I should be doing a million other things

• like laundry (washing the Munch's wet training pants - the potty training is *not* going very well - he's far too stubborn to be bribed to sit on the potty with mere jellybeans as his reward!)
• like dishes
• like straightening all the clutter in the living room
  
• like washing my factory-closeout tweed in prep for the twisted yolk henley that I want to cast on for asap
  
• like knitting (!) on all my UFOs
  
• like putting away clean (gasp!) laundry
• like dusting
• - like a million other things that I could easily find to do if I only looked around

................but instead, all I can do is look at pictures like THIS.

Oh Em! She's just so beautiful, she actually makes me cry*!

*just that little tiny bit. out of sheer happiness.

May Sock Swap

I was invited, by Emily, to participate in a May Sock Swap. As you can guess by my last post, my previous experience with a sock swap was such an overwhelmingly positive experience that I decided immediately to go ahead and jump right in.

I was paired up with my swap partner on Friday, and having visited her blog, am absolutely thrilled at my match-up luck. She's AMAZING - and will be so very much fun to knit for! She (hopefully this doesn't give anything away!) is xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. She just adores colour, too, which makes my job all that much more fun! (2/18/08 - Editors note: After I looked at Emily's May Sock Swap blog and saw that there are only a handful of folks participating, I realized that even my tiny little 'hint' up above would totally give the identify of my sock swap partner away - so I went back and censored myself to keep up the suspense!)

While the Munchkin watched some episodes this morning from Season 2 of the Muppet Show, I browsed through my half dozen or so stitch dictionaries until a certain "lovely 19th century pattern" featured in B. Walker's Second Treasury caught my eye. Then once I knew what pattern I was going to make, it was on to pick the yarn!

The pattern is a lace insert panel, so I didn't want a sock yarn too wildly coloured to distract from the detailed stitches - so I went straight to my tried & tested "semi-solid" source and snapped up a skein of Sundara's 'Grape over Grey Violet' - which should be PERFECT for the socks. I almost got the 'Toasted Orange over Pistachio' instead, but with some input from Peggers felt in the end that I should err on the more-purple and less-orangey-yellow side of things. So now I just get to swatch with some leftover Sundara to get the layout right, and then once the skein arrives I'll get right to work!

Unlike my usual all-knit, all-the-time inclination, I'm thinking of working the main body of the sock in reverse stockinette to make the lace insert panel pop out that much more. Dunno. Just a thought. We'll see how it looks in the trial runs.

Of course, all comments and thoughts from everyone out there will certainly be welcome!

Now I'm off to walk the Munchkin to the public library to get some new DVDs for his weekend viewing pleasure (he's only allowed to watch TV on Saturdays & Sundays - a good way for us to keep our sanity!) and return my books and get some more for me as well. Plus maybe a new book on CD for me to listen to while I finishing knitting a pair of standard socks for our family vet, the Snicket Socks for myself, and swatch for my May Swap Socks.

........and then I get to finish cleaning a few last bits around the house and make a batch of pate brisee cheddar-cheese laced pastry to chill for a few hours in the fridge in prep for the apple pie & home-made meatball and spaghetti dinner that we're having tonight for Peggers' boss and his boss' mom. You know. Just your regular Saturday chores!

For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her

...What a dream I had
Pressed in Organdy
Clothed in crinoline
Of smoky burgundy
Softer than the rain...
(Lyrics by Paul Simon & Art Garfunkle)

Just look at what was waiting for me when I came home last night in the evening hours......

Do you know that I cannot find that lovely Soak concoction anywhere near me? And that I'd been coveting it for far too long - but reluctant to give in and buy it (with it's resulting shipping & handling charges) on the off-chance that I wouldn't like whatever scent I had decided to go with? But now I can try! And I can try them all! {insert a shamelessly greedy mwaaahh-hah-hah-hah type laugh here...}

And !OH! the Brittany cabling needles! They're so lovely and wee yet super strong and sleek to the fingertips. I keep petting them. And taking them out of the packing and putting them back in again. And the butterfly is already a favorite of the Munchkin's - in fact minutes after opening the packing I had to wrest it from his sticky little fingertips so that it wasn't twirled around the room as he ran in circles on the living room rug in butterfly-induced happiness!

We won't even discuss how lovely those little Lifesaver candies are.

At first I thought it was my happily-anticipated package from Miriam Felton, as back at the beginning of the month I was one of three totally lucky winners in her Birthday Contest (!) so imagine my total jaw-dropping amazement when I saw that the From: name on the package was not Ms. Mim's , but instead Emily's! She enclosed - along with the goodies and the booty - a lovely little note, too, saying that it was just something meant to brighten my day after the loss of my friend, which indeed it truly did. So much so that I was able to shake off the weariness of a very long work day (working until 9 pm can be pretty ucky - but working until 9 pm when you were up the previous night with your son from 3:15 - 5:30 am is really & truly an ucky of a totally different variety!) and pull out my knitting needles, load up the last disc of the Deadwood series that I have been watching lately thanks to the loan from a friend, and knit away happily and peacefully until 11:30! This was indeed a day-brightening package and just a truly lovely, kind, and all-around wonderful thing to come my way. Much like, I would imagine, Emily to be in person. (I myself would not actually know, as unfortunately I haven't yet met her in the flesh!)

I'm mildly ashamed to say that I'm not currently working on my pal's sockpal socks - I finished the first without too much trouble at all and have cast on for the second (and am 3 rows away from finishing the ribbing and moving to the calf) and am not at all worried tha t I won't finish in time. So instead I'm totally indulging myself by swatching and knitting and ripping for a sock design that I have floating around in my head. And I have to say that this is just So Much Fun that I can hardly bring myself to stop to do other stuff like, you know - Eat. Sleep. Go to work.

I first started swatching and suchlike with the sock yarn that I intend to use on the finished product - the above luscious Apple Rose from Misty Mountain Farms, but I quickly realized my error - not only am I using size 1 needles which means weeny stitches, but due to my ripping/frogging/yanking out in frustration I'm wreaking total hell on my lovely sock yarn - so now I'm swatching and suchlike on some kitchen cotton and size 6 circular needles - faster progress, easier stitches to see/count and no worries if I fuzz to hell and back a length or two (or three or four or five) of kitchen cotton!

This current design interest is due first to Gryphon's post asking for design ideas for her yarn - and then suddenly one popped into my head. But while I can imagine a knitted item that I'd like to wear, I have literally no idea ho w to design one. This came up one day in e-conversation with Mel, as she had just heard that a design of hers was accepted at MagKnits (!), and she graciously offered to see if there was space for me to join a design blog that a friend of hers was running - the perfect place for me to post all of my stupid questions and run my ideas and problems past sympathetic, like-minded people. So join the blog I did - just last week! - and while I was browsing through Barbara Walker's first two Treasury of Knitting Pattern books (Woohoo! my library owns them both and now they're checked out to me until the middle of 2008!!!) looking for a stitch pattern to go with my original idea I stumbled across another pattern that immediately said to me STOP! KNIT ME AS A SOCK! So I figured that as a sock is smaller and as that might (?) mean that there is less room for me to screw up, a sock would be a better first design project than the sweater than I was thinking of. (But never fear, the sweater idea is still there, and I found the perfect stitch pattern and am now really, really excited about getting this all sketched and schematic'd out, too, after I'm done with the sock!)

Well, that 'tis all from me for this post - I need to go back to work and keep making all of the necessary changes to the Copyright web pages that my Dean handed to me yesterday - what fun, 'ay? Happily enough, though, I have an hour of virtual reference desk service to do right before I leave, which always means a little knitting-related time in some way, shape, or form, for myself between questions, so I most certainly have that to look forward to!!!!

Wee Tiny

My sock is done! I knitted it last night while watching about 1/2 of The Holiday (Jude Law, Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, & Jack Black). I'd only give this movie a B - and that's because Kate Winslet is in it - - otherwise I'd give it a C. Jude Law does okay - but it's a role that I just can't get my head around him in because in the movie he's actually a decent guy - and his escapades in the Real World suggest otherwise! Cameron Diaz is ditzy and far too cookie-cutter stereotypical - annoying, almost. Jack Black is Jack Black - not given enough screen time to actually become the character in the actual movie - and while I like Jack Black well enough, he can be annoying in large doses. Kate Winslet is lovely as always - I wish that she lived in town so that she and I could go for coffee and chat, and I could hang out at her house & try and figure out how she brushes/styles her hair so that it always looks so good without actually looking like she spent too much time on it (in my world, spending more than 5 minutes on your hair is Too Much Time) - and maybe even raid her closet.........you know?

But anyway - I digress.

I knitted the sock first on size 1 dpns, then after wrestling with them for about 10 minutes (keeping in mind the entire time that the whole knitting exercise was only supposed to take about 60 minutes!) I ripped them out & off and re-did the whole thing on two circs and was much much happier. I did a basic k1tbl,p1 ribbing for the top then did the leg plain then switched back to dpns and did a garter-stitch heel then turned the heel then used the dpns to pick up the stitches for the gussets (and here I probably would change the pattern for myself and next time pick up 7 instead of 6 stitches, as I had a hole at the top of the gusset which I can sometimes kinda' avoid by picking up an extra stitch just to be extra careful at that super-tricky spot) but then switched back to circs to finish off the foot and the toe.

I used some leftover hand-dyed Sundara sock yarn in Dusk. Hey, if you're going to do a swap, better do it w/ the good stuff, right?



Then this morning I came to work and wrote a nice little letter to my swap pal and addressed the envelope and sealed it and then spent an hour out at the reference desk where I actually had a chance to look at blogs again for the first time since last Friday............and when I got to Emily's blog I realized that -DUH!- I had totally forgotten to take pictures of it. So I went back to my desk, hauled out my letter opener, and staged a few photos, then tucked the sock back away yet again and sealed the huge slice in the envelope with some good old sticking tape!

Man O Man O Man but this week has been a brain-frying sort of a time.................

I shall mail the wee tiny package off to it's intended pal tomorrow - oh what fun what fun what fun - and what a lovely lovely lovely Emily to come up and then also be willing to coordinate all of this!

I'm going to go now and post my picture to her Flickr group - and then go home and start watching my mailbox!

:)

I really should be working.......

.....but I'm not.



Today is the Munchkins' birthday - it is so so so hard to believe that my little colic-ridden bundle is 2 years old! Old enough to demand birthday cake at the merest hint of a icing-laden sugary slice! Old enough to sleep through the night - even if he chooses not to on an almost-nightly basis. Old enough to try to put his own socks & shoes on. (He doesn't succeed at it, though.) Old enough to pretend that the rolled-up bamboo place mat is a sandwich and the coaster is a pancake.

This was maybe, oh, at 4 days old.
Never, ever since has he again been this quiet.

So this afternoon I'm not working. I'm catching up on major, major blog reading after an insanely busy week & an insanely busy morning. I have pushed so much work around and finally off of my desk today plus done so much online grading & reading that now my eyes actually hurt. So what I'm going to do is post here, then leave work a bit early so that I can hit the health-food store and then go and get the little wee one - if you can call a 2-year old (who is both so tall & so verbal that he is routinely mistaken for a 4-year old child, even by those who have children themselves) 'wee' and take him home & play with him & read to him to his heart's content because it is - you know - his birthday. And if you can't have a fairly decent day on your birthday - particularly at this young an age! - when can you????

But first, I post.

I post of All Things Heather & her drive for donations to raise money to buy books for a South African school. As both a reading freak in my own right plus a militant mommy who makes the Munch read (not that I have to make this child read - he demands it on a nonstop basis!) plus a librarian plus someone who used to live in Botswana for a bit (the country above South Africa) - this donation was a no-brainer. And getting yarn as a result? A total bonus - but I would have done it w/out the yarn.........

Next I post of Emily.

Who sent me a lovely little wee-est treasure in the mail. I was overwhelmed last night when I got home from work (the Munch was still sleeping when I went to get him at his daycare provider's house - yesterday was Dance Day for the kids at daycare who are old enough, which correspondingly meant a very very late nap for the little guy and not nearly enough sleep!) with temper tantrums and making dinner and just being exhausted in general, so I didn't open Emily's padded envelope until today. I made myself wait and let the excitement build - plus I wanted to open it in an environment where it was nice and quiet and I could actually read Emily's letter and understand it instead of being interrupted every other word with requests for reading yet another Maisie story, more milk, dump truck location clarifications, or comments about the dog barking.

My sock. My lovely, soft sock that is knitted so

well - even at this small size - that it has no holes in the gusset!!!

It is lovely and beautiful and too cute for words - and this from someone who is most certainly not a fan of things generally considered twee. I have it currently very very carefully tucked in my front pocket - both because I like to reach in my pocket and feel that it is there, and also because I am showing it to - generally - every single person I see today. I ran to E's blog and read all of the posts of hers lately that I had missed and signed right up for her Wee Tiny Sock Swap. I am so excited, I can hardly wait. I'm hoping to get an International Swap Pal. Just because I love those funky stamps & foreign accents are just SO cool, are they not??????

So now I have posted. So now I go. This weekend should be just lovely - warm warm warm (well, warm considering what we've been putting up with lately!) and time alone w/ the Peggers and time to garden and time to knit and maybe even some time to throw open the windows and doors and air out the house and let in the Fresh Spring Air!

(a girl can always hope, can't she?)