The Season Of Socks

There's something about the heat of summer that drives me to create lovely, woolly socks. I'm not sure why, but Ive been on a bit of a sock-roll recently.



Aren't these lovely? More Kureyon sock yarn, this time for my mum. And I had enough left over to knit a lace scarf for myself, which is blocking as we speak.

Ans then there's these lovely socks for F, using yarn bought from Knitting Iris. I love her blog, I love her yarn. F wants to wear these socks despite it being about 90 degrees outside today.

Status: hiatus

Well. That was a long break.

Visitors

My mum and dad made the trek over the ocean and across the continent to see us all. We had a blast while they were here, but the kids really miss them now that they've gone.

Re-entry to Scotland

It appears our tenants may be planning to cut and run on their lease in the next few weeks. As it makes no sense for us to pay the mortgage there and our rent here when we are planning to go back so soon anyway, we've decided that I should aim to get back to the old country with the kids even if R has to stay here for a while for work. Scary biscuits.

Knitting

Oh, so much knitting! Firstly, this little gem from F. I'm so proud.



Next, something I'm almost embarrassed to post. I decided that THIS was the year that I had to enter my one and only County Fair. Since I have limited knitting skills, I decided that it was the taking part rather than the winning that counted. So I decided to go for broke and learn a new technique. So I did. Entrelac socks. For some reason, I picked rather hideous colours. I apologise in advance to the poor knitting judges that were subject to this monstrosity.



They didn't win a prize, I'll never do anything entrelac again as long as I live, but I did get a free Fair ticket out of it - not factoring in the cost of the wool, obviously. Let us never speak of them again (I'm not even going to pick them up at the end of the Fair, I'm so mortified by them).

Lots more knitting to share, but right now I have dinner to pre-prepare.

Lurgy redux

In the space of eight daylight hours today, both kids were felled by some unidentified fever. F, who usually has the energy of a thousand suns, lay on the couch with heavy eyelids all afternoon. Poor A didn't know what was going on - she just screamed for 4 hours straight.

It's bedtime now, so I'm banking on a couple of hours to myself before the inevitable Parade of Sick Children throughout the night.

Just time to show one more finished object. The Spicy Fitted Tee from here.
Bad yarn choice, again, but I was knitting from the stash. Bulky acrylic yarn does nothing for me. This pattern...oh dear...I love the design, and I love many of the other patterns in this book, but the pattern was quite simply the worst I have ever tried to follow. Confusing, illogical, and pretty much unintelligible. In the end, I looked at the photos and constructed the pattern myself. However, I love the design so much (and I liked that for once the shaping was obvious enough that I could make the sweater both long enough and waist-cinching enough) that I plan on making another one. Next time, less bulky wool. The photo makes it look awful. Poor R will never make a photographer.

Lurgy

Well, that was a long hiatus. As the title suggests, illness descended on the household, particularly me and the little one. It really knocked us both out for a couple of weeks. Then, more pleasantly, we went on vacation to Big Bear for a week. It was lovely. Oh, how I wish we could live in a place like that. Of course, it's nice to visit and a whole other kettle of fish to live there full time.



I managed to finish some knitting, though. Firstly, the ubiquitous Hemlock Ring Blanket. It's a very belated present for my sister who turned 40 (!) in December.



Then, something for me. Coriolus socks . I enjoyed the construction of them. I made a bad, bad yarn choice though. I thought I'd try Berrocco Comfort DK. Far too splity and soft. Still, I'd redo the pattern in something more suitable, although I'm not too fond of sport-weight socks.



I have about a million different things on the needles right now, and I really need to finish some more stuff. That's all for now.

Force of Nature

So, someone in the house (me) thought that it would be a good idea if the kids learned to share a bedroom. Currently, we have 3 rooms, but I'm thinking of our move back to Scotland. Property prices there continue to be insane, so we might find ourselves in close quarters for a while. So when A began to sleep through the night, the countdown to Sharing: A New Beginning started.

It's now ten long, long, nights since we started. R and I agree that it could have been much, much worse. The problem is that either one or the other of them wake up at some horrendously early time, then that's us for the day. We've been up before 5am every morning. I hate mornings. I am also famous for the declaration that "I need at least 9 hours of sleep every night". This is hard work, but I'm determined to stick with it.

This is all a roundabout way of explaining why there are no pictures in this post. I conducted a very special photo session on the sitting-room rug on Sunday. It was to be a true confession of all my recently cast-on projects which I really mean to finish, but, well, I don't. Unfortunately, part of the deal about Sharing: A New Beginning was that F got a clip-on book light so he could read in bed while A slept. The book light takes the same rechargeable batteries as the camera. We have managed to find the book light in various positions at night after F has fallen asleep, most notably hinged around his jaw like a flip phone. As you can imagine, this is all rather hard on batteries,which invariably get transferred into the book light. Keeping F sweet on the room sharing deal easily trumps blogging. Sorry.

Still, I've done a bit of knitting. This is my new favourite sock pattern, primarily because it's somewhat mindless (apart from the heel), and it uses sport weight yarn, so it goes quickly. Both things are appreciated by my sleep-deprived brain. I'll post pics next time.

Simple Pleasures, or how Elizabeth Zimmermann could bankrupt Big Pharma when it comes to anxiolytics

Well, we had another trip to Urgent Care last night, not for F this time, but for his accident-prone father. It's a long story that involved much swearing and frustration on my part, but he's fine. It was just a soccer injury (a broken nose, nothing too dramatic), but a chain of circumstance meant that there was an ENORMOUS hassle about it. The kiddos didn't get into bed until 9.30, which led to a (rainy) day of crazy crankiness from everyone. Plus, as the resident insomniac in the family, I felt it was my duty last night to wake up at 2am. I stayed that way until everyone got up at 6.30, when I promptly fell into a deep, wonderful, yet painfully only 10 minute sleep.

Anyway, onto knitting. I've been coming to the realisation that I use knitting as a form of therapy. As anxieties increase, so does my knitting. It also seems to correspond to my drive to clean the house. At least my neuroses are productive. Thoughts of our pending international move have begun to be more intrusive, so my knitting pace has picked up.

This is my first EPS Sweater. Suitably small, I know, but I wasn't going to chance anything bigger. I made it a bit large on purpose - sweater season in SoCal is so brief that I wanted it to fit next season as well.




I love the elegance of the simple arithmetic that produces the finished garment. I love the yarn: Lamb's Pride Superwash Worsted in Rose Quartz. I'm going to make another ASAP, but a bit less plain this time. And because I had to do some maths to make the pattern, I felt much more accomplished and ordered than just plugging away at a usual pattern. So I've decided that it's official: Elizabeth Zimmermann cures my anxiety.

Hurrah for Sleep

We're getting to the point where I can (almost) confidently declare that the littlest family member is sleeping a more reasonable amount of the night. Some mornings we even get through to 6am. With this Great Leap Forward, I find that I'm feeling alternately a lot more human/craving even more sleep. The best part of all, is that R and I have decamped to the spare room, so we can read at night again. I'd forgotten how much I really love to read. Believe me, the quality of the reading material does not matter in the slightest. I've downloaded Barack Obama's book to the Kindle, but I find myself gravitating towards crappy, trashy bestsellers.

The boy F had his birthday the other week. We got him bike, and he now seems a little less like a really wee boy. It brought a motherly tear to my eye to see him take off down the garden path on his new acquisition, and it takes a lot for that to happen!

He also had his first real injury, and I was surprised it was related to plain old clumsiness, not the bike. He tripped over a rug in the sitting room and gashed his forehead. He had a couple of staples put in to close it up, and had a sore neck for a couple of days. He must have hit the table leg really hard. Anyway, he's fine now, and he even had the staples taken out today, so hopefully it'll be nothing but a bad memory soon.

Onto knitting.

I started this cardigan (Sirdar leaflet 1752 for Snuggly Baby Bamboo DK) for A just after Xmas. The pattern and the yarn were a gift from my mother for Xmas. I loved the yarn, as I seem to love all bamboo yarn. Unfortunately the pattern had to be pieced together. Seaming is not my strong point. I should have just converted it to be seamless, but I was impatient to get going on it. Suffice to say, A will not be phased by the crappy seaming, but I am. To the point that I want to try and find a seaming class to go to some time this year before we leave for the old country and the knitting hinterland.



And then for the heck of it, I made a few dishcloths.