Ruthless Knitting Archive

The Middlebury cardigan is done but for the buttons. It’s a great relief to have it totally off the needles, as it seems like I’ve been knitting it for a long time (though it’s apparently only been since September). I’m immensely pleased with how it turned out. I’ll do a full finished object rundown with pictures as soon as my buttons arrive and I sew them on.

This has been one of those weeks in which I spent several days wanting to cast on something new RIGHT NOW. Indeed, I actually cast on a number of different things, but I ripped all of them back out about twenty minutes later. It’s become clear to me that my frantic-wish-for-new-knitting moods have nothing to do with knitting and everything to do with my mental health (which, have no fear, is excellent — but we all have our bad days). The weather this week was rather relentlessly bleak, and it made me feel dissatisfied and easily distracted. On Wednesday, the rain cleared up, so I rode my bike to the arboretum, ran hard for six miles, and rode home. That made me feel better, and my knitting woes evaporated.

Now that Middlebury is done, I’ve happily resumed knitting my Red Herring socks.

I made the first one in May, intending to give it to my mother for her birthday, but it turned out to be too small for her and perfect for me. Since I had other priorities at the time — namely, starting and finishing the Oriel Lace Socks for her — I never did get around to knitting the second Red Herring, which was a shame, since I did love the first one dearly.

What’s great about returning to the socks at this point is that (a) it’s an all-new pattern, since I’ve pretty much forgotten everything about knitting the first one, (b) it allows me to check off the only substantial project on my list of unfinished objects, and (c) it goes so quickly! At some point during the summer, I got the ribbing cast on for the second sock and knit a few pattern repeats. At a meeting on Tuesday, I knit a few more pattern repeats. That meant that when I turned to the sock last night, I had finished the seventh pattern repeat in no time flat, leaving only four more for today. I did three while having my morning tea, so once I do the last one, I’m on to the foot and the smooth sailing of plain stockinette. Whee!

Throughout the process of working on this sock, I’ve been using my Go Knit Pouch (link goes to Scout’s Swag, where they can be ogled and purchased) to carry the sock around and knit from. Just last night, I started suspending the pouch from the arm of my knitting chair instead of dropping it unceremoniously on the floor at my feet. This feels like a great leap forward in pouch usage. I love this bag — it keeps everything neat and tangle-free while I’m knitting. I think I shall get a bigger one for my sweater projects.

I have to hold off on my promised good news until next week. Meanwhile, have a great weekend!

Thank you for your many compliments on the Florence progress pictures! I ought to have finished it by now, but instead I started something altogether different.

For lack of a better name, I’m calling it my “wine-dark sea” pullover. Because of the dark blue and the wine-y brown. And because of the nautical stripes. Please humor me.

I feel some remorse about beginning a new project when I was so close to finishing Florence, but I have a number of perfectly good excuses. First, David left town for a few nights, which always rather unmoors me. I wander aimlessly about the house, eat too many cookies, watch too many bad movies, and usually start a new knitting project. It seems I can’t help myself. (Indeed, this project was born as a swatch I knit the last time David left town.)

Second, I’m going to get the new Harry Potter book soon, and I wanted a project I could knit mindlessly while reading. I’m only an inch or so away from dividing this for the sleeves, at which point I can sail along through the rest with little thought, eyes focused on the gigantic book open in my lap.

While excuses #1 and #2 are valid as far as they go, excuse #3 is perhaps the most honest: I was sick of Florence. I had spent too many days looking at pink. Too many days knitting with dental-floss-like yarn. I need to work on something different for a while — something that offers a more pleasurable tactile experience. This yarn is 100% tussah silk. It’s fitting the bill nicely.

Sooner or later, I will most likely grow tired of knitting around in circles, return to port, and take up again with my lass Florence. For now, though, I’m quite happy to be becalmed with my stripey friend here.

Once upon a time, I knit a sweater with a turtle on it for little baby Gwendolyn.

I used Mission Falls 1824 Cotton, and I made up the intarsia pattern myself. When I finished it, I was a little concerned that the head opening was too small, but given that Gwen wasn’t exactly born yet, and given that I didn’t expect the sweater to fit her until she was about nine months old, I didn’t have any way to figure it out for sure. So I had Leona try it on.

As you can see, it fit Leona perfectly well, and Leona has a biggish head. “Good enough,” I thought.

Seven months later, Gwendolyn is getting bigger all the time, and she’s just about big enough for the sweater. But it doesn’t fit her, because her head is not as squishy as Leona’s. Indeed, the process of being forced to try on the sweater made her quite grumpy, and she didn’t cheer up until her mother had removed the offending garment. Obviously, something must be done.

Gwendolyn’s mom would like me to try to fix the sweater, and I am only too happy to comply, in part because it gives me an opportunity to fix a few things about it that I never liked anyway. Also, it will provide a welcome distraction from my glacial progress on the back of Florence (formerly the Habu top), which looks like this:

Why have I managed to finish so very little of Florence? Well, there is the regular business of life: I have had to attend to work, house cleaning, bike riding, jogging, yoga, grocery shopping, making dinner, lunch with Gwendolyn’s mom, and so on.

Also, I’ve been trying to work up the Buster pattern so I can submit it to the Jimmy Beans Wool contest. I thought the hard work would be over when I got the charting done, but, uh, no. It’s been pretty painful. And just when I thought I was getting somewhere (around Wednesday), I realized that I had to more or less start over. So the Buster pattern and I are not on good terms right now.

Then, yesterday, after Yarn Harlot wrote about Mystery Stole 3, I totally got sucked in to the idea of making a mystery stole. I was particularly excited about using up a skein of laceweight yarn that I bought last winter with no particular project in mind. So I signed up, only to learn that I needed a lot more laceweight yarn than I actually had. I decided to just cast on for the swatch for the project, figuring I’d sort out some kind of plan as I went along. Luckily, by the time I finished the swatch, I had come to my senses: I don’t have the yarn for a stole right now. I don’t want to make a stole right now. And I have lots of other things I would rather do. I resigned from the Mystery Stole group this morning.

(Let me add that this outcome is one of many reasons that I love to swatch. When I’m really jonesing to start something new, nine times out of ten all I have to do is knit a swatch for the new project in order to realize it will in fact be no more exciting than my current project. Then I wash the swatch, put it away, and get back to whatever I was supposed to be doing.)

Which was what, again? Oh yes, Florence. Well, instead of doing that, I took apart the baby sweater. Now it looks like this:

It is time to formulate a plan. Here is what I’ve been thinking:

(1) One thing I didn’t like about the sweater to begin with is how thick the seams are. They are probably an okay thickness for an adult garment, but they don’t work for a baby sweater. The thick seams on the sides and for the armholes were unavoidable (because I couldn’t have knit the turtle in the round), though I can perhaps improve them a bit by doing the seaming with a lighter-weight yarn. But there was no reason to seam the shoulders or hood, so this time, I’d like to graft them. This should have the bonus effect of making them stretchier, which should help the sweater fit better over Gwendolyn’s noggin.

(2) I seem to remember that the back of the hood has more stitches than the back of the neck was designed to have. I tried to solve this problem by increasing in the last few rows of the back of the sweater so that I had a one-to-one ratio of hood stitches to back neck stitches. This is why the back of the neck looks kind of wavy in the picture below.

I don’t think that increasing those stitches was a bad idea, but it didn’t help much, because then I bound them all off and ended up with an inflexible back neck anyway. I’d like to rip out a few inches of the back and reknit it so that it gradually increases in width to accommodate the hood stitches.

That brings me to (3). If I make the back bigger but leave the shoulders the same size, and if I graft the hood on, and if I graft the shoulders, do you think that will give the head opening enough ease and flexibility? Or do I need to do all of those things and make the shoulders narrower, leaving more head space? If I do that, I’ll have to rip out the whole hood, because the hood is knit onto the front, and I can’t adjust the shoulder size on the front without also ripping out the hood. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, but if I can avoid it, I will.

What do you think? Other ideas?

Lately, I haven’t had much to say about my knitting. I’ve been doing a lot of what I think of as Duty Knitting — working on things I have to finish so I can move on to other things. I got myself into this mess by knitting one sock for my mother that doesn’t fit her. This necessitated the knitting of another sock that will fit her. Then I volunteered to knit a test sock for Nicole. And to finish Grandma’s socks — which were, at least, only a 1/2 sock commitment. Before I knew it, I had three socks that needed mates. Meanwhile, I knit the front of a garment, creating the need for me to knit the (almost entirely plain) back. So my knitting queue looks something like this: second Oriel sock, back of Habu top, second 9 to 5 sock, second Red Herring sock. All of these projects are beautiful, and I thoroughly enjoyed creating the first half of all of them. But I am enough of a process knitter that second halves are not as much fun for me, while I am enough of a product knitter (also known as a “duty-bound knitter”) that I can’t imagine leaving those second halves unmade. And given how busy I have been with work, for which I have been putting in punishing hours to catch up, the knitting is proceeding very slowly these days. Thus, I see my knitting life mapped out for me for the next several weeks, and lo, it is dull.

So. Let’s see what Florence is up to, shall we?

We last left Florence in May 1927, when Slim was nowhere to be found and Bob had popped in for a visit. The diary picks up again a year later.

April 4, 1928. We started to clean house.

April 8 Easter Sunday. Louises all here. Snowed + blowed. Was not very nice. Louise, Little Billie and I were weighed on April 7 1928. I weighed 90 lbs Bill 42 and Louise 141.

I was to quit at the store on April 7 but did not quit that week.

Hmm. Things were a bit gloomy in the land of Florence, what with the bad Easter weather and her plan/desire to quit her job. Perhaps weighing 90 pounds was some consolation. (Louise, by the way, was her sister, and Little Billie her nephew.)

The next diary entries are inexplicably dated from the previous month:

March 19, 1928. Went to Buffalo. Left New Castle at 10:51 and arrived at Buffalo at 4:10. Bob met me. We went to shows and had a very nice time. We left Saturday Mar. 24 for Canada and came back from Toronto on Sunday Mar 25. Mother called me at evening that Grandpa I. died Sunday Mar 24 at 10:40 A.M. Bob and Mr. Wills went to Albany and Cornell N.Y. Monday A.M. at 4 o’clock to see about that job they were bidding on. They came home that night about 12 o’clock. I came home Tuesday. Left at 4 something and got into New Castle about 9:30. Harry and Frances met me in the Ford. Grandpa was buried on Wednesday Mar 28 at 2 P.M. Rev Binginer(?) preached the services.

April 3, 1928. Slim left that morning on the run and did not come back that night. He was not back yet Easter Sunday April 8. Wednesday April 4 Chas Bentfield was in Pittsburgh. Said he saw Slim in Ambridge. Had a letter from Bob. Said they got the job April 3 $71,000.00 job.

I gather from this rather mixed set of entries that Bob was still in contention, especially given Slim’s ongoing absences. The $71,000 job (that’s 1928 dollars, people) sounds like good news, though it might have kept him in New York unable to visit for a while. And obviously, the death of Florence’s grandfather was bad news.

The next entry is long and quite interesting:

April 11, 1928. Slim came home on the 2:30 train in the A.M. He went to bed could not sleep and woke mother up and talked with her. He seemed to be very delirious but worked the next day April 12, 1928. He was in bad shape on the train. Imagined he saw and heard things. That night I stayed home from Grandma’s and stayed up with him all night. He did not sleep a wink + neither did I. He was delirious all night. We had Dr. for him about 8:30. He said he would be alright in a few days. He improved the next day. The High School play was Friday evening April 13 1928. I stayed home with Slim + stayed up that night with him. He was seeing things all night and was very bad. Then that morning he went in on the 6:40 train and met Rowland + he took him to St. Francis Hospital Saturday afternoon April 14, 1928. I called up hospital Sat. + Sunday + he was getting along O.K. Then Monday morning I went to Pittsburgh. Had a talk with Rowland and then I called Aunt Lottie + her + I went out to hospital to see Slim. They did not want to let us in but after I talked awhile they let me go up to see him. He was up + around looked real good. Said he felt alright. Then when we came down we went to Jinko Arcade to see his Dr. Dr Hemminger + he said he did not know when he could come out. He would see him on Tuesday morning and then let me know. I went home with Aunt Lottie and stayed all night. Expect to stay until Slim gets out of hospital.

Thursday Slim got out of hospital.

Did you follow all that? The short version: Slim got sick, Florence nursed him, Slim got better. The longer version is more interesting: Slim became delirious and woke up Florence’s mother in the middle of the night to talk to her (aside: Was Slim sleeping at Florence’s house? Rather unexpected and unsuitable, don’t you think?). He went to work hallucinating, possibly endangering the lives of passengers. Florence stayed up with him all night the next two nights straight while he hallucinated and was “very bad.” They sent him to the hospital in Pittsburgh, where Florence remained by Slim’s side (to the extent possible) for the next four days.

Folks, I think Bob is out of the running. Florence’s devotion to Slim is extreme, and since he apparently made it through his health crisis, I suspect he clinched his place as Suitor Number 1.

Meanwhile, I turned a corner in my knitting. Well, not literally. But David and I took a 54-mile bike ride last weekend, which gave me plenty of time to think about my frustration with the Duty Knitting. I started counting up all of the sweaters that I have mentally designed but not yet knit. I currently have the yarn to make four separate designs, and I have designed and swatched two more but not bought the yarn for them yet. That’s quite a queue, people! No wonder the Duty Knitting is getting me down.

But while I was thinking about my project list, it occurred to me that six sweaters = “the Ruthless Knitting Fall/Winter 2007 Collection,” currently in its planning stages but coming to a website near you (this website, that is) in the coming months. For some reason, thinking about these six sweaters as my collection-to-be makes me feel enormously better. I will devote this fall and winter to creating them all, and it will be fun. I just have a few other projects to wrap up first, as well as some design decisions to figure out via swatching. (Just to be clear — it is a “collection” in my own mind only. I don’t intend to write up all of these patterns, nor do I intend to sell them. The label is not to be taken seriously.) The Duty Knitting no longer seems like such a burden.

Meanwhile, Florence also had a decision to make. Slim or Bob? As much fun as her diary is to read and contemplate, however, it is not a novel, and Florence did not weave in all the ends of her story for us. These are her last two entries:

May 16, 1928. Louise and I opened up at Jake Fishers.

Saturday May 18, 1927. Street car hit Slim’s car at Conway.

That last entry is a doozy, isn’t it? When I first read it, I thought, “Slim’s been wounded! Or killed! And this is the last entry, so we’ll never know what happened to him!” But then I re-read the date: 1927. Slim’s car was hit by another car before any of the events of this post. In fact, it seems that his car was hit right around the time that Bob reappeared on the scene. Apparently, Slim wasn’t hurt. He just has bad luck with cars; you’ll recall that he had to return to Pittsburgh at an earlier point because his car had “burned.”

As for “Louise and I opened up at Jake Fishers,” I’m not sure what that means. As best I can figure, one either opens up a nightclub as a performer, or one opens up a store as an employee. There’s no other internal evidence to help us determine whether Florence and her sister were a wild pair of performing flappers or tame shopgirls.

And that’s it. No closure.

But I did a little digging. First, I did some literal digging: right after I finished reading the diary for the first time, I realized that the little sewing table that had containted the diary also contained an address book that I had thrown away, and that it might also have been Florence’s. So I recovered it from the trash and flipped through it. Nothing of interest appeared among the addresses and phone numbers, and I was about to write it off as unhelpful when I saw a note on one of the last pages. It read: “Slim’s Social Security,” followed by a number.

Reader, she married Slim. Why else would she have jotted down his social security number? Only wives do that.

But I wanted more evidence, so I kept looking. The diary has Florence’s (rather unusual) last name in it, and I used it to do a bit of Internet geneaology research. Via an entry about one of her grandparents from a 1908 book, I learned that Florence was the son of a barber and that she had an older sister named Louise, as well as a twin sister named Frances. Using a list of her grandfather’s descendants, I confirmed that Florence married Slim, while her sister Frances married a man named Harry. (That must be the “Harry and Frances” who met Florence in the Ford.)

Still, I wanted more information. And I wanted to return the diary to Florence’s family, now that I had figured out who they were. So I sent an e-mail to a man in Germany whose e-mail address I found on a genealogy website. He contacted Florence’s second cousin, who e-mailed me with her physical address and a note about how delighted she would be to receive the diary. (The whole series of e-mails took about 24 hours. Isn’t the Internet great?)

The second cousin was able to tell me that Florence and Frances were born in 1906. Florence married her sweetheart, Slim, and in 1965 they lived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. After Slim died, Florence remarried twice. Using the information about her latter two husbands, I found an obituary online for Florence’s second husband that mentions that Florence died in 1998. She lived to be 92 years old.

And so the adventures of Florence come to an end. In honor of the fun we’ve had together, and the fact that I’m once again at peace with my knitting, I’ve decided to name the Habu top after Florence and to offer the pattern (assuming it comes out well) for free here on the site. I just have to finish knitting it first. Stay tuned.

Since my last post, I cast on and knit four inches of an Endpaper Mitt in brown and green, decided it was too muddy looking (as well as too small), and frogged it.

I then cast on and knit four inches of a Monkey sock in some lovely Interlacements Tiny Toes, decided it was too big, and frogged it. I had swatched carefully for both of these patterns, but neither swatch turned out to be accurate, probably because the swatches were too small.

Last night, wanting to knit something plain so I could read and knit at the same time, I began the all-stockinette back of a sweater in camel-colored Nashua Creative Focus Worsted. This morning, I knit another few inches, decided that it was coming out too small, and frogged back to the ribbing.

Then I got to thinking of a sock I knit in December, the Moccasin Sock from Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Knitter’s Almanac. There’s a bit of a story to this sock. In my immediate family, we had a name draw for Christmas, and I got my husband’s name. I know, that should be against the rules, but I accepted the pick and decided I wanted to knit David some black socks that he could wear to work. Now, David has big feet — size 12 — and I had not previously made socks for him. I decided to knit him the Moccasin Socks because they are re-footable, and I liked the idea that if he wore holes in the socks in the future, I could take off the soles and knit new ones on. (Full disclosure: I also disliked the idea of having to knit more than one pair of size 12 socks.)

My plan became complicated because David didn’t know that I had his name, and I wanted the socks to be a surprise. So I told him that I got my brother Austin’s name and that I was going to knit some socks for Austin — a not altogether improbable scenario, since I had already made Austin socks for his birthday in August. I also knew that if no one seemed to have drawn David’s name, he might get suspicious, so I had my other brother, James, pretend to have David’s name and ask him what he wanted for Christmas.

Meanwhile, I was hauling ass on this sock. I must have knit the thing in two or three days, which is really fast for me. I asked David to try it on, since it was way too big for me and “his feet were closer in size to Austin’s” (or so I told him), and it fit okay. While he was trying it on, however, he innocently commented that it was a nice sock but that he “didn’t think hand-knit socks were for him.” Oh.

Rather than knit him a pair of socks he didn’t want, I abandoned the project and made him a Christmas stocking instead (which you can see here). Then, lest the sock go to waste, I had my dad — who had professed his desire for more pairs of handknit socks — try it on. It was a little loose for him in the leg and too long in the toe, but he claimed to want it anyway, so I promised to rip out the toe (which meant ripping out and reknitting the whole sole and the toe), size it down for him, and knit a mate for it.

Returning to the present: in my frenzy of knitting things and then ripping them apart in the past few days, I remembered the sock and decided that I didn’t want to knit it again, since the finished pair wouldn’t fit my dad very well anyway. Instead, I ripped it out this morning.

Before I ripped it out, though, I took pictures of it so that I could document its short life, and while I was taking pictures I told David what I was doing. We agreed that I had been engaged over the past few days in knitting as performance art. Rather than creating garments, I’d been focusing my energy on knitting pieces of things — a partial mitten, a single sock, and a bit of sock ribbing and leg — and giving them brief life and a small audience prior to destroying them. Knitting as performance art might be compared to sand painting, but with yarn: you meticulously create something intricate and (almost) perfect, take a good long look at it, and then erase it.

I like this concept. It makes the frogging easier to bear.

So, without further ado, I present to you the art piece I call “The Elizabeth Zimmerman Moccasin Sock.”

Pattern: Moccasin Sock from Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Knitter’s Almanac
Yarn: Knit Picks Gloss* in black; Stahl Wolle Socka Color in 9128, blue tones; black reinforcement thread
Yardage: just under 1 skein of Gloss; partial skein of Socka
Yarn Source: Knit Picks; my Aunt Cathy
Needles: ? Perhaps Knit Picks classic circulars in size 1
Gauge: 9 stitches per inch in Gloss; 7.25 stitches per inch in Socka
Modifications: (1) Zimmerman describes making this sock over 44 stitches, but I wanted to use fingering weight sock yarn, so I rejiggered the pattern and knit it over 86 stitches. Rather than do K2, P2 ribbing, I knit the top in garter rib, which looks great but turned out to be too inelastic for my purposes. Also, I think I had too many stitches in the top part of the sock, even for my husband’s generous calves. (2) Zimmerman says to knit the foot until it is 8 inches from the beginning of the instep, then to join nylon thread and knit another inch before beginning the toe shaping. The problem is that she never says in the pattern how long the entire foot is supposed to be, so it’s difficult to determine when you’re adapting the pattern whether you should go with that 8 inches or make the foot longer or shorter, especially since it’s obvious that some part of the toe is meant to wrap underneath the sock, but not how much of it. Turns out that it was not very much, and I should have stuck with her 8 inches, but I figured that my husband’s feet are unusually long so I didn’t begin the reinforcement thread until I hit 9.5 inches. This made very long socks.

Incidentally, I rounded out my performance of this sock by frogging the sole and deciding, after partially frogging the foot, that the Gloss was not holding up to frogging well — the plies, I observed, were coming unplied. I threw the rest of the sock in the garbage. After leaving it in the garbage about an hour, I had lunch, dumped some crumbs on it from the countertop, contemplated it, and realized that those weren’t the plies coming unplied, that was the Gloss separating from the reinforcement thread, which I had forgotten all about. I retrieved the sock from the garbage can, brushed the crumbs off, and frogged it, too. I think this final “scene” only added to the interest and creativity of my performance of the Moccasin Sock.

I’m not sure I can top this one.

–

*A note to anyone interested in the Knit Picks Gloss: though the label says to wash garments knit with this yarn by hand, I put the sock through the washing machine. Not only did it come out looking great, with no change to the gauge, but it continued to look great after being frogged — that accident with the reinforcement thread notwithstanding. I’m not going to tell you to machine wash this yarn, but I know what I’m going to do with mine.

I’ve been working on a secret project this past week — well, not that secret, just a secret from the person I’m going to give it to, who may or may not check this blog, so I can’t post about it until I’ve given it away. Which could be weeks from now. Rest assured that the project is coming along swimmingly, some pieces are blocking as we speak, and I hope to wrap it up in three or four days.

Meanwhile, I have been easily distracted. Yesterday in particular, I sat doing work and my mind kept wandering off to the million things I wanted to knit right then even though I was working, not knitting, so the point was moot.

I try to be, and for the most part am, a fairly monogamous knitter. Sometimes, I give way to temptation and begin a new project — or two or three new projects — before I have finished the one I’m working on, but it tends to knock me a little off-balance to be trying to finish more than one thing at a time. As I work on one project-in-progress, my mind keeps casting about frantically to the other thing, screaming helpfully “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SOCKS?! WHEN WILL YOU FINISH THE SOCKS?!” I don’t enjoy this mental berating, and so I try to confine myself to one project while allowing small distractions, according to these self-imposed rules:

(1) If I am knitting something that takes a long time, like a sweater, I’m allowed to do a small project, like a hat, between finishing pieces of the sweater.

(2) I am allowed to knit a swatch or two for a future project whenever I want to after the yarn for that project is purchased — usually more or less immediately.

Which brings me to today’s knitting content: the swatches I knit for Eunny Jang’s Endpaper Mitts.

I bought four balls of Knit Picks Palette to knit two pairs of these mitts, though as you can see from the swatch on the bottom left I also briefly abandoned the Palette to try out some Mountain Colors Bearfoot in one. (And oh how it bled! And I kind of knew it would but did nothing to prevent it!) It’s been an interesting exercise in color doing these four swatches, and I could do about a million more except I’ve experimented enough to figure out my gauge and I’m ready to get going on the mitts as soon as my current project is complete.

An aside: This is my first time using the Palette, and I like it more than various comments on the Internet led me to expect I would. Not that I can recall the source or exact nature of any of those comments — I just had a vaguely negative impression. Is anyone else extremely tempted to buy the “Palette sampler” every time they look at the Knit Picks site? I always think, “Oh, how great it would be to have all 30 colors!” Followed immediately by “Oh my God, I do not want 30 more balls of yarn!”

Anyway, I’m thinking I’ll start with a pair in the light gray and some dark green Mountain Colors Bearfoot I have in the stash, and then I’ll probably do the other pair in brown and pink. Or light gray and brown. We’ll see.

With the Endpaper Mitt swatching taken care of, I should have been pleasantly anticipating doing further work toward the completion of my secret project, or at least looking forward to starting the mitts afterward. Instead, I started thinking of creating thumbless baby mittens in the Fair Isle pattern from the mitts to give to a particularly adorable baby of my acquaintance. I was ready to cast on for them right that second, but I held steady. And then I cast on and soon after abandoned an afghan square in Thorn Stitch (from the second Barbara Walker stitch treasury). And then I ordered some yarn: a skein of Handmaiden Sea Silk in Sangria for a lacy shawl, two skeins of Hand Jive Nature’s Palette sock yarn (one in Dark Teal, one in Indian Paintbrush) for a pair of Red Herring socks, and the Icosa Ball pattern (to be made with stash yarn), all from Knit-Purl in Portland.

Because, you know, I needed more projects.

Good grief.