayed home instead and stared in disbelief at a tomato:

As big as a child's head, honestly. We made tomato salad with it.

Yesterday we picked up a couple of interesting looking gourds that we used to dress up the house for autumn (our decorating skills are limited. The gourds in a wooden bowl: that'll be it for the season).

The nights have gotten chilly here, and I'm thoroughly enjoying the frosty breeze we get in the wee hours. I started wearing socks again, after many months of barefoot-ness and sandal-mania. (Yes, yellow cashmere socks even.)

And I started another pair of socks, made from this:

It's Plymouth Yarn Happy Feet, and I'm using it for a pair of Wendy D. Johnson's Nanner socks. The intended recipient: Mama! She kindly requested a pair of red socks for Christmas. There's a bit of purplish red in the yarn, but I think overall it's still very red.

Mystery Solved!

While waiting for the cable guy* to take the cable box and release me from TV dependence, I finished Nancy Bush's September 09 Mystery Socks. Without a model to wear them for a photo shoot, I positioned them on the 1930s office chair that Hubs salvaged from his university's unused furniture dumpster a couple of weeks ago:

After finishing clue #3 last week the rest of the socks wasn't much of a mystery: I just kept on with the pattern (which is now officially called "Fox Faces," I believe), did two extra pattern repeats to accommodate my size 41 feet, and finished with the toe.

The toe was new to me: instead of decreasing four stitches at two sides every second row, Nancy's instruction called for a six-stitch decrease at three places, starting with the center of the bottom (see the sock to the left in the next pic).

I'm afraid the decrease on the bottom will make the socks less comfortable to wear with shoes, but I'll need to test that to be sure.

I said it last time and I'll say it again: the yarn is absolutely delicious (Zen Yarn Garden Serenity Sock). The socks are so, so, so, so soft, they are perfect for wearing in bed. Although I don't actually wear socks in bed! But somehow, in my mind these socks have become "bed socks." But since the color looks really good with jeans, I'll probably end up wearing them outside, too.

Mmmmmmm... cashmere socks.... mmmmmm. Heaven... mmmmm.

(*I'm still waiting. ETA: 9am-4pm ; the guy's got 14 minutes to show.)

Third Clue, check!

The third clue for the September mystery sock got us around the heel.

It's a very pretty honeycomb heel, which I didn't know how to make before. The heel looked terribly small, but I learned from Ravelrers that this is a so-called French heel (can anyone confirm this?). In any event, it fits very nicely, so no complaints on my side.

The yarn is most pleasant to work with, and I'm hereby declaring it my favorite sock yarn (but I'm speaking with just five pairs of socks under my belt, having so far used Opal Hundertwasser, Fleece Artist BFL, Shibui, Malabrigo, and Knit One Crochet Too Ty-Dy. Really, what do I know?) Zen Yarn Garden Serenity Sock: get yourself some!

The yarn is soooooo soft, and sooooo wonderful to the touch, and I just want to squeeze it all the time. I'm almost looking forward to being just a little bit sick this winter, so I can stay in bed all day, wear those cashmere socks, and read mystery novels!

The tangled-mess-scenario from last weekend repeated itself last night, and this time I got the scissors and just untangled and rewound the entire skein and made two small balls of equal weight. Now I'm ready for the fourth clue. What could it be other than "continue in pattern until you hit the toes"? Dunno, but I won't, will not, absolutely not, continue knitting. I'm sure Nancy Bush has worked in some crazy pattern mix, just to throw off people who secretly continued knitting past this week's clue.

The news around the house? We're getting rid of TV! I never had TV until I met the Hubs, and the reason for not having a TV was that I was afraid I'd watch too much. And indeed, since I started knitting I also began to watch a lot of telly. Mostly junk, and most of the time I pay no attention to it whatsoever. The Hubs hardly ever watches with me and ends up in the other room doing other stuff (such as reading or work). I decided that spending parts of the evening in separate rooms is just totally wrong, and since Hubs is all for bringing down our TV/internet/phone bill (a bundled package deal), we're cutting our ties with the current provider and switch to a different company that offers phone and internet separate from cable TV. I have one more week to watch junk, and then it's all over! I'm totally excited. We're getting rid of the big ole telly box as well, since we usually watch DVDs on the computer anyway. This will free up a big part of our small living room, and we can move our dining table so that it fits more people. "Fitting more people" is becoming important: Monsieur is really getting into the cooking thing and wants to feed more people more often. This weekend he decided to try something from a cookbook he's never used before and picked a Finnish cookbook. He is buying lots of beets and potatoes today, but doubts that he'll find reindeer meat... I'll keep you posted!

Antennae!

Howdy! How was your weekend? I made my Hubs go gaga; what did you do?

Well, Hubs says I didn't actually push him over the edge, but surely I came close. This is what happened:

For the mystery socks I had wound one skein of yellow golden cashmere heaven, and to knit the socks two at a time I needed both ends of the yarn. This of course is a piece o' cake if you use a yarn swift and a ball winder. Not so if you wind by hand using the back of a chair, since you "lose" the inside end to the yarn you wind around it. So I wound the yarn around a toilet paper roll tube to maintain access to the inside end. So far quite clever, yes? As you can image, my ball of yarn looked fairly... well... un-pretty. But it served its purpose: I had two ends of yarn to work with, to knit two individual socks.

Then something strange happened last Saturday, and I refuse to recall what it was exactly. But somehow I ended up pulling a large part of the inside body out of the ball of yarn. I accidentally pulled a lot of the inside out! This left me with a huge mess of tangled yarn. I pulled and pushed and untangled and moved around and pulled some more, and I did all of those things for about an hour, but I just couldn't untangle the mess. So I got the scissors, thinking I must cut the yarn near the sock end, and again near the ball end, throw away the middle and tie together the two loose ends.

When Hubs saw me with the scissors, he did this manly thing where he felt challenged to save the world, one strand of yarn at a time. So he sat down and untangled the yarn. And he did so for a long, looooooog time. No scissors ever touched that yarn.

In the meantime I sat in the other room, undoing my shiny "Luxus" sweater to take care of the mess I had created by not watching my gauge. Something I hadn't quite considered: the yarn's a mohair blend. Ripping was painful and took a lot, a lot!, of time.

With all of Saturday's yarn frustration, I treated us to key lime bars on Sunday. They were yum. I made the crust using animals crackers.

And since I was feeling the yellow thing, I knit up a bit of the LaLana Wools Streakers! I got in Taos last spring (mostly white, with a bit of yellow here and there), and I came up with this:

The yellow turned especially pretty once I was ready to cast off, so I crocheted some antennae on top of it:

Unbelievable how quick a knit a hat is! This is my first hat, and I didn't even have a pattern to follow. (Not that this is an ingenious pattern, but I'm pretty happy that I got the measurements right the first time.)

Winter, Where Art Thou?*

*I take that back. Please, winter, stay away for a while, will ya? Send brother autumn first, pretty please.

Textured Shawl(ette), Jr.

Couldn't help but take a few more pictures:

The yellow Mystery Socks are coming along swimmingly. I'm done with the second clue, thanks to Jeremy Brett and David Burke, who make such a wonderful Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson team (in the British 1980s series) that we watched three episodes last night.

Here's a pic of the finished first clue, which involved knitting a vikkel braid:

It's easy enough to make if you have clear instructions. I found a nice vikkel tutorial here.

So long!

Mystery Sock

Orlane's Textured Shawl is done and currently drying on the office carpet (note to self: invest in blocking mats and blocking wires. Tell Santa about this. [Also tell Santa about a yarn swift and a ball winder.] [While at it, while not mention sock blockers?]).

(Yes, her older sister, Textured Shawl #1, is keeping her company in this picture.)

#2 turned out smaller than #1, but I figured my friend Emma's shoulders are much smaller than mine, so what looks like a shawlette on me might work for her as shawl.

Since the shawl is taking an eternity to dry I started to knit the Sock Knitters Anonymous September 2009 Mystery Sock, designed by Nancy Bush.

The challenge is to use yellow yarn. I had this golden yarn in my stack, thanks to Minh! It's a beautiful cashmere mix (Zen Garden's Serenity Sock) and wonderful to knit up. This is the thickest yarn I've used to knit socks, and it's amazing how fast the sock's growing.

I hope I'll catch up with everyone else before Nancy releases the third clue next week. And maybe, maybe, I'll even get to work on my sweater this weekend.

Cheers!

Where's My Pic?

Many many many bloggers have loudly complained about Typepad over the past week and some even moved over to Wordpress; I use Blogger and am quite happy with it. However, Flickr is giving me a bit of a headache... Sometimes Flickr and Blogger don't communicate as well as they ought to, and photos just disappear. It's all fairly frustrating, and I wonder: are there alternatives to Flickr? Obviously there are. What I mean is: for quick blogging-with-photos, what are the alternatives? Any ideas, anyone?

Orlane, the textured shawl, has grown, but not to a size worth photographing. Two non-knitting pictures, then. We'll see how long before they disappear...

The cobbler was quite tasty. The peaches were so perfect, I think I would have preferred eating them raw. The "dinner party" was a success, though. It's always fun having people over.

It's getting cooler around here; the mornings are perfect for walks along the river. There's plenty pretty at the river.

Denial

I'm in denial about the "Luxus" sweater and started a new yet another project to distract myself: I'm making a second Textured Shawl (design by Orlane), this one in linen and for my friend Emma.

The yarn's completely weird; it's GGH's Safari Gold, which is a nylon/linen blend. It knits like string--the type of string used to secure a parcel, for instance. It's a very stringy yarn! It attracts dirt like crazy, but Emma lives in a spotless house, so I'm not worried about it. (Good thing I'm not keeping the shawl for myself; it would get dirty here in no time.)

And by "weird" I'm not saying I don't like it... it's just different. And it's in a pretty green, a very light green that sometimes looks grey.

I got the yarn in Germany at a sale; I bought three skeins for three euros. I hope three skeins is enough; if not, I'll finish the shawl with a grey border, since I have the same yarn in different colors.

Other than the second Orlane and no progress on Luxus... well, there's not much to report. The fall will be super-mega-extra-crazy busy. I thought that last spring was busy, but in retrospect, it was a breeze. Now the real craziness begins. I haven't been getting home before 8 pm, and since I usually collapse at around 10:30 pm, between making dinner and prepping for the next day and doing stuff around the house, I have about 30 minutes of knitting per evening. I'm not complaining, I'm just curbing your expectations for finished projects.

As for the long weekend ahead: well, I have to work. We opted out on the possibility to join friends for a weekend at the beach. Instead we will be entertaining tomorrow evening. Hubs invited a colleague of his, who's bringing his wife, and since Hubs planned the entire dinner menu already and is going to do most of the shopping this evening, I have little work to do. Apparently, I'm in charge of the salad and one side dish (recipe and ingredients for the latter will be provided; I don't even need to make a decision as to what veggie to prep). And Hubs asked me to make a peach cobbler. I tried one of the peaches he picked up at the Farmers' Market... and it was tasty! Yum yum.

On that note, enjoy your weekend!