Afterthought....

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I was a good girl and did work on something other than Presto Chango yesterday. I finished the Dawn Brocco afterthought heel on the Art Socks. It's the best fitting heel I've ever done! I'm just trying to decide if I should do the toes in the same pink or use the Art School.....



And I made great progress on Presto Chango. The left sleeve and front is completely finished. I really like the way it looks, although I'm not to happy with the seam on the arm. Don't know if I'm unhappy enough to take it out and do it over or not yet.


Yesterday was a good knitting day...I finished listening to Freckles from LibriVox. It was just about as good as I remember from my childhood. Now my review of the LibriVox recording. It was mostly awful. A predominate reader never really learned to read out loud. It was almost as if she read to the end of the line and thought there was a period there, and then finished off the sentence as if it were it's own sentence.

"The thickness of the swamp made a dark, massive background below, while above towered gigantic trees." This is how it's supposed to read. This is how she read it: "The thickness of the swamp made a dark, massive background below. While above towered gigantic trees." The obvious pause between "below" and "while" broke up the continuity of the story and the previous lifetime elementary teacher I must have been kept wanting to stop the reader and make her re-read it properly. At times it was almost painful to listen to. It may put me off using LibriVox. Hopefully, I hit a bad recording and that's not the quality of all the readers.

Eldest Granddaughter had a great time at the County Fair. Can you tell?

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Over on Mariella's blog she mentioned doing I-cord thumbs on a pair of Mittnz. I'd read about the technique (Meg Swanson) but not how it's done. A little research pulled up this blog entry. Here's the first installment on how to make a glove, fingers first.

Did It Again....

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I found a new yarn! It's Instant Gratification from Hill Country Yarns. I got mine on-line from DiscountYarnSale. It was on sale. The single skein is called Indian Summer. The red and white is Candy Cane. What's nice about it is that it's a DK/Sport weight rather than fingering/sock weight. It's 100% Merino superwash.


I, of course had to CO as I'd just, and I mean just finished up the dishcloth I'd been working on the day before.I decided I'd like to do a stitch pattern that breaks up the colors. So I browsed through Ravelry for finished projects and found a gorgeous sock. It was Crusoe by Marilyn A Roberts at Knitty.com. It's a very simple pattern and goes quickly cuz you're only knitting half the sts every other round! The other half are slipped! I'm calling these Indian Corn.

The only caveat is several yards into the skein I found a knot. I've written to both Hill Country Yarns and DiscountYarnSale. It'll be interesting to see if they respond. The knot itself is really not anything more than an annoyance. What upsets me is that when using a space dyed yarn, shortening the color span disrupts any pattern that may have been creating by the dyeing. If it's on the heel flap, it's no big deal, but if it's in the middle of the leg or foot it changes the whole color pattern. Can I live with it? Of course, but it's still annoying to be sold something that is less than the best the manufacturer can do.


For those that would like to try listening to books but don't want to purchase any equipment, try Librivox. They have hundreds of books in the public domain for immediate download and listening using programs that should already be on your computer (Windows Media Player). I found several of my childhood favorites: several of Louisa May Alcott's, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Freckles, Heidi, Black Beauty, Anne of Green Gables, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Mark Twain, as well as lots of "adult" books--Plato, Jonathan Swift (if you've never read A Modest Proposal you really should!).