Toe-Up Socks with Heel Flap II

I'm a lame blogger!
I finished one of my spiffy new heel flaps yesterday while I was out. I tried it on and decided it was too big. I decided it was too big and with nary a thought of the consequences I ripped it out. The result is that I cannot show anyone what my lovely heel looked like.
Bother!
It's mostly okay since I liked it enough that there will be more heel flaps in my future. I'll take a picture of it then.

Toe-Up Socks with Heel Flap

I took Purly Whites' suggestion and googled for "toe up heel flap" and found a number of useful links. I found a number of sites that have patterns that claim to produce socks knitted from the toe up with heel flaps.
I'll probably go looking for more later, but for the time being, I've started another pair of socks. And this pair will have my first attempt at a backwards heel flap.
The socks are being done in Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock, I think the color is Black Watch, though I'm not sure and don't have the ball bands any more. There's not very much blue, so maybe it's a discontinued color.
I'm thinking to try Denise's instructions first as I like the look of the pattern best, but at some point I'm sure I'll try all three of them, and however many more I find. Unless, of course, I fall head over heels in love with one pattern before then.

Second Clapotis II

I spent a couple hours on Sunday picking up stitches in the Mountain Goat Clapotis so that I could rip back to the error I made during my last Economics class. It was review for the final time and the instructor (I refuse to call him a professor after the performance he gave) couldn't remember the material well enough to answer people's simple questions. Later that class we took our final, I did well. Mostly I'm just glad to be finished with it.
At any rate, I thought I'd fixed it and it turned out I was wrong. This evening I got it worked back as far as I'd been when I noticed I had a problem and then some. I'm on my third repeat of the decrease rows and it's so nice to have each row be ever-so-slightly shorter than the one before it. I can't wait to be done so I can block it and gift it to its betrothed... well, it's intended owner at anyrate. The girl's already married so I guess she can't really be betrothed.

Pair of Sock III

I finished the sock's girlfriend on the bus into work this morning. While this left me without knitting for the remainder of the bus ride, it was worth it. All I have left to do is sew in 4 ends. Lets just wait and see how long that takes me.

Pair of Sock II

The sock's girlfriend now has a heel. I took it dancing last night and pulled out the offending rows; I think I knit past one of the wraps thereby getting ahead of myself on half of the heel. At any rate, last night as I sat through the beginners lesson at the Emerald City Contra Dance, I got that fixed and was again working in the correct direction. That is, forwards, towards the cuff of the sock, I'm making these backwards, er... toe up, just to see how I like it. The one thing I'm worrying about is that I prefer flapped heels to short row and I have not yet found a way to emulate a heel flap while working from toe to cuff. Any suggestions?
This morning, while strewing plastic containers all over the garage, we were organizing them, honest.. I took a break and finished the heel and the first couple rows of the cuff. I am within 10 rows and 4 ends of a completed pair of pairs of sock. I list sewing in the ends separately because I have, unfortunately, been known to leave pairs of socks with nothing missing but the ends in the work-in-progress pile for over a year. To my credit, that particular pile got put in a box that got lost in a move that early in that year, but it's still ridiculous.

Boring Knitting

My knitting is boring me. That's not really accurate. Some of my knitting is boring me, some of it is frustrating me.
Peacock's Clapitis is too big to carry around and knit on in the summer. (and besides I made a mistake about 2 inches ago and I'll need to rip it back) The biggest problem is that I really want to finish it off before I start my Stitch Ya Neck Out scarf. I thought that since I was already at the point where you turn the corner to start the decrease rows I would be finished by the end of this week. That appears to be a pipe dream.
The second sock has a half a heel. It also needs to be ripped out, I messed it up, I think I forgot to pick one set of bars up, so it'll need to be pulled back to the point where the heel turns and re-done. Not a big deal, but more complicated than I'm up to doing on the bus, so no progress there in the last couple days either.
My feather and fan swatch is sitting neglected in a bag in the corner. It's done nothing wrong (or if it has, it's been long enough that I've forgotten what I'll need to fix).
Those are the projects that I've worked on recently enough to mention. There are more. Many, many, many more... When I actually do a photo inventory of my stash, there will be pictures and descriptions of mountains of unfinished projects with guesses as to how old they are. Some of them might need to be carbon-dated.

Stitch Ya Neck Out

I got my yarn for Stitch Ya Neck Out. It's 6 balls of Jaeger Matchmaker in color 900, mocha, with which to make Forbes Forest. I'm slightly intimidated by the cables and bobbles. One of the blog posts had a suggestion for changing the bobbles and I'll probably try it out on my swatch, but I'm not sure, I might just do it as written.
My lovely victim... er.. partner (did I guess who you are correctly?) also sent me a skein of Rowan Summer Tweed in the completely over the top pink that is color 528. I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do with it, but I'm sure it'll be fun when I figure it out.

Secret Pal 5 - Package 4

I got home on Saturday from a hike with my parents and the puppy to find a package on my porch. It was a box from my secret pal with a copy of Knitting on the Edge and Invader Zim episode 2 in it. My secret pal is wonderful!

The hike with the puppy was wonderful. My folks had wanted to go to Rainier but I wanted to bring Zhenya along and pups aren't allowed except on paved roads. So we went looking for puppy friendly hikes and I found this lovely site: www.explorerdog.com/hikes. We went up to Twin Falls State Park where we took a roughly 2 hour hike and turned it into a leisurely 3 hour stroll (with hills), met lots of other puppies and saw the waterfalls from all three lookouts. Zhenya also communed with the river. We have determined that, while Zhenya is not afraid of water, he has little inclination to swim. Instead, he did what he always does, which is lie down at my feet. My father has pictures; I need to get them from him. At any rate, the puppy walked calmly into the river as far as his legs would reach the bottom and then he lay down in the water calm quiet and cooler than he had been a few minutes prior. It was HOT over the weekend; I do not blame the puppy at all for wanting to cool off in the river. For that matter, he did pretty much the same thing in a large-ish puddle/rivulet by the side of the trail, once going up and once coming down.

Pair of Sock

Well, the sock that I started at the Yarn Harlot's presentation has been completed. It's a little ankle sock, my first. We'll see if I like hand-made ankle socks any better than the commercial version once I finish it's girlfriend. I'm continuing the little self delusion that these two socks are in fact two sets of one sock and so far it seems to be working... or maybe it's just that by not making a cuff I've cut the amount of labor per sock in half. Whatever works, right?

One of the stories I promised you from Thursday, is that, as you all know, I decided to start a sock project as the take-along for the Yarn Harlot's talk. I started it as we waited for an hour before they let us upstairs. I knit through the entire talk. I had my sock prominently in my hand for every picture taken of me at the event. I got it quite a bit of knitting done on it. My sock got to see her sock firts hand. And here's the kicker: I did not realize how much a groupie I'd feel until we were leaving and I looked at my roomate and practically swore. I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed until then that the Yarn Harlot's sock probably had something to do with my deciding I had to have a sock for that afternoon. I feel quite the follower.

Mobius Basket II

The mobius basket went to lunch with my sister and I last week. Out of this deal, I got a skein of lovely red Manos yarn; it's either Bing Cherry or Brick, I don't have it here to look at the tag. She got a non-orientable blue-on-blue basket. And we both got salmon for lunch.
In the yarn shop where she bought me the skein of yarn, one of the staff came up and complimented her purse. I said it was a basket and not really a purse (please ignore the simple fact that it was hanging on my sister's arm with her keys and wallet in it looking for all the world like a purse), and she proudly said, "It's non-orientable!" The poor employee didn't seem to understand and my sister offered no explanation. Since I didn't figure out how to explain, the conversation ended there.
She loved it! My little sister actually loved something I made for her without getting explicit permission first!
In reality this isn't the first time it's happened, she liked the wristwarmers that I made her a couple years ago, in fact she wants a pair for her husband so he'll stop stealing hers. (I need to remember to send her some of the leftover yarn so she can darn the moth hole in one of the cuffs before it runs) But immediately before that gift there was the ill-fated dusty rose bulky chenile (are we noticing a problem here... none of these descriptors fits an object well suited to the recipient) hat and scarf set. It was donated to the school's clothing swap bin within 3 months of my giving it to her. I've forgiven her for giving it away, I'd rather know about the failures than keep making them, and at this point I see the failing was in my choice of project and not her level of gratitude.

Meeting the Yarn Harlot

I met the Yarn Harlot on Thursday! She signed my book and we got pictures. I even embarassed myself and have a couple of stories that I feel compelled to post here so everyone will understand. It was ever so much fun.
But first, I have to go to a Renn Faire and write an economics paper. So the stories will have to wait.

Yarn Harlot is in town..

And I'm cutting class to go see her this evening at Weaving Works! Whee!!
I'll take my knitting in (of course) and work on something small... Maybe a new pair of sock?
Yes, that's right, a new pair of (singular) sock. I always start off with the intention of finishing two of them and it just never quite happens. This time, I'm avoiding the pressure of finishing the second sock by defining them as two separate projects; we'll see how that works.
And so here I am thinking about starting yet another project. Is this because I need more projects? No, it's not. It's because I am in that unfortunate place in all my projects where I want to start a different one because they're inconvenient.
The mystery shawl is obvious.. I'm still not done and, more importantly, it's not public knitting.
The feather and fan swatch is annoying me. Seems like every time I pick it up there's a new mistake for me to fix.
And the clapotis is a bit too big and wooly for me to work on when it's this warm.
So I'm probably going to start a new project.

Not Much Knitting II

Once again I have little progress on the current projects and no new projects to talk about. My roomate got a second package from her secret pal; it was a couple of books. One of them is volume two of a set where she has and likes volume one quite a bit! This was a fabulous stroke of luck since I don't think there's any way for the secret pal to have known about the pre-existing copy of volume one.
(I'm reminded of our most recent Christmas fiasco wherein we received not one but 3 copies of volume two of a set where we already had volume two, and were lacking volume one. We've since rectified the situation and have one of each... or maybe we have an extra volume two knocking about somewhere, I'm not sure)