O blogger, where art thou?

There seems to be an increasingly worsening trend around here of not managing to blog very much during the work week. This past week was the worst - I blogged on Sunday and here it is Saturday with the next post. Ouch.

A lot of it is due to concentrating on doing my chores and getting to bed at a fairly reasonable hour most nights. Sometimes it has to do with not having enough progress in my knitting to make a post worth reading. However, while these reasons are perfectly understandable, they sure don't translate into a gripped and scintillated reading audience, eh?

I will try to do better.

Starting with comments responses - rachel, you are a great cheerleader. I do feel awesome for not giving up on the Fafner blanket. :) I haven't done any more sewing since I last talked about it, but at least I know that the project is really and truly going to work. Yay.

Tanya, alas, we didn't know about Peter and Heather's housewarming today :( and we have other plans - my MIL and BIL are coming over for the afternoon/evening. (To DH's delight, they will be bringing dinner and saving him from having to cook.) It promises to be a lovely time but I must remember to hide my MIL's Christmas knitting before they get here!

At least, if I can't say I've been blogging regularly, I can say that workroom progress continues. The best news is that I purchased a hanging shoe organizer with clear plastic pockets. And mid-week, DH mounted it on the side of the fabric shelf in the workroom, and all my needles are now organized bee-yew-tifully, one size per pocket:

(I have had to slide pieces of white paper in the pockets to cover up the truly hideous floral print in the background, which was quite the disappointment to see when the thing arrived because the product photo had shown a white organizer. However, one day I will custom-cut white fabric and glue it to the inside of each pocket to make it look nice permanently.)

Isn't it great? This was a joint effort between DH and I. He thought of the idea of the side of the fabric shelf being a possible storage area for needles, and I thought of the idea of a hanging shoe cubby. Magic.

Next up: I want to go hunting for containers tomorrow to start organizing some of the other craft stuff.

Heraldic tabard for moi

The back is really coming along nicely. Here's what it looked like on Friday morning:

(shown here on top of the front for comparison)

Happily, it is even further along now - I'm only about two rows away from completing the heraldic motif. After that, it's just a few inches of stocking stitch, some neck shaping, and the back will be done!

Self-patterning socks #2 for DH

I haven't worked any more on these, but I did have a thought. What if, instead of making them for some unknown occasion for DH, I made them for my brother? His birthday is coming up mid-April. This would seem like the perfect idea. However, I'm still waffling on whether or not to do it because of two issues. One: My brother likely has bigger feet than my husband, so I would have to rip back the two inches of leg and the heel on the sock and make the foot bigger before turning the heel again. While annoying, this is a minor issue. The bigger problem is that I don't know whether my brother would actually like the socks. I think he would absolutely appreciate the gift itself, but although the colourway of the yarn has 'manly' colours like grey and black, the pattern might be a little too 'fussy' for his tastes. So I'm torn.

I think I'll ask my mom. I'd have to call her anyway to give me my brother's shoe size. (Anyone know how to translate shoe size into foot length?)

Striped socks for moi

The slow march towards completion continues. The socks now look like this:


It's kind of cheesing me that the two balls of yarn do different things with the patterning. See it? Part of the problem is that I pulled from the centre and the two balls variegate through the colours in opposite directions. But that's not the whole story. The second ball is doing something just a little bit different and weird and the socks, while very similar, do not match.

On the bright side, I'm only ever going to wear these things casually around the house or to sleep with, and they're not for someone else, so I'm not freaking out over it. But still.