All But Thumbs

It's the day before Thanksgiving and thankfully, I'm pretty sure I don't need to go to the grocery tonight.  There's the season's first quart of eggnog in the refrigerator and the Philosopher and I picked up a turkey and the traditional fixings and some wine, so we should be set.  We're going to be eating turkey leftovers from now until Valentines Day but hey, mid January, thawing out a large chunk of turkey and making chili is going to sound like a brilliant plan.

We have to have a brief moment of loss for the Tweety Bird stretch gloves I've been wearing the past couple of winters in the early-winter/late-winter it's not quite cold enough for my ski gloves periods.  They were your basic black glove except for a small plastic square with really random Tweety designs on them. Unfortunately, yesterday morning, they disappeared. I'm relatively sure I dropped them between getting off my train yesterday and getting to my building but by the time I realized that about four hours later, they were long gone.

Fortunately, I started those mitts last week! A baby shower and a couple of commutes later and ta da!



I decreased a little too fast and funny on the flips and I don't have flips knit on the thumbs yet but they got worn to work today and none too soon. 15 degree weather calls for warm gloves.  My office is really chilly today, so I'm wearing them inside too.



Here is where I am on the thumb so far. I had seriously thought about just making these fingerless mitts. My thumbtips are now loudly reminding me that making flips was a better idea.  Ideally, I would probably round up some conductive thread and just finish off the thumbs but in the absence of that, I'm planning on thumb flips.



Misc close up shot of picking up the stitches for the flip. These were done as 1x1 rib all the way up and on the flip. This means they fit me, the Philsopher, pretty much anyone and everyone. Well, okay, not the Brunette, but that is just because his fingers are much longer than mine are.To do the picked up stitches I alternated picking up a knit stitch and backward looping for the purl stitches. Ultimately I only picked up 11 stitches on the back of each mitt. They seem anchored satisfactorily.



And finally a flip picture.

These went really fast and now I want to knit all the mitts.  Hoping to drag out the ones for the Brunette and Husband this weekend.  They're DK weight, they'll go SUPER FAST.

Final details for these mitts:
Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Medium Weight
Water One Off Colorway from (I think) the Rare Gems sale in May
Size 1.5, 2.5mm needles
One week to complete!

Stress Knitting

Tuesday night I went home and told the Philosopher that I just needed 30 minutes to nap before I tackled the current pile of things to do.

Just 30 minutes, wake me up then and we'll eat.

Curled on the bed, trying to shut my brain off, I noticed I had to forcibly relax my hands, which were tightly fisted. My fingernails aren't that long but I cannot imagine that sleeping with clenched fists was going to do anything particularly good to my palms.

I'd spent the afternoon in a research forum, listening to presentations from fellow faculty and giving two presentations of my own. I've grown weary and a little resentful of the current red sock project and was determined to use the time to get through it. I'm almost to the toe on Sock 2, so I made some significant progress but if my hands were anything to go by, it apparently that hadn't brought my stress level down enough. I worry, a bit, how much more stressed I might have been had I not been repeating those K1P1 stitches over and over and over.

Such it was that when I woke up at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday (note that the Philosopher did not wake me up on Tuesday evening), I was pretty sure that I needed something different to knit for a couple of days. The red socks are in time out and I picked up a skein of BMFA Medium Weight and some size 1.5 (2.5mm) needles that I'd stuffed into a project bag a few days ago while sorting the stash.

Oh yes, I sorted the stash a little on Monday. After nearly a year of managing to only really binge once on yarn (the sweater quantities with AudioGirl), I actually feel like I'm starting to get a handle on how much yarn I have. I also wound up another four skeins for socks once I've finished the current pair. If I knit another two sweaters and about a half dozen pair more socks, I might even be able to mostly fit the yarn in it's bins.

Yesterday and today have been a lot of attend-and-listen meetings and with that, the commute, and stress rounds, I've made some progress.

Stress rounds?  Those are those one or two rounds squeezed in when I get back from a meeting or as I read a particularly long email and try to bring my blood pressure down. Can't think clearly, knit a round. Tempted to put my fist through the computer monitor (oddly a less satisfying thought now that we don't have CRT monitors anymore--not that I miss them), knit three rounds.  At only 40 stitches and on such 'large' needles, a round goes quickly and I can set down my security knitting and go back to the problem.

It's a one-off Water from Tina's dyepot and I'm really enjoying it. Hopefully in the next day or so I can have some mittens as it's getting colder.  Maybe also I can have some sanity, but that might be too much to ask from a single skein of wool. 

Sock Show Thursday: Paucity of Mojo

We're mostly thru the super cold snap that charged into Chicago this week. I'm still wearing my hat but not totally yanked down around my ears with a scarf entirely muffling my face.

Knitting mojo has been really low this week. I took a couple of projects with me to Vegas over last weekend and yes, I knit in the casinos. Gambling doesn't appeal to me (as I told the Incredibly Patient Mother, all I could think was how much yarn I could buy with that money) but I'll hang out and the Philosophers friends and the dealers were all charmed and curious about the current sock.

Mostly, though, we were busy and in the days since we got back little has been done. Our return travel day, Monday, saw our flight three hours delayed due to the rain/ice/weather in the area and after landing at 12:15 a.m., we found an iced car! Hooray. Fortunately one door opened so I could dig out the scraper and the Philosopher, who had slightly warmer clothes on and mittens, could scrape things off while I sat in the car with the heater going full blast and slowly melting things from the inside.  With that kind of reentry and getting to bed at 3 a.m. rather than the 11 p.m. we'd hoped for, we've both gotten through what we have to for work and that's about it. 

I think we're hoping for a 7 p.m. bedtime tomorrow so we can get a solid night's sleep before a very full weekend ahead.  

While we were in Vegas I finished sock one of Pair 13. Hmm, you haven't seen those yet.  And there are no pictures to show you.  And it's 9 p.m. and I'm in bed with bad lighting.  So, picture a shaded red yarn, knit in my usual 1x1 ribbed sock.  Now picture Sock 2 as a dozen rows of ribbing.  Tada!  

The muppet scarf is off the needles and waiting for a bath. 

And with the cold, I keep dreaming of new mittens and matching hat and mittens and all the things I want to knit this winter so I'm warm and stylish and everyone I love is also warm and stylish with fresh hats and mitts and scarves. I wonder if I'll get that home-self-cloning kit for Christmas so I can duplicate me...