stitching.. and bitching..

In knitting news, I am still swimming in fiber. I can't remember if I actually, technically signed up for the Tour de Fleece. In fact, I'm pretty sure I meant to, and didn't. However, in spirit, I still plan to loosely participate and paw my way through my intended pile. Maybe in the next few days I will get a chance to post pix of the amazing fiber stash I've amassed in the last... month. I think I'm sitting on about twenty pounds. Oh my.

Provided my back starts cooperating.

I'm making decent progress on my trekking sock, I'm into the calf increases, and pleased to realize I'm using a handy geologic slope formula to compute my increases. Rise over run indeed. I'm hoping to be at the knee by Thursday's stitch and bitch, I refuse to call it "sit and knit". Stupid people and their stupid attempts at hogging copyrights on things that they don't have copywritten.

Of course, on the 4th (hope you had a good one) I had to rip out ~ six inches of sock. That's approximately sixty rows... of precious calf. I thought by putting my increases on the back, I would create a 'seam'. What I created was a pouch, ideal for a heel growing out of my calf, or a place to squirrel away change. Basically, I find neither of those options to be suitable. Additionally, it was turning my rows into chevrons in the back of my sock. I was not amused.. so frog... frog... frog... and now I'm back at it, spacing my increases about, and hoping to get caught back up. I frogged it back to the bold yellow stripe near the shin there. Ideally I would like to have this puppy finished in about twelve days. This picture was taken about three inches before I decided the frogging was necessary. I should have taken one of the pouch before I killed it off.



I used a figure 8 toe up cast on, that is slightly goobered, on my trekker. We like to refer to it affectionately as a resevoir tip. Thursday we are having a class on the figure 8 toe up, so I think whether I've finished sock #1 or not, I am going to go ahead and cast on #2, just to hopefully get a nicer start on it.

When I finish these pups up... my next knitting project is most likely going to be the ballet sweater from the July Magnits

Knitty has a few patterns calling my name as well. I am all about this "extremities" issue. Some of those mitts, example- the knucks, have the potential to be some serious stash busters.

I also just bought a skein of my friend PippiKneeSocks's hand dyed sock yarn in a faboo colourway called "Lilly Pond" I plan on eventually turning that into a pair of knee highs for my eleven year old. Pippi, as a matter of fact, was just published in the new issue of Knitty regarding her amazing hand spun, hand coiled yarns.

So that, for now, is my knitting news. I plan on taking the trekker out into the wild tomorrow. Which will probably be my last effort to get outdoors for a few days, highs will reach the upper 90s and are to be into the low 100s (plus our nasty 90% humidity) for the next week or so. Ugh, I can't wait to get back to the mountains.