WIP's, Postie Offerings and Weekend Plans

I suppose this post is more of an update of the past week or so since my last entry. Chris is at work right now, but he is leaving from there and going out of town for the weekend, to the lovely seaside resort town of Wool Bay with a friend who has a cabin there, to do a bit of boating and fishing, so I have the whole weekend to myself, and my knitting, from this morning until Sunday evening. Whooo hoooo!

Of course, I still have to work, but just being able to have the time that I am at home free of distractions. It's also nice because alot of my time seems to be taken up in dragging out and repacking my projects, and sometimes I neglect doing things like spinning or dyeing simply because the whole process of arranging things is intimidating. It's so much easier if I can leave the wheel in front of the couch, or the dyed wool hanging on the shower head. So I expect to get a few things done while he's gone, and of course, I'll post about all that, hopefully, Tuesday or Wednesday when I have my "two whole days in a row" off work.

The postie has been very good to me this week. I ordered, and recieved, a new MP4 player off of ebay. It has a 4G capacity, will hold my audio books, has a screen for watching videos on, and also an e-book function, which lets me read txt format books on it. This part is promising, since I can copy the written (not graphs and such, but nothings perfect) part of patterns onto my Windows notebook, which is txt format, and then transfer those to the player. Which means I no longer need to take the big paper patterns of my projects around with me on short trips or to work. I can just put the info on the player, and then if I run into trouble, or get more finished than I anticipated, I have the written pattern right there in a much more compact way.



I've figured out everything but the video part so far. I know how to USE the video part, but can't figure out how to transfer videos on there (and all the different formats doesn't help either). I got an excellent deal on this thing, but it is a Chinese no name ripoff product, and the instructions are good mostly for humourous entertainment, but aren't much help in figuring out to work the thing.

But once I do get the trick, I hope that will be "knitting handy" too. I'll use an example, if I may. I'm knitting on a pair of socks, and reach the heel, but alas I'm away from home and computer (vacation, work, whereever). It's a short row heel, and I really wanted to use Cat Bordhi's method of picking up wraps that I saw on YouTube a couple of weeks before. But alas, even though I had practiced it at the time, I hadn't used the technique, but had planned on trying it on these socks. With this device, I could download that video ahead of time, and have it ready and waiting on my player when I reached that step in the WIP. That's my dream anyhow, now I just have to figure out how to execute it.

The player wasn't the only postie offering this week. I also recieved some lovely stitchmarkers from Binkaboo's Etsy shop. She had sent me some pretty blue stitch markers a few months ago as a RAOK, and I loved them so much. I'm sure it wasn't her intention when she sent the first ones, but she did get a good customer out of the deal, because I just love her work to peices. Not that the green/gold coloured ones aren't pretty, but just LOOK at those pink ones! In my book, those are pure ART.



Now for my WIPs. The "Socks Ahoy!" socks are going along very nicely. I started out with three balls of Koolaid dyed Patonyle to do them with. Since I'm doing two socks at once, a couple days ago I took the last ball and rewound it into two balls, and although I didn't get the balls exactly "half and half", I think it will work out fine, as from the looks of things I will only need 1/4 to 1/2 of each ball to finish the project anyway. Shortly after I pick them back up, the old balls will run out and I'll attach these two "mini" balls and I'll be in the final stretch.





Frankly, they are long enough now. As long as I generally make my socks, but I want to experiment with getting socks over my calves, so I'm going to knit away until I have "nearly knee" socks. At the moment, I'm doing a 1 stitch increase now at the end of each needle on each sock, every four rows (there's 8 rows in the pattern repeat) to make the leg wider as it goes up. I'm keeping to the K 2 P 1 Widdershins pattern, but don't have enough yet (and I'm not sure I will need enough) to make another repeat of the cable, but we will see. I'm trying it on every few rows to judge how much increasing I need to do (YAY for toe up socks!!!), but essentially the results are K2 P1 panels on each side of the sock.

The Peace in the Hood cardi (CPH pattern) hasn't seen as much work as the socks have, but I have gotten about 2/3rds of one sleeve done. I mostly knit on it when there is something on TV that demands I actually WATCH it, since the stitchs are bigger and don't demand as much concentration, or even me looking down overmuch. I'm in no hurry. I never really planned to have it done for this winter anyway, and it could easily go into hibernation as Christmas approaches if I get too overloaded with "gift knitting". But I do so LOVE knitting with the Peace Fleece every so often.



Well, that's about it. I'm off to the LYS and the grocery store soon. I don't precisely NEED yarn, but I do need to support them, and I've neglected them over the past couple of months what with the Bendigo trip and all. That's my excuse anyway.