The renovations are continuing with tiles going up on the wall. They are a light gray, 60cm in size. There is a border, not up yet.

Socks

Florenze is hiding somewhere. I looked every where last night and this morning for the bag which contained the pattern, two balls of yarn and my favorite sock needles. No joy. Scrambling, I found some old bamboos to take along on the train. Too tired this morning, I started the Drops Alpaca cable socks on the way home this evening – AKA Chicken Wire. Sorry, it looks like fencing to me!

The yarn is from The SweetSheep – colour Vampire from Michelle’s Spectrum Club. I adore the colour, the yarn splits rather easily. I did some pattern alterations. Since I am not knitting knee high socks, I took out some of the purls to reduce the sock to 64 stitches. That and altered the back cable. I like things balanced. The pattern as written has another of the six stitch cables. The choice was to make left and right socks (running the cable in different directions) or change to an 8 stitch cable so that it is symmetrical. Balance won out.

Drops has a lot of patterns available for free – somewhere around 1900 in English, 13oo in German and a whopping 3200 in Norwegian. Depending on your level of bravery, you can really go for it. Which patterns you see depends on which language you select from the front page. There are a number of wonderful cable and lace patterns as well as felted projects which I found only in the Scandinavian Language section, not to mention 8 pages worth of Norsk designs. Seems to me that Kauni yarn would be wonderful in a couple of these patterns.

Books

Picked up from the library today when I returned two books and a Diane Mott Davidson on cassette: Fresh Disasters by Stuart Woods, Hell hath no Fury by David Weber and Linda Evans, and Tumbling Blocks by Earlene Fowler.

Which leaves me my new toy – all set to help hold things together. Given to me by the eldest this evening.

-Holly