Sock Pix

You know how some bloggers always take picture of their FOs in their bathroom mirrors, or posing in a particular way? I've decided my trademark picture will be at a funny angle as I try to get whatever it is in front of the camera built into my computer (it's a MacBook) while at the same time reaching for the mouse or trackpad to take the picture. And the lighting will be strange, because the elevator shaft bedroom is not very well lit. But I think the cables I switched to show up a little in the second picture,despite the funny angle and the wacky lighting. And you can definitely see there are two socks, which is all I need for the Sock-a-Month KAL (I think).

The library where I work is overrun with knitters. In the six or seven weeks since I started working there, I've had three separate orientations. At the third one, I sat down and was greeted with "Oh, you must be the crazy knitter!" and it turned out that one of the librarians who organized the sessions had seen my Knitty patterns (which of course was inevitable once the Twins pictures included my bare stomach!). Even at the first orientation, the most animated conversations I had were with other knitters who were sorry they hadn't thought to bring their knitting (I would have waited a little longer than my third day of a new job to break out the knitting too, except that I get sleepy when I sit and listen for long periods, and knitting helps). So next week three of us are going to knit at lunch in the staff room, and see how many other knitters come out of the woodwork. One of the other knitters is from my department, but we found the third knitter by accident--we were looking for a delivery and she was working at the reference desk, where we thought the delivery might have gone.

I've started some socks (I plan to stop when I have two!) from the purple handspun that I've already made into mittens and a hat. I'd planned to make leg warmers out of the rest (to wear under my pants when it's really freezing next winter--mostly hidden, but with a little bit peeking out at the cuff). I'd gotten most of the way through the first one when I began the last cake of yarn--and discovered that it was much, much thinner than the first two--enough that the fabric became noticeably lighter weight. Not good--so I decided to turn the last yarn cake (actually, it's more of a yarn muffin) into slipper-ish socks. I started them at break today, and had my second conversation of the week about how you actually only knit with two needles at a time when you use double points, and how it looks much trickier than it is--you just need to find a way to keep the needles you aren't knitting with getting in the way of the ones you are.

And of course have one empty needle when you start... the first few times I used DPNs (as usual, refusing to get any kind of instruction or help), I filled all my needles with stitches and just started knitting the stitches from one needle to the next (which was already full). When I got to the end of the first needle, I had one empty needle and one needle with twice as many stitches as the others, so I just shifted half of them to the empty needle and did the same thing again. It worked, but it wasn't terribly efficient. And it was fiddly--in addition to all the shifting, the whole operation felt squished, like when you're knitting the heel of a sock but you only have 4 DPNs so you put the instep stitches all on one needle and use the others for the heel. I don't remember when I figured out what I was doing wrong--surely I can't have listened to suggestions or asked for help?--but somehow, I got it right eventually.