Back to socks

Just lately, everything I try to knit turns to crap. Dumb mistakes, poor yarn/pattern choices, and sheer bloody-mindedness have all taken their toll on my knitting confidence.

For example, I've dropped stitches in a plain shawl and have been completely unable to pick them up. In fact, trying to fix it made it sooooo much worse. That shawl then came out much, much smaller than I'd have liked. And the final straw (this is where the bloody-mindedness comes in) is a pale blue cardigan which is too rough (it's baby yarn! ), at some point in the yarns life the outside of the balls have been bleached by the sun which is only obvious when you're not looking at it in my lounge rooms craptastic lighting (I do 99% of my knitting there), my tension is all over the place, I've just found a boo-boo that means I'll have to frog back most of the second front, but I'm NOT GOING TO LET IT BEAT ME!!! I will win. I'm about 80% done! However it does need to sit in the naughty basket until my urge to cut it up into itty bitty bits subsides.

In the meantime, there are socks. I haven't knitted socks for almost six months, but it feels like time. Short socks (therefore quick), easy socks (familiar & comfortable), and yarn that's pretty, but not precious. Just socks.

Handspun squishy goodness

I decided to take a break from knitting my current cardigan project (4 ply, scratchy, bleach spots on the yarn from the sun - grrr). Don't feel like knitting socks (gasp!), can't find a shawl pattern that grabs me.

Time to go stash-diving.

I came up with a handspun 100g 5 ply-ish skein in a pretty red/green colourway. I'll admit, I didn't really think about how it was dyed before I spun it. It was basically large splodges of green and red with a smidge of yellow on a white roving. I just spun it how it came and plyed it with itself. It turned out as a really pretty skein and is soft, soft, soft.

Some searching on Ravelry's pattern database yielded a suitable pattern for a slouchy hat with matching fingerless mitts, and I cast on!

I'm now halfway through the second mitt, with the hat all finished. There's a problem though. The way I spun the yarn means it's not consistently coloured all the way through. The second mitt is quite a different colour from everything else. It's really too late to do anything about it now. (sigh) So here's hoping it won't sit in my market bag forever.