one more for the road

I hope you all had a lovely Valentine’s Day! The Boy and I are not big V-Day celebrators, but we did enjoy some delicious steak and red wine, although in truth only a few sips of wine for me. I love the idea of wine (if that makes any sense at all!) but I’m sadly not fan of the taste. I’m much more of a spirits kinda girl, and now that I think about it I’m wishing that I broke out the rum to enjoy with my steak!

I did manage to finish one sock of my rainy day Valentine’s gift pair in time for V-Day, but am only a couple of stripes into the second pair. Perhaps partly due to the fact that I decided to cast on for yet another pair of socks… Including my mystery socks, this makes the third pair on my needles at the moment. This doesn’t seem to bode particularly well for my 2012 resolution to shift a few WIPs before starting new projects…

But the Boy has this whole week off work and wanted to see a couple of films at the cinema. Since I seem to be incapable of sitting through a whole film without some sort of knitting in my hands at the moment, I was going to bring my rainy day socks. Knitting stripes in a darkened cinema isn’t impossible, a large proportion of my stripey socks were knit at the cinema, but it does involve keeping track of the row count in your head as you watch the film, as well as negotiating scissors in the dark and being very careful to snip the right colour yarn, and well, frankly, I really couldn’t be arsed.

Clearly a whole new project was necessary, and self patterning yarn was the obvious answer. All the fun of stripes, and no effort! Perfect! This yarn was originally my first foray into a toe up sock, but has shamefully lain abandoned in the WIP pile since late 2010 according to Ravelry (after that much time does it still class as a WIP? Surely it’s descended into UFO territory by then.)

Although I’m a little sad that I don’t get to see the pattern unravel since apparently I am simple minded enough to be entertained by watching a repeating pattern unfold, this thing is flying off the needles! I only cast on yesterday morning using some plain grey Regia Stretch for the short row toe, and by the end of The Descendants (good film but entirely unbelievable – if I was married to George Clooney cheating on him would be the last thing on my mind) I had half a foot. We went to see Hugo this morning (beautiful film. I may have shed a tear of two… I’m usually pretty anti-3D, but this one really worked. I still hate wearing the glasses though), and after 2 hours of that I’m all the way up to the heel!

Flying, I tell you.

The Boy has to pop into work for a couple of hours tomorrow, so I’m tagging along and will be parking myself in the cafe with my kindle and my knitting whilst I wait for him. I’m quite looking forward to it – nice coffee, good knitting, and a truly terrible book.

I finished Game of Thrones last week, which I really didn’t think was my kind of thing but it was only 99p in the kindle bookstore over Christmas and I wanted to see what the hype was about. I could not put it down and ended up absolutely loving it, but the high death count left me feeling a tad disconcerted so I fancied some brainless reading that was light on the body count. I chose Dan Brown. Granted, there’s usually plenty of death in a Dan Brown book, but his writing is so terrible that it’s usually bordering on comical and I can rarely take it seriously. It’s a been a good few years since I last read Dan Brown, and my goodness, I had completely forgotten how awful he was. Usually, I can get past the bad writing because the story is a bit of page turner (he’s like the literary equivalent of crack to me. A total guilty pleasure.), but I feel like I’m choking this one down. I keep doubting whether I can go on, but somehow I keep on going!

Phew, this post ended up being a whole lot longer than I intended so I’m off to spend the better part of tonight trying to decide which sock to bring along tomorrow…

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Green & Grey

I’m very into IQ84 right now and I can’t quite seem to put it down. The stripey socks are perfect for knitting/reading fodder since they’re so simple.

They’ve been working up quite quickly as well, but they’ve been thrust aside for the moment because I’ve come to the heel, and even the simplest of heels are too much for knitting and reading!

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A Perfect Evening

Well hello blogland, I’ve missed you guys! It’s certainly been a while. I cannot believe it’s November already. Crazy. So much Christmas knitting to do!

Sad to say, there hasn’t been an awful lot of knitting action going on during bloggy absence. The odd row here and there on my cinema socks (currently up to the heel turn) has pretty much been the extent of it, but on Friday night I finally got round to caking up this skein of deliciousness,

and cast on for the Spiral Cowl. (Thanks for everyone’s comments regarding my cowl vs shawl post, they were all duly noted, and the cowl is definitely the way forward!)

I’ve made a couple of slight modifications already – I cast on fewer stitches and have abandoned the picot edge in favour of some nice squishy garter stitch. The pattern is delightfully simple, but since I’ve only been able to snatch the odd minute to knit a few rows at bedtime, progress has been a little slow. It also didn’t help that I had somewhat troublesome start with this pattern, despite it’s simplicity.

Firstly, I cast on using my preferred Old Norwegian/Twisted German cast on using both ends of the yarn ball. Joined to knit in the round, was careful not to twist, and carried on knitting. I was far too lazy to get out of my nice warm bed and snip one of the cast on ends. Mistake number 1.

Of course, when combined with knitting in the semi dark and watching a film whilst not being entirely awake, this was a recipe for disaster. Naturally I got my yarn in a big old tangle, twisted here and there, thought I’d freed it, felt very pleased with myself, and merrily carried on knitting. The next morning rolls around, and it’s very apparent that in all my twisting I’d managed to wrap the working end around the join several rows back. That’s probably as clear as mud, but the important thing is that it resulted in me having to tink back several rows, unravel the wrapped yarn, and reknit.

Then, I couldn’t decide how many rows to knit for the garter border. 6 looked too few, 8 would result in 4 garter ridges which just seemed wrong (I have a weird thing for odd numbers and borders) so I decided on 10. But when I’d finally knit 10, it seemed too much. Cue more tinking as I swallowed my weird odd-number-border tendencies and tinked back to 8 rows. Mistake number 2.

I finally thought everything was on track and started on the spiral pattern, only to discover that somehow, despite having counted, recounted and re-recounted my 120 cast on stitches, I’d managed to pick up another 2 along the way. Infuriating. And definitely Mistake number 3. I couldn’t be bothered to tink any more so I did a couple of sneaky triple decreases in place of some double decreases to vanish the pesky stitches away. Problem solved, and I’m hoping that it’s plain sailing from here on out.

And this is my plan for this evening…

The Boy is out at the Tyneside Cinema film quiz, so I have the night alone to knit and catch up with the new Murakami book. Bliss.

I’m not usually a fan of hardback books, they’re so cumbersome and a feel lot less cosy than paperbacks, but Haurki Murakami is one of my favourite authors and I’ve been dying to read this since it was published in Japanese in 2009. Plus the covers just looked beautiful. Besides, I’ll probably just end up getting the paperbacks eventually anyway, since all the rest of my Murakami books are paperback and I’m one of those strange people who likes to have matchy matchy things…

Despite having had this for a couple of weeks, I’m only up to chapter 2 so far, but I’m loving it. Definitely looking forward to getting through a bit more of it tonight.

In other news, I bought myself a new camera as a (very!) early birthday present, so excuse my while I adjust. I absolutely love it, but it’s a lot more complex than my old point and shoot so it’s taking some time to get used to everything. I’ve been lamenting the lack of daylight hours I’ve had to play with it, but I’m slowly getting the hang of it. It is far better than my old camera in low light conditions, so hopefully (especially with all these dark nights starting again) I’ll still be able to take some decent  photos this winter. I’m off to Amsterdam tomorrow for a long weekend, so I’m really looking forward to lots of camera play!

 

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