Jaywalker socks

...Of course it had to be the Jaywalker socks. Truthfully, I am a very conservative sock knitter, and I prefer simple socks. I guess. My feet also tend to attack anything that traps them with malice, and a tightly knit pair of Jaywalker socks in Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock seem to be sturdy enough.

As far as sock yarns go: I LOVE this yarn. It's great. It's soft but not fluffy, it's sturdy and the colour is gorgeous. In the past, I have been extremely unsuccessful with 100 % wool socks. Suddenly there are more holes than there is fabric, but Lorna's Laces holds up! I would say it "wears like iron", but iron doesn't wear very well (what can I say, that expression annoys me), so I'll say it wears like copper or aluminium instead. The signs of wear and tear (felting) just strengthens it. Thumbs up!

The colour is, of course, also fantastic. I have decided to keep the socks to myself, to be completely selfish. Purple items stay with me, and that's that.

Hopefully I will get some more socks for me, me, me! eventually, I will just have to raid my stash for wool/nylon blends. Right now I'm chugging along with my self-imposed challenge (which is 12.5 % completed, and I'm keeping up with it!), knitting a Wollmeise Seascape Shawl for my mother. It will be quite different from the one in the pattern, as it's fingering weight, non-fuzzy and in shades of brown. I think it will be nice, though.

Back to the socks, here is a picture:



I have found that it is a good angle for socks... the ceiling is probably the only surface in this flat that is NOT messy. Har har.

organisation

I haven't been active on ravelry for ages, but now that I'm knitting again, I've visited the site more often. I was getting a lot of ravelry love, too, which is very nice. 244 people love my Little Birds Pullover, that makes me strangely giddy.

Anyhow, I don't know for how long ravelry has had the organize function. I'm guessing it's been there quite a while, but only just now I have decided to make use of it. I organised all my 130 projects into stuff for: heads, feet, shoulders, hands, stuff with sleeves. I also made some technique categories for lace and stranded colourwork, and I'm going to make one for cables as well. Ysolda designs was the last category. Yeah, 20 % of all my knittings were from Ysolda's patterns, so I guess she deserved a category of her own.

Also, recently, I got new batteries for my camera's flash - and proceeded with taking a myriad of self portraits. I did it wearing a bunch of hats, though, so I can update some of my project pictures soon. I only had 12 hats here in Trondheim, but with my ravelry organisation I can see I have made 31 (although two are bows for my hair and there is an abundance of gifts amongst the hats). Hats also had the highest completion rate, with no frogs and no hibernations. I'm guessing stuff with sleeves has the lowest completion rate; I didn't add all the frogs and hibernations to THAT one... stuff for hands was also pretty bad - 6 out of 32 were either in hibernation or frogged. That doesn't include all the mittens I have started but don't have on ravelry. It's the second sock syndrome, but with mittens.

Anyway; this was a very geeky post, and with no pictures either. The good news are, I'm almost 75 % done with the socks I'm knitting. When I complete them, I'll be 12.5 % done with my challenge, and then I'll get to decide what I'm knitting next! I'm leaning towards a pair of Selbu gloves for my older brother, even though gloves are an exercise of my patience. (But they turn out so pretty!) Also, the last time I was at my LYS, they had really, really short DPNs - they can't have been more than ten centimetres, but they appear to be ideal for that fiddly finger knitting. I might have to get a set of those!

It's nice to feel like a knitwear factory again. It's been too long. ;-)