Tee-Hee!

These particular socks make me giggle for a number of reasons.
1. The colors. Purple and Orange? What MORON puts those together for socks? Oh wait.
That was me.
2. These are my first toe-up project. I'm likin' it. I have (as you know) wide feet and these allow me to just keep increasing until I get as wide as the widest part of my flippers. Nice.
3. The colors mirror each other on the socks. I started one from the inside of the yarn cake and one from the outside so it is totally coincidental but I love it!
4. The project takes me back to BYOD when we dyed the yarn. Tasha, remember me winding this skein round and round those pews trying to make the repeats long enough? They're not all that long, are they?
Still, long enough to work!
5. Just looking at the colors makes me smell orange and grape Kool Aid.
6. I am totally avoiding about 4 other projects I really SHOULD be working on. I giggle out of a sense of sneakiness. (You've probably guessed by now that I'm not a good "sneaker".)
7. closely related to 6, These will NOT take me a freakin' YEAR to complete.
So there. :-p
8. These are for ME. They will be warm and fit perfectly and look goofy and be completely delicious in all the ways I love.

So far these have no pattern to tell you about. I cast on by alternating backward loop on two circs. I'm adding stitches 4 at a time (just like you would decrease on a top-down) until they fit my feet. I will then do plain stockinette. I'm thinking of trying a short-row heel on these as I've always wanted to and.....why the heck not? After that I'll probably do stockinette leg just for speed's sake and then a 2x2 rib cuff. That's the plan anyway.

Hint # 2 and something new

Here's SotSii up through hint 2. I finished it Sunday and went ahead and blocked it. It's really pretty. Hint 3 came out last Friday and I've seen several pics of folk's shawls up through 3. I think it looks a little snakey but I can tell that it moves back out after hint 3 so I'm sure it won't keep looking like that. I think it's beautiful! It also feels nice in the hand, which will be great when it's wrapped around me! Yay for Secret of the Stole 2!

This is what I've been doing this week instead of the stole hint 3. I'm designing a scarf for a friend. I bought the yarn first and then went on a pattern hunt. It is sport weight yarn so I was looking at all these patterns that I knew would take me until well into Spring to finish.

I found the perfect pattern in my Crochet Scarves book. I know how to crochet! I started working and realized that knowing how and being good at it are 2 totally different things.

I went on another hunt and found a great pattern in my "Encyclopedia of Stitchery". It's a knit stitch that looks like a crochet shell pattern. Yay! I did some swatching (pictured below) to see how many stitches to cast on and how much of a border it needed. There was an error in the pattern in the book but I found a correct version online. Love the internet! Hopefully I'll be able to post the pattern for the scarf for you here once I get it all worked out.

I'm pretty sure it'll be a beaut'!