First pair of socks knitted start to finish (9:30-something tonight, begun in the mists of mid-concussion recovery) since the 2018 concussion are DONE.\u00a0 And on my very, very grateful feet.\u00a0 They’re a rich, deep, but vibrant blue.\u00a0 No pics, because they’re *on my feet!!* and it’s late and I’m really tired but celebrating with hot chocolate (had TWO marshmallows in it!\u00a0 And spices!)\u00a0 to be sure I really sleep.\u00a0\u00a0 They are also the ugliest, most mistake-ridden socks since the first pair, including having some of the same problems.\u00a0 They fit about as well as my second pair, when I had the length right but the wrong shape for the part of the foot from heel to ball of foot.\u00a0 (The first pair were too short, too wide, and came off if I walked sock-footed down the hall.\u00a0 Ribbing was uneven, there was a row of purls instead of knit stitches across the bottom of one heel, and so on.\u00a0 But they were SOCKS, and they felt better than commercial socks, so I wore them happily while knitting replacements.\u00a0 That was in, I think, 2012. Whenever it was a triumph.<\/p>\n
The next pair after the blues I just made, a rich dark-chocolate brown, now have four inches of cuff (need only another inch of cuff)\u00a0 and now that I remember some of my earlier tricks, should be less full of “What the heck is THAT lump?”\u00a0 Tomorrow I will cast on the pair after that, when I decide on the color.\u00a0\u00a0 One way I can keep knitting smoothly (or used to) is by not using the same color for successive pairs, and by having the next pair well under way when the first one is finished.\u00a0 5 inches of ribbed cuff can be boring, so by starting the cuff about when I’m halfway done, and just knitting a few rows a day on the cuffs, they’re almost done when the other pair is done, but no long sessions of knit two\/purl two.\u00a0 And no need to decide then about what color, because I’ve already got them on the needles and connected, just 3-4 rows on.<\/p>\n
I don’t want to have to use the swift and the ball-winder yet; I’ll be knitting from pull-skeins (though nobody these days seems to know how to do the kind of smooth-flowing pull-skeins that Bernat produced in the ’60s…mothproof 100% wool, worsted weight, with the free end pulled out for you a little ways.\u00a0 I loved Bernat Sesame.\u00a0 My yarn mountain has been at SABLE (stash above & beyond life expectancy) since the concussion, because I’d stocked up shortly before, anticipating more time to knit.\u00a0 Time was there; brain wasn’t.\u00a0 But if I can regain some speed, the stash will start reducing.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If I don’t buy more yarn.\u00a0 I do not need more yarn.\u00a0 Why am I looking online at yarn again?\u00a0 Because I need socks.\u00a0 The yarn I have, bought to make nice thick cushiony socks with, is fine, but…look at that new color…wow that other colorway shifting through colors I like…NO, I’m telling myself.\u00a0 You have to use all the yarn sitting outside the storage boxes you bought for yarn and then…thinking you’d just buy more boxes…left in their shipping boxes after double-wrapping in plastic bags.<\/p>\n
Oh, yeah, NewBook.\u00a0 This revision is coming along nicely now, but it threw another plot bomb at me yesterday.\u00a0 Still processing it. Maybe good, maybe not.\u00a0 I had to go research ground-penetrating radar to see if it made sense.\u00a0 Pages of stuff that now looks like sawdust stuffing are out (I thought it was interesting when I wrote it, but it was mostly infodump about stuff that wasn’t plotworthy anyway) and new things are now happening.\u00a0 Twins are still in.\u00a0 A mysterious blue card is still in.\u00a0 Ky & Rafe & Stella & Helen are still in.\u00a0 Also some familiar secondary characters.\u00a0 The kids still haven’t found the secret passages.\u00a0 They’ve been kept busy with other things.\u00a0\u00a0 But it’s only a matter of time…\u00a0\u00a0 And there’s an idyllic train trip that turns…peculiar when a mysterious group of\u00a0 AWOL soldiers shows up wanting help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
First pair of socks knitted start to finish (9:30-something tonight, begun in the mists of mid-concussion recovery) since the 2018 concussion are DONE.\u00a0 And on my very, very grateful feet.\u00a0 They’re a rich, deep, but vibrant blue.\u00a0 No pics, because they’re *on my feet!!* and it’s late and I’m really tired but celebrating with hot Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,10],"tags":[17,7],"class_list":["post-775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":777,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions\/777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}