While in Poughkeepsie for Christine and Justin’s wedding (which was awesome, by the way), I went bowling. First we were going to go minigolfing, which is an obsession of Ben and Elissa’s, but then I saw a bowling alley, and successfully changed our destination. I am no good at all, but I did manage to win two games. I was so excited to get there, but then I picked up a bowling ball and realized: if my wrist was too sore to knit, what in the world was I doing in a bowling alley?? I wasn’t thinking at all. During the second game, my wrist really started to get sore, but I was using an 8 pound ball, which is pretty much the smallest I could use and still be using an adult ball. I worried that I would be in pain during the wedding and the next day, but AMAZINGLY enough, my wrist stopped hurting and I actually got quite a bit of knitting done on Monday and today. Plus, the curiosity got to me and I tried on the socks, so now I know that they do actually fit me. It’s pretty exciting.

I’ve been having some pain in my left wrist, so I find it difficult to knit more than a couple of rows in any one sitting. I’ve been favoring it and waiting for the pain to go away, but it’s been a while now since I felt this way, so I think I’m going to have to go to a doctor. Bummer!

I’ve finished the heel of my second pair of jaywalkers, and now I’m decreasing them and preparing for six mind-numbing inches of the foot. I keep forgetting to see if I can get my ankle into this pair. If not, I’ll have to find SOMEBODY else to give them to. Too late, I found out that there are a couple of larger, official updates to the pattern, which can be found here. If this pair doesn’t fit me, I guess I’ll go up to the next larger size. I’m going to be in Poughkeepsie this weekend for Christine and Justin’s wedding (yay!), so maybe I can try to get some more done on the socks while I’m traveling to and from.

Also, while looking for something else entirely, I came across a bag that I have been 95% finished with for the past two years. Everything is knitted and felted, and now I just have to sew the darned pieces together. Nevermind the fact that this bag is no longer to my exact taste, I should just be done with it, right? I think I don’t want to finish it.

So I finally finished my first pair of Jaywalker socks. As you can see, they’re pretty cute, even though one foot is about 1/8 of an inch longer than the other. Oh well. I need to find somebody with narrow, but long feet. Maybe I’ll have to try them on the feet of all of my tall, skinny friends. It could be like Cinderella, with socks, and a lesbian subtext!
Seriously, though, I really love this yarn. It’s Lorna’s Laces and it is self-striping, which is the greatest thing ever! I think that the stress of the last month gave me the motivation to finish the first sock and start/finish the second one, so let’s hear it for silver linings. I realized pretty early on (but not too early to do anything about it) that these socks wouldn’t fit my feet, so now I am making a second pair in the larger size given, and I hope that they’ll fit me! This pair is going to be magenta and white striped, which will look adorable on me!

Here are the beginnings of my new socks. I really like the way the first pair turned out, so I’ll stop being so lazy and do more work on these.

It’s been a while since I last posted anything, but I have actually been knitting stuff. I made more booties (and then didn’t photograph them, but more on that later), but the big project was the scarf that I made for The Boy. It was a broken rib scarf, and if I’d had any idea how much work that was going to be, I probably wouldn’t have slacked off until late-mid December. I started it when I bought the yarn in October, but then got bored with how slow it was coming. Fast forward to the week before Christmas, when I realized that I had a problem on my hands.

How to finish without my fingers falling off? It wasn’t easy. I stopped hating the pattern so much and became an automaton, and fell in love with the cashmerino yarn, which also helped a lot. I watched a whole lot of Buffy dvds until the wee hours of the morning, but I finished a whole 20-some odd hours before Christmas, so GO ME. Below, the finished product:

Wow. I just realized how horribly blurry this picture is (this may be why you’re not supposed to take pictures of FOs at 3 am, after 7 hours of marathon knitting and cursing).

I finally sent out four pairs of booties that I’d been holding hostage longer than was decent. I stupidly forgot to take pictures of them (more for color variety, since they were all made from the same pattern), but one of my friends was kind enough to send me a picture of her son wearing them. This is the first time that I’ve seen my booties on a human. Cute! She said that he usually hates socks, but kept these on for a few hours, which tickled me to no end. I’m honored. The kid lives in the South, and it wasn’t that cold there on Christmas, so I salute the trooper. The pattern is made for a baby of about six months, so they’re kind of huge on him right now, but at least they’ll last for a while.