Weekend knitting

I finished them! My Conwy socks, the Second Pair Syndrome socks are done!
It's surprisingly hard to get a shot that shows the color properly. It looks lighter with flash, but brings out the purples nicely,


whereas the no flash version shows off the cables and the blue tones.


If you haven't knit Conwys yet, give them a try. The cable pattern is interesting enough to occupy the brain without making TV-watching or talking impossible. It was a fun knit.

There has also been some progress on the WIP front. My dad's sweater (remember, it's burgundy, not bright tomato red!) has gained an inch or two, and I've started on the cables. Granted, they aren't recognizable as such in this shot, but trust me, they're there.


And then, there are my sister's socks. Knit in Opal Hundertwasser, regarding which I have a confession to make.


Just a few days ago, I was reading the Yarn Harlot's blog and chuckling to myself. She was talking about loving a baby sweater pattern so much that she bought several, kept thinking about them obsessively, and even had urges to go back and buy the rest of the kits so she could just keep knitting them. There may have been something self-righteous about my chuckle, just a little bit. I mean, I'm bad, but clearly, this proved that the Yarn Harlot had it much, much worse. I wouldn't go back and just keep buying the same kit over and over again, no, not me.

Until now. In my case, it isn't the pattern, it's the yarn. I confess that I am a process knitter and that I get lots of pleasure out of watching yarn stripe, pool, change colors. But where a normal yarn has a regular pattern, the Hundertwasser keeps surprising you. Because the socks aren't supposed to come out identical, there are all sorts of different patterns and colors in a skein. You just start knitting and keep knitting because you want to know what color or pattern comes next, or how long the section you're working on will be when it turns into something else...
I haven't been able to put them down. Literally. I must have knit 4" just this morning.

And now for something a little less uncommon: the Baltic Sea Stole. What you see here is the seed stitch border. I cast on 171 stitches instead of 111, and unless I thoroughly misunderstood the math involved, I should get either 9 or 10 pattern repeats out of this. I have the pattern and the chart in front of me.


Now all I have to do is math. We'll see how it goes!