How to keep a fool occupied for hours

G'day all!

Last night I decided to wind my large skein of striping sock yarn into balls. Oh how to keep me occupied for hours!

First it is blue:

then it is red/pink:

and sometimes it is mauve and blue or mauve and pink! And it keeps making pretty colours! Oh what a happy time of drooling. I almost want to run it back through the ball winder again! Dribble.

Last night I promised a finished sock. Well I did eventually get there but the sun was just setting, so I had to take pics under the halogen bed light with my foot on a spare pillow. Excuse the hairy leg :-)


And here is the other side where my foot doesn't look so mutant.


I modified the pattern. I needed a longer toe. I also had 67 stitches (?? how'd I get an odd number?) on the foot. That helped make the swirling different. This sock destroys bamboo needles, btw. There is lots of poking needles in the wrong direction into two stitches. I'll have to carefuly sand down the tips of the needles - just as well I have two pairs these days! The sock is quite tight - see how it curves around my heel and into my instep? I didn't know I had such an arch - I've got flat broad feet, something to do with the lax ligaments I inherited from my Pop.

I have two things planned for Project Spectrum so far, plus I need to make a charity item. Didn't get the charity item done last time. Actually, didn't get anything made out of stash either cos I just had too much on my plate.

Thank you, Lyn, for your comments about the spin-ins. I know some of the old girls are very sprightly indeed, and I do wish you would not take offence at me drawing a wide brush. I overgeneralise on occasion. Some of the ladies I talk to at the guild are very happening people but I do wish that things like committee meetings and even better spin-ins occurred when I could attend... I get a set number of annual leave days and I don't like using them up on one-off days off work.

I finally got a bit of dyeing done tonight. I locked the cats out of the kitchen cos it is too cold and dark to go outside and newspapered up the floor and then mixed up the food colours. Pics tomorrow, along with pics of a new sock toe. If you are lucky, cos tomorrow is crafties night.

Speaking of crafties, last Wednesday, that's a week ago now, Peeve and ChocolateTrudi and I got together and had a night of pawing through Peeve's sock yarn stash and gawping at her books.
See all this yarn?

There is more than that in Peeve's stash - her Stash Flashing showed it all. It was very pleasing to be covered in sock yarn and see some real live No No Kitty. I lust after both of those skeins - they are in the pic with the ironstone yarn.

Trudi brought along some yarn to swap with me, only I didn't know I shoul bring yarn to swap so I got very embarrassed. See what she gave me? I shall have to spin some nice stuff for her.



And these three balls of yarn were dyed by Trudi. I found the purple blue mauve ball is actually two balls of yarn. Thanks, Trudi! I shall have to make it up to you! The yarn is laceweight, and there is a bit of a funny story about it.

In September 2004, there was a great excitement on the SnB list. Yarn had been spotted for 99c at Dimmey's (a store which sells seconds and end of line stuff). The SnB hoards descended upon the various outlets and like locusts started stripping the great boxes of yarn bare.

So I've decided to pop into Dimmey's on the way home. As I hurry off the train and towards Dimmey's, this Spanish guy starts chatting me up. "You have such PASSION in your eyes! Come with me! Have a coffee with me. I make music for you!" He could not have known that the passion in my eyes was the excitement of going to buy nice CHEAP yarn! I passed up his kind offer to make music for me, even though I was tempted - but I wanted to go buy yarn more and there was a little matter of getting married at the end of that week....

Anyway, Trudi got lots more of it than me it seems - I only got 26 balls of it. I think she said she got about a hundred! The dyed stuff was some of the white yarn like that I blogged ages ago.

BTW, Trudi is a published author on her second trilogy. Her books are very entertaining (gee that sounds sorta trite but like as soon as they come out I buy them and devour them, and ooh, the next is due out in May?) and Nathan got grumpy at the end of one of them cos Trudi wrote it the way she wanted to, not the way Nathan thought it should go.

anon!