Socks, Socks Everywhere

Yes, I'm still knitting socks. Short socks that is. I finished the ones I started in May & have begun another pair for June. I used to churn out a pair a week a few years ago but I really feel the barometric changes in my fingers & thumbs as well as my right hip & left wrist since my two accidents in the last three years. I'm a walking bag of aching  joints & burning fingers when we go from pouring rain to clear & hot the next day. All of this restricts my sitting & knitting ability although I swear the knitting keeps my fingers limber enough to continue working on the keyboard!

So now I knit a pair a month or so. Depends on the good Dramas on TV, too. I love Friday & Saturday line-ups on PBS & Knowledge. Sometimes I get a good THREE hours of knitting & watching in! LOL  Rooting around in my stash this weekend, I found a 100gm ball of Opal sock yarn. It's one of their NEON series in pinks & blues & yellows & greens. Covers everything in my wardrobe!!! I'm not sure when I bought this yarn - possibly a couple of years ago when my favorite yarn store was closing out. I haven't bought much Opal since they dropped their Rainforest lines. I loved the Rainforest colors. I bought Fish & Clown & Parrot & Ladybug twice. I had several other colors chosen when they stopped shipping to Canada. sigh And then I found the DROPS colorways .  .  .  OMG.  As you can tell, I love color in my socks. Fact is, I love color period. No blacks or whites or browns for me, my basics are Raspberry, Watermelon & hot Pink.

Don't laugh but I bought yarn called LadySlipper on the computer. Just some better quality acrylic yarn for a work sweater for the winter. Something that can be tossed in the washer every couple of weeks & survive without a lot of care. It was cheap & cheerful & perfect for the job. When it came, it was the same color as my Dalesman wool that I bought - one skein at a time because I couldn't afford a whole sweater's worth. I knit a lovely jacket from the Dalesman wool but it has to be very carefully handled to wash it. I wasn't expecting the same color - I thought it would be more of a purple shade. Nope. Its the same screaming Raspberry as the wool. It sure made me laugh.

A little trip to the Mail Box

I don't check the Box every day but I do try to empty out the junk mail on a weekly basis to get rid of the catalogs & other crap that shows up unsolicited. Yesterday I got a nice surprise!! A squishy soft parcel with two months of my Roving of the Month!!

I sure don't need any more roving - I could probably spin for the next 10 years & still have roving left over - but the colors & the fibre made me do it. I just couldn't NOT join the Roving of the Month club. Aren't the colors lovely?? I love anything purple or hot pink. Add a little turquoise to the mix & well, it's an addiction! I'm drawn to the patterns in hot pink even if they don't fit or aren't suitable. And I have so many pairs of socks in purples, pinks or both that I'm branching out into reds & just a little acid green.

My package also included a sample of painted silk hankies in - now what did you expect?? - why pinks & purples, of course. I really like silk hankies because they don't have to be spun to be used in a project. I've stretched & pulled silk hankies into yarn & knitted them into a baby's cap without spinning. Silk is so strong & beautiful. This sample matches a couple of ROM's from last year if I want to combine them into a project. I have quite a collection of silk hankies & the remains of two bricks of tussah silk from 1973 - I spun & crocheted a gorgeous shawl without setting the spin  .  .  .  I was a newbie at the time!! But I learned my lesson well. It sure was nice finding that silk shawl 40 years later when I couldn't afford to buy silk & take it all apart though.

 And in the bottom of the bag I also found a skein of painted sock yarn that I won in a draw! I've been concentrating on knitting short summer socks for my sneakers since I only have a couple of pairs. This lovely skein should make a wonderful pair in some of my favorite colors.

Taking it Easy

The sun is out & the grass is riz .  .  .  . 

It's summertime & the living is supposed to be easy. Tax time is over & the heavy duty data entry jobs are raising their ugly heads. There's nothing like a rent dead line looming to get yer ass in gear.  Good thing I have a library of audio books to keep me entertained. Stuart MacBride is narrating his own book, Blind Eye, as I write this. I've come to love the Aberdeen accents & slang of the Police as they go about solving crimes with the craziest characters I've ever run into. I just laughed out loud at DCI Steele's attempts to get DI Logan - main character - to donate a sperm sample so her wife can have a baby. Between getting shot at, blown up, beat up & chased down by DCI Steele, Our Hero leads a busy life. Sure makes the data entry go by quickly.

And what's going on when I'm not on the keyboard??? Why, knitting Summer Socks, of course. I have two pairs on the go at the moment. I found only one skein of DCS Confetti in a pink, yellow & grey self-patterning yarn. Confetti has really good yardage per 50gm ball but not enough to knit ME a pair of short socks with a nice deep heel. I found a light grey & a dark grey but nothing that really matched. But, most of the sock will be buried in a shoe so I decided to knit the ribbing to the heel in Confetti & picked the dark grey to finish the foot. The other pair are in leftover thin blues. The car knitting bag contains Crafter cotton remnants that will become very large face cloths the next time I'm in the parking lot waiting on the Ex husband.