"Holiday" Knitting

It's been awhile since I've had consecutive days with time enough to knit, but the holidays brought some reprieve and enough down time to do so.



I managed to finally finish the Broad Street Mittens I started last January -- mostly out of necessity. My first pair is getting rather natty, and I really do prefer convertible gloves -- I like having access to my fingers at the flip of a mitten-cap. The pattern is easy to knit up, but as winter bloomed into spring my interest in completing them waned until the snowy season returned.

Tangled Yoke is also knitting up quite nicely but I've gotten to the sleeves and seem to have an incomplete set of DPNs for them. It seems that a couple needles have wandered off! I'm sure that as soon as I buy another set, they will return a la Murphy's Law. As I also need smaller circulars for the remainder of the body, I bought them all together online and wait for them to arrive.

I'm usually more prepared when I start a project, but I had some initial difficulty getting gauge -- I had to go down two whole needle sizes, which is unusual for me. I'm a rather tight knitter and generally have to go up a size. Thus, not only did I overshoot gauge, I had to knit several swatches before finally getting it. My LYS's have not been good to me in terms of finding the right needles - it seems that a shop will never have the type and size I'm looking for and especially when I need more than one size, I end up running around to several locations in order to collect them all.

What, oh, what did people do before online shopping? Drive themselves crazy and all over town, I suppose.

So in the interim, I've gone to work on, well a pair of socks, of course!



While generally I am not a yarn stasher, I have a slight addiction to multi-colored sock yarns, and have a significant collection of them. The difficulty with these yarns though is finding a pattern that is palatable both in style and color and not all colorways are suitable for all sock patterns. Knitting Socks With Handpainted Yarns has a lot of helpful hints in determining which patterns work best for which type of colorway but even with those tips, it still seems to takes some trial and error to find the right pattern. Or maybe I'm just incredibly picky.

I've been starting and ripping and starting and ripping with this Jitterbug beauty [the tag seems to have escaped with my runaway needles so I haven't the foggiest what the name of the colorway is] for several months now and finally returned to the Jaywalkers for it. The chevron creates the right amount of dispersal to get this combination of bold colors to look right and while I generally don't like to repeat sock patterns (because then how will I ever knit all the sock patterns in my queue?), I certainly didn't want this yarn to go to waste. So while I wait for my needles, Jaywalkers, it is.