Fixing

I am pleased to report that I finished the lace scarf with minimal personal injury and am now back to regularly scheduled programming of socks and baby knits. Sock Two of my current set was going remarkably well until just now, when I realised I had somehow carried on with the heel colour right around the pick up for instep and was going to have to rip it out. I believe I have mentioned before how much I detest frogging. The act of unravelling work just makes me crazy. So now I am sat in a waiting room with two options: frog, or sit and glare and hope it frogs itself. So far option 2 is not producing the desired result. And the idea of not only frogging but doing it publically, admitting to the world that I made a ghastly error, is more than I can take right now! BFF frogs stuff all the time. She frogs stuff at the drop of a hat if she's not sure she likes it. I will madly press on with a doomed project whilst she, meanwhile, has cheerfully taken her work to bits and started something else. I wish I could be that sort of knitter but alas, I am not. As a result, I find myself where I am right now - the worst kind of knitter imaginable: one without a spare project, in a waiting room. Oh dear, oh dear.

The Finish Line

I finished my Ravellenic Games project with an hour and fifty minutes to spare. I feel vaguely bereft not being on deadline - a feeling I should probably enjoy whilst it lasts, because I have to finish some more baby stuff by Friday! It's funny that knitting is the only area of my life where the pressure of deadlines actually helps. At work, when studying, anything else in fact, I am always ahead of the pack, finished a week early for fear of having a crisis and running out of time. But with knitting I always find myself furiously developing a wrist injury an hour before the thing needs handing over. Perhaps it means I put less pressure on myself to be on time when knitting is involved? Or maybe I am just overly ambitious and unrealistic about my knitting goals. Either way, I always see the finish line way too early, and it seems that in this occasion the finish line was lacy and made of mohair.

decompressing

The knitting holiday is off to a flying start, with about five iches of the lace mohair scarf done and one finished sock sitting proudly in front of me. The scarf kept me sane on the six hour train journey, during which time I put up with a variety of crazies who were causing havoc all over the place. Thank god for knitting! NOT thank god for mohair though, which sheds more than I ever thought possible. By the end of the journey I looked like I had been attacked by a moulting yeti. Fail. On the other hand, I looked up mohair on wikipedia to find out more about it, and concluded that angora goats are pretty damn cool. After a terrible night of nightmares, I got up about half an hour ago and came to sit in the conservatory and bind off the sock. Am I the only person who loves Kitchener stitch? People seem to be forever baffled and enraged by it, but I find it wonderfully soothing. I also get a huge amount of joy from watching the toe close up before my eyes like some sort of witchcraft. It's nothing sort of amazing! On the agenda for today, then: cast on sock 2, ready for mindless stocking stitch in front of the telly later, a few more inches of the scarf and maybe finish one of the baby boots that I have been avoiding on account of the fact that I don't understand the pattern. Oh, and at some point the bff is going to teach me granny squares, which I am mega excited about, despite the fact that trying to do crochet always ends in my throwing the work, hook and all, across the room and wailing in rage. Crochet just makes too much use of the third dimension for my liking. Knitting is much flatter!

Plenty of time

This weekend marks the beginning of Knitting Holiday 2.0! I am beside myself with glee. I have yet to even start my Ravellenic Games project, and also have socks, a vest and two shawls to be working on. The train journey is five hours long. I CAN HARDLY WAIT!

Socks

I love knitting socks. I think they may be the ultimate knitting project. They're portable.  They are a combination of mindless, happy stocking stitch for hangovers and lunch hours, and short rows which require a bit more concentration.  They are the perfect canvas for self-striping yarns and plain, luxurious ones.  Getting my point? Socks are my knitting crack and I always have one on the needles. 

However, and I cannot stress this enough: I HATE the beginning of socks.  Let's summarise what happens when I cast on a fingering-weight sock on my 2.5mm bamboo DPNs:

 1.  The stitches barely fit onto the one needle and fall off
 2. I can't count the stitches because they're too small
 3. The stitches fall off either end of the needles when I try to join the round
4. The inevitable twisted joins
5. The first inch is always like fighting with an octopus.  A very sharp octopus.

In short, I suck at starting socks.  I procrastinate (see: startitis, this blog post), I throw the thing across the room and I generally get really, really annoyed.

And yet, I continue casting the damn things on compulsively, one after another.  I must really, really love socks.