A quarter past 7 in the..... yea you get the idea

Secret of the Stole II. My current main WIP. Back in November I heard about this KAL and I decided to try it. I had been toying with various clubs, Year of Lace, Blue Moon Rocking Sock club, Simply Socks club, and more recently the Tsock Tsarina's sock club. Well, I am very careful with money (read will squeeze blood from a penny) and I couldn't justify spending $28 to $34 a pair of socks with yarn and patterns I might not want. A KAL seemed to be the perfect solution.

I ordered Knit Picks Shadow and began right on time. I actually have been able to keep up for most of the time. I was kept behind one week I spent with the family at the beach. I am enjoying it very much; in fact, I am now signed up for four other KALs too.

Dem Fisher sin Fru. It actually is almost over, but I haven't even cast on yet. I had one skein, and was lucky enough to find a second matching one four months later,

Mystic Light.
I have the yarn, 2 skeins of Sterling Silk and Silver in black.

Slow Bee and Secret of Bad Nauheim I need yarn for still.

3ish in the Garden of Dishes and Laundry continuing

After the holiday season, I realized that I had spent months knitting gifts, but the poor husband did not receive anything. Now please don't think I have the kind of husband who asks for hand knit things, wears them with pride and has ideas for the next present. No, I have the kind who will go to the yarn store, but only if he has something to occupy his time and I don't ask him for anything more than a "I'm ready to go". I made him a pair of socks, he was gracious enough to pick the yarn, and he rarely wears them- twice, I think. But he is the only one who I know really is impressed with what I make and I MUST force knitted objects on such a person.

My first knitting project was actually a scarf for him, but he even admits he won't wear that. "Too fuzzy." So I had him find a better scarf. He chose the Dark Mark Scarf after 5 minutes on Ravelry. Then the yarn hunting began. The man is hilarious! I love to find excuses to go to new yarn stores. Fibers is relatively local, so it was a perfect opportunity. I ask the ladies there that we need an Aran weight. We are shown a few choices, my husband ignores everything and begins squeezing skeins. Finally he holds up a skein and says "Will this work?" It was blue, probably considered a bulky weight, and it's a novelty yarn. Its fuzzier than a Pomeranian! When I am, of course, gracious enough to mention this, he looks sheepish (pun intended) and replies "But its so soft." I lovingly remind him he does wear the other scarf, which took me two months to find the softest yarn Micheal's had to offer. He concedes and the decision is made that we will choose primarily based on color, as he is very particular about this. I go off, as does he.

I wander over to the Manos wall, and am tempted to start the highly popular My So-called Scarf. The husband had already vetoed it because it seemed to scratchy, so yes, I had become distracted. I see one of the shop ladies move in the direction of the color wall, where the husband is shoving his hand. (I cringe every time he does this, and I just hope he has recently washed his hands.) There is some kind of mumbling, but I hear "What are you making?", "Do you know what size needle you'll be using?" The next thing I know I hear my husband's plaintive call, "Honey, help! They're talking to me!"

In the end, I ordered some Knit Picks Wool of the Andes. I now have the urge to order yarn all the time. Yarn coming to me makes it seem more like the world really IS begging me to knit. Oh, I didn't leave the store empty handed! There was some wonderful blue Colinette Jitterbug and I got a skein of Frog Tree Alpaca in Teal. The Colinette will be socks for me, the Frog Tree... I'm thinking fingerless gloves, probably Knucks.

I had been working on my WIPs for about two weeks, when my first KAL began. Which leads me to...

Noon in the Garden of Dishes and Laundry

I currently have three projects on the needles, but am only actively working on one. I have never been this "bad" before. I like to have one project at a time, with maybe a dishcloth or two in the middle if gets tedious. (See these) But now I have three rather large projects. Any yet, I feel fully justified in having all of them.

The first, I call it first only in that it is the oldest, is a pair of socks I started in October for the Ravelry October SockDown challenge. It was cables, and I had only one set of fingering yarn at the time. It had been purchased months before and was my first "nice" yarn. In that internet bout I explained in my first entry, I came across Cable Net, and decided it was to be the destiny of that special yarn. The SockDown was the perfect excuse to begin. It was cast-on. The sock quickly became tedious; a black hole of knitting in only 8 inches. Christmas knitting had to take center stage. I finished the first sock on my winter break. The second sock was begun, but I decided it was too complicated for the many times I wanted to knit in the car, and dishclothes, while nice, needed to take a rest before I ripped my hair out in perfect square chunks. And so...

Project two was cast on. But I'll describe that one a little later.