Budding knitters

I made a little progress on my second sock this week. I would have done more, but I ended up teaching several children how to cast on and do the knit stitch. I was at my sister's house knitting before dinner Thursday (Rosh Hashanah), and all the kids were fascinated and wanted to learn. The youngest was a 5 year old (my neice), who had a lot of trouble, but tons of enthusiasm (though I have to say it got old taking the knots out that she made in my yarn). There were also 2 9 year olds, a boy (my nephew) and a girl (a friend of the family), and a 16 year old (my oldest neice). Everyone was really excited when they saw what they could make by knitting. I had my Stitch N Bitch book with me (the first one), so they all looked through at the color pictures of the projects in the book and got excited about doing one project or another. Of course, the 16 year old picked up the techniques quickest. She wants to make a blanket, though I suggested something smaller for her first project. My nephew asked me to make him a wristband. We decided I would use my orange and red koolaid died yarn with navy for his initials. I'm going to try intarsia for that. His wrist is tiny though. We'll see how it comes out.

We also this week planned a knitting weekend in Martha's Vineyard. I'm taking 4 of my stinkers from Wednesday night SnB, and we're going to knit in our pjs while we drink margaritas! I'm so excited! We might also die some more yarn, and of course we'll drive around the island, have seafood, check out the beach, maybe shop, eat, and eat some more. It'll be awesome. We're all psyched, so now it's just a matter of waiting for that weekend to get here. Yayyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'll try harder

Clearly this isn't going to come easy for me. Maybe with effort and time, it will get easier to do this more regularly.

So. Three months later. Sadly it's been a pretty unproductive summer, knitting-wise. I thought I would get a ton of knitting done on my business trips to Hong Kong/China and Indiana, but I ended up not knitting at all (despite carrying all my knitting paraphrenalia with me everywhere). I finally finished my first sock and have started the ribbing at the top of the second. I'm excited to wear these, and then to make more with all the other sock yarn I've bought over the summer.

I did make some great yarn acquisitions over the summer. As mentioned above, I got some more hand-dyed merino-tencel sock yarn to work with for my next pair of socks. I also got some dyeable yarn, and went wild with Kool-aid with my SnB stinkers dyeing the hell out of it. I ended up with gorgeous yarn, and unfortunately, a migraine. Now I know to wear a mask next time so I don't get high off the chemicals in that shit. But it was soooo much fun! I still have one more skein of yarn to dye on my own. I want to do green and blue variegated. We'll see how it turns out.

Alsooooo, I bought some worsted-weight yarn made from the hair of Samoyed dogs from Seven Sammys, processed by http://www.stillrivermill.com/. It's beautiful, and is supposed to develop a fuzzy halo after being knit up and with continued wear. I'm a sucker for quirky stuff like this. I also bought some silk/bamboo blue yarn with slight green flecks and some black bamboo yarn in a store in Hong Kong. I met some women there from the local SnB group. It was great to travel halfway around the world and have a ready-made, welcoming community to meet up with.

So, having just packed my twins off for their freshman year of college at UMass Amherst, I find that I will have some free time. I'm looking forward to catching up on all the knitting I was supposed to do over the summer, and to hopefully blogging here more regularly.

Like I said, I'll try. No guarantees.