Failed Attempts

On the drive to and from Texas week before last (hard to believe it's been that long already), I took lots and lots of knitting with me. I cast on a few projects before getting in the car because I wanted to be able to knit away without the stress of trying to keep my double-pointed-needles (DPN) from slipping out of my hands and onto the floorboards of the car.  Socks are great travel knits, especially those with no pattern to knit, because you can just knit away, keeping your hands busy and not worry about whether or not you've lost place in the pattern.  Also, you can keep talking with your fellow travelers and enjoy the company as well as keeping your hands busy.

Until, that is, some of the stitches drop off the end of the DPN and you attempt to grab them all up while bumping along the interstate.  What seemed like a luxuriously smooth ride suddenly goes to what seems like a ride down an incredibly holey patch of road.  Anyway, I knitted away on a couple of projects:

1.  The cowl I'm designing for Elizabeth.  It's got these lovely cable circles all over.  For some reason I got bored with it and pulled out

2.  A pair of socks in red yarn for me.  These are the ones that I lost stitches, grabbed them, had to rip out some of the stitches and attempted to grab them again, only to get completely frustrated and rip out the whole thing because after turning the heel and starting on the foot I realized that the needles I was using were entirely too big for the project so...

3.  I sized down a needle size and pulled out the yarn (same brand, different color) that I was going to use for socks for Ernie and cast those on and knitted on those a little bit.  I did a good bit of mental math for these, which will become important soon enough.

4.  Then I decided that the hat that Elizabeth wanted me to make needed to get done over the weekend, so I cast it on and started working on it.  I did some really cute stripes using the Fibonacci  sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 (and then back to 1).  It's really cute, don't you think?   She's giving it to her friend for Christmas.

5.  At this point, I needed to get back to my sock project, so knitted away on it.  When we were on our way home, I knitted some, but wasn't highly motivated. I think I was tired.  But I wanted to get these socks finished for Ernie before David goes for his haircut next week, so I worked until the heel flap and put them aside to bring to work for lunch.

6.  During lunch, I pulled out the sock, looked at it and said, "Hmm....these look really big." But I always say that about men's socks, so wasn't giving it much thought, but decided to put my hand through and see just how big I'd made it.  My arm popped right through and I could pull the cuff up to my elbow without stretching it.  The socks were big enough to fit an elephant. (mental math that I did was multiply 10" by 8 stitches/inch to get 80 stitches...problem is my gauge with this yarn and needles is actually 7 stitches/inch which means that the sock was 11.5 inches around before stretching...I don't even think they would fit David.

7.  So I ripped them out and cast on 70 inches, only to realize that that wasn't divisible by 4 (as I got to the end of my ribbing) so rather than cast on again, I simply knitted two together a couple of times and worked away on the cuff.  But it really bothered me that I'd knit those two stitches together and decided to rip it out, start over, and call it an evening.  So, I cast on 64 stitches because at some point this made sense and knit away on the cuff and several inches of the leg.

8. During lunch the next day, I realized that, darnit, the sock was now too small.  So I have now decided that these socks are for me.  I was worried that the teal color was trending too close to green for Ernie's appreciation anyway.  I've put them back in the bag because I must get Ernie's socks finished!

9.  Then I pulled out the lovely Malabrigo Rios in colorway "azul profundo" that I knew I wanted to use for Ernie eventually, pulled out a pattern because I'm clearly not fit to do mental math anymore and started knitting away on the most beautiful socks that a man will ever wear, I'm sure.  I'll have pics of that in a couple of days.

It's been quite an eventful few days of knitting.  I'm glad that I didn't bring my sweater along.  I would have probably ruined it in my inability to pay attention to anything important (like patterns or math!).

This weekend, David and I are going to the beach.  I love working on projects at the beach.  The oxygenated air, the sunlight, the relaxing sounds of the waves, seeing the pelicans.  It all puts me in a trance of relaxation and happiness.  I'll finish those socks for Ernie, probably get some work done on a couple of other pairs of socks...and generally enjoy the down time before crazy-ness ensues next week...more on that another time.