The Jaywalker socks are done! They’re one stripe off, which I think is kind of neat. One is longer than the other, which is less neat. The shorter one is the right length – I don’t know if I’ll rip it back to make them even or not.
The details:
Pattern: Jaywalker, from the September 2005 MagKnits
Yarn: Regia Nation Color 5399, 2 skeins, with a little left over from each
Needles: Size 2 plastic DPNs
A few months ago, K decided to plant some flowers in a patch of dirt in front of our house. So, we went to the home ‘n’ garden store, emphasis on the garden part. While K picked out flowers, I was enticed by the vegetables. I developed a grand plan to create a small vegetable garden in a patch in our backyard.
This patch:
We came home from the store, and I ripped out weeds and rocks and grass from the patch of dirt. I planted three kinds of tomato and six sugar snap pea seedlings, packed into the kind of topsoil that comes with plant food in it.
And then I pretty much forgot about it. Weeding? Watering? Fertilizing? Please. I have knitting to do. And some of the plants grew, while grass and weeds tried to make a comeback.
Today, I finally tried to clean up the garden a little bit. Imagine my surprise to discover, amongst the weeds, actual peapods!
And, hiding in the leaves, teeny tiny little baby tomatoes!
I picked five peapods. Despite the evidence that bugs got to a few of them, they were quite tasty.
In knitting news, it’s been a slow week. I had a Downtown Day for work, and I was all set up with my iPod and the second Jaywalker for a nice Metro ride. And then I woke up an hour late, and I had to drive downtown, and the only knitting I did was a round and a half during the break in my meeting. Hmph.
Friday was my day off, so, of course, I spent it at a workshop on Cataloging and Classification. Because that’s just the sort of Partyin’ Librarian I am. The workshop was interesting, and I got to spend some time on the UCLA campus, where they have a potato tree.
Wanna see a close-up? Sure, you do!
See? Potatoes!
I showed people in the workshop that picture (in the little preview window on the camera). They thought it was a joke. But I bet I’m not only one who went home and looked it up and discovered that it’s a Kigelia pinnata, better known as a “Sausage Tree”. I still say potato.
UCLA is a place of many wonders.
The workshop itself was held in a gorgeous reading room lined with bookcases.
What can I say? I love a bookcase that requires a ladder.
And then I looked up.
I realize that this is probably an architectural choice, some sort of deconstructionist approach, but, to me, it just looks they got confused about where the ceiling would go and decided to leave it out.
I also worked on the second Jaywalker sock during the break (when I wasn’t taking pictures of odd vegetation). But, of course, I didn’t think to get a picture of that.
In the past week, I have knitted on a sock at a Weight Watchers meeting, at the West Hollywood SnB, at a meeting of my union, and in front of the television. And I may be working on it at the library this afternoon, depending on how many people come for our monthly Craft Club.
Do I have pictures of the sock in any of these places? Of course not.
I’ve been working on my very own pair of Jaywalkers, in a colorway of Regia Crazy Colors that’s sort of like a rainbow. I started a couple of weeks ago, and I thought I’d be done with the pair by now, but I overestimated my ability to turn a heel. I started out with the flap heel in the pattern, then hated the way it looked after I picked up the stitches around the gusset. I ripped it out and tried to do a short-row heel, but I couldn’t quite understand the pictureless directions I was following, and I couldn’t find my copy of an Interweave Knits back issue that successfully guided me through short-row heel-making on a pair of baby socks, and I think I created a new type of heel. One for people with REALLY wide, round heels. So, I ripped that out, and that’s where it all went horribly wrong. I ripped and ripped, and I couldn’t figure out where I was in the pattern. And I ripped and ripped, and I couldn’t find where one round ended and another began. I’m normally not bad at reading my knitting, but I was lost. So, I ripped and ripped, and I eventually ended up two rounds past the end of the ribbing at the cuff.
That was Thursday night, at SnB. I worked on it a little on Friday, my day off. At Saturday’s union meeting, I got back up into the heel, which is once again a flap heel. After gleaning some advice on picking up the gusset stitches off the Internet, I have a fairly decent turned heel, except for the glaring hole in one corner, which I am not ripping back to fix. I’m not. I refuse. I will finish this sock and get on to its mate. I just hope I finish the toe before I finish the skein, because I only have two skeins, and I’d hate to have to rip back AGAIN just to shorten the leg.
Although, come to think of it, I’d have a chance to fix that little gap….