End of the Week Update

Exciting news! Lots of exciting news!

Icarus: I am half a row away from finishing Chart #3 on Icarus - and baby, I'm roaring towards Chart #4! Unfortunately said chart is a whopping 25 rows (doesn't sound like much, I know, but I'm somewhere around 450 or 500 stitches at this point, I think, so it's actually a LOOONNNNG row every row, every time!) Still - I'm getting closer! My deadline is Memorial Day Weekend, and I'm having serious doubts that I'll make it, but still - I'll see my dearest Grams that weekend regardless and will certainly bring my knitting with me, so at least she'll see what will be coming to her sometime in the month of June......... My friend Sandy is also knitting Icarus, and is a chart or so behind me with a similar deadline. I feel like dropping her a virtual challenge to RACE! and see who can get done first. What do you think, Sandy, are you up for a little friendly competition among knitting librarians???? ;)

Sockpalooza socks: after several lovely e-mail discussions with Jessie she and I settled on a set of colours for my sockpal socks, and today I got the glorious news that the yarn was dyed and dried and ready to be shipped out. Here it is in all it's pink glory:

It's PINK, isn't it? It's beautiful - reminds me of the shades that a really lovely peony flower petal go through on their way from tip to center....................and as peonies are my Absolute Favorite Flower I think that's a very very cool thing indeed. I love how there are little tiny subtle bits of the lighter pink that show through every here and there - I think it's going to give the socks that lovely little edge that they'll need to go from being Nice Socks to Super Special Socks.



You can bet that as soon as I got her message in my inbox I ran RIGHT out and wrote/mailed the check to her ASAP!!!!!

Also in related Sockpal news, I'm a fairly regular reader of Wendy's blog - she is Queen of the Socks, let me tell you! - and was really interested when I saw her post the other day about toe-up socks done with a gusset and heel flap. Cuz you know that I want these Sockpalooza socks to be HIGH socks - and what better way than to do that toe-up? Plus that totally eliminates all the worries of staring the socks 1/3 of the way into the pattern and then adjusting for the heel accordingly - - and gives me a good sense of how much to increase the socks to make sure that they fit my SockPal's legs by the time they reach their final tip-top measurement! Jessie did the above skein in a full 7 ounces of fiber - which comes out to a staggering 760 yards (bargain-conscious folks take note of this : a veritable TON of custom-dyed merino/bamboo/tencel sockyarn and all for just $30 including extra-speedy shipping!!!!!!) - so I should have plenty to make the socks nice & long - but doing toe-up just seems to make sense, you know?

But how exactly do you DO that - translate a cuff-down into a toe-up? I'd wondered about it before, but never had the courage to try it - so when today I read Wendy's latest post about doing just that - a cuff-down pattern knit toe-up I screwed up all my lurker courage and actually posted that question to her on her blog. And do you know a mere hour or so later I had a message in my inbox from Wendy herself giving me the basic specs and advice on how to do it?????

WOW!

So between her two original toe-up gusset sock patterns (for both fingeringweight & sportweight yarns - is she good or WHAT?) and her personal advice to me I'm totally committed to giving this a try. I'll probably sneak the yarn into work and use a Very Accurate scale in the biology department to make sure that I divide the 7 oz. into two even balls, but in the future for this exact sort of thing I might see about getting my own scale a-la Grumperina.................

To round out this post I take great pride in showing how last weekend went - not only did I get my Panera breakfast fix twice in one weekend (ahhhh....I splurged and had a chocolate croissant Sunday for breakfast!) but I was also gifted with THE most adorable pair of pj's ever. Peggers chose as my Mama's Day gift not only a pair of pj's for me (via a setup called 'pajama-gram') but also went whole-hog and ordered a matching set for Munchkin. Here we are looking like total dorks, posing as Peggers told us to:

I always always always forget to even explain or address this, but in case anyone caught sight of this pic & was wondered - my BRIGHT RED right arm is due to a stunningly large birthmark - specifically a port wine stain that made my life a living HELL in the elementary school years but around high school turned into a Very Cool sort of thing to have and in college became a total non-issue........ I actually remember a few years ago reading out loud one of those absurd Cosmo or other girlie magazine quizzes to Peggers about compatibility or something - and the quiz asked "if you were to put just your right hand out with a hundred other peoples right hand, could your husband/boyfriend figure out which one was yours and why?" and just SNORTED in response. ;)

....and here is a lovely little picture of the Munchkin and I snuggling in our matching pj's on his Big Boy Bed, which currently is made up with some very sporting monkey sheets.........




Happy belated Mama's Day, and Happy Weekend to Everyone as well! Here's to springtime knitting!!!!!!!!!!!!!!