If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again?

You know, it's sock knitting. Not rocket science, not brain surgery, nothing all that earth shattering, but it has gotten under my skin and turned into quite the chigger! (A very nasty itchy bug in these parts.) I tried and tried to make my Jaywalkers look nice. I like a shortrow heel, and thought to myself that a toe up try was in order, since I had never made a sock that way before. Well! Never again! Here are my socks on:

Do you perhaps see anything odd? They do indeed look mighty funny off the foot, kinda all folded in on themselves, but on they looked ok I think. But, that is not the only thing about these that just didn't go right. Look at my left leg above, do you see it? Well, maybe that is too far to see, look here:

Can you see it now? These two balls of yarn were the same color and dyelot. But, oh baby, they are not the same at all and it is very, very noticeable when you have them in your hands. I was so disgusted, I didn't even measure all that accurately and now this one is slightly shorter than the other one. Oh good. What a great job I did with these!

So, what do I do? Start another pair of socks, of course!:

These are coming out great! I have a small error in my set up row, I was working from written instructions rather than the chart, I didn't see the chart until I got home and had five rows of the pattern done, but I declare that small error to be on the back side, and no one else would probably see it. Do you see it? So, now I am on my way. These are Yogo Socks from Woolen Collectibles, an old pattern I got a long time ago. They are a lot of fun, and now that I have the pattern down, they are moving right along. See? I can sort of knit socks! Yeah!



This color is Mountain Colors Bearfoot Wild Raspberry and it is gorgeous. It took about 45 pictures to get this right. I finally went outside, as you can see to get the color right! Sorry about the errant white cat hair, you know who is always with me, dontcha know!

Caryn and I are on our way to Maine next weekend (Yeah!) so no post next weekend or the weekend after as we will be on our way back to Kentucky. Drought ridden, Kentucky. We are losing our pasture that we have worked so hard to get in. It just hurts, and I can't imagine how the farmer's around here feel. We have lost 80% of the wheat crops and 100% of the fruit crops. We have been declared a natural disaster zone, and they will be able to get some compensation. I have no idea what we will do . . .

Anyway, I will talk to you all again in two weeks! Oh the joys of packing - what to bring for projects? I have four or five lined up, maybe I'll just bring more socks. :) Take Care everyone!

How Boring am I?

This week has been full of the SSDD syndrome! (Thank you, Stephen King for this acronym) and who knows if I spelled that right! There just hasn't been a lot going on around here. Unless, of course, you count cleaning and laundry and all that fun stuff - so, the fiber world has had to take a back seat this week, and actually it didn't become a back seat driver either.

I've been spinning the Romney, and if I show you anymore pictures of it, I'm sure you will puke. So, I thought I would show the basket of corriedale-romney filling up:

You know, I think I was getting some sort of injured elbow from all that wool pulling. Maybe I need to comb twice, I don't really know. In any event, I gave it a rest this week to make sure I didn't do any serious injury.

I've been doing a little bit of spindling, although, I think I stink at it.

What do you do with the yarn on the spindle when the spindle is full? Do you wind onto a toilet paper tube? If you do that how do you add more yarn to it for a continuous thread?

The second Jaywalkers is still in progress:

The color on this is right on for a change - I wanted to show you the heel, as I did a PGR Shortrow heel and it came out really good. But that camera shot came out too close, and a bit blurry.

Farmer Chris went for a short ride yesterday:


Blazer seems to be pretty happy here, but then again, how can you really tell?


And that's about all from this neck of the woods!

We Interrupt this Program. . .

Ok, so my honey brought me to Louisville (Lew-ville, for all you non-southerner's) yesterday to celebrate our 24th wedding anniversary. Isn't that cool? Being romantic does not come naturally to this man, but all his other attributes tend to make up for this fact. Our wedding anniversary, is most often the time of year he will show signs of being romantic, and this year was no exception. We had chocolate covered strawberries with champagne, in a suite made for honeymooners. . .

We went to a glass blowing museum and he actually was going to get me a $40 key chain, but I just couldn't do it. I know me, and I would have broken that lovely piece in a month!

We walked along the Ohio river and noticed the skyline and all the bridges going over the water. We reminisced about all the places we have lived, (mostly Holland, Mi and Buffalo, Ny) and how far we have come from there to here. About how much we miss the water and walking along shorelines. I had brought my camera but, unfortunately, the batteries were dead. I got one shot of the Old Spaghetti Factory (we had dinner there last night) and some of the architecture of the city.
It was totally cool; there were all these really old buildings but right next to one there would be a new parking garage. It all blended though, it was a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to what he plans for next year!