Out of the five projects I profiled in my last blog entry, I've worked on only one of them since...and then temporarily shelved it. (It was the semi-secret project. The gauge turned out to be completely off. I'm going to have to rip it alllll back and redo my calculations from square one, which makes me quail, not because of the recharting - although that's going to be annoying - but because it is ridiculously hard to frog that Muppet pelt yarn I showed you.)
Instead, I got completely distracted by Janneke Maat's "Aragorn" sock pattern. I started it because I realised on Monday last week that perhaps I should be concerning myself with ensuring that my husband had a good present for our tenth wedding anniversary on the Thursday, and I briefly had delusions that I could do a pair of intricately cabled socks for him in that space of time. (Aren't I funny?) I got over that pretty quickly, but not before I had cast on for the first sock, and, since I took the day off for said anniversary, got to spend some time on it:
Isn't it fantastic? It looks like it just fell off of the needles at Rivendell, doesn't it? I adore it. The cast-on instructions in the English have a few problems with them, but after spending some time with the original Dutch instructions, Google Translate, and this helpful article from Knitty covering the tubular cast-on, I figured it out. For anyone who's interested, my findings are as follows:
- The instructions state very clearly that you're supposed to cast on using the tubular method, but although you're given round-by-round instructions for the cast-on, at no point are you told when you're supposed to grab the purl bumps from the area where the provisional cast-on is. So I extrapolated that the grabs/pickups are really the "yo"s in "Rnd 1" of the cast-on.
- There's some extraneous Dutch in "Rnd 4". Having looked at the actual Dutch instructions, I can definitely say that this Dutch bit in the English an accidental duplication, so don't translate it, don't worry about it...just IGNORE it.
- The "purl the yarn over" in "Rnd 4" should actually read just "P1" (again, this is from having checked the original Dutch).
Other than that, though, I've found the pattern pretty darn clear. And I certainly love the result.
Naturally, though, this didn't end up being the anniversary present. (Birthday present, though - that's a definite possibility.) I sat DH down on the Tuesday evening and shamefacedly confessed that I was an idiot who had been focusing on other important things that have been happening lately, and that I was not planning anything particularly blow-out special for him for our tenth anniversary. He, in turn, confessed to exactly the same thing, and we then (with relief) made a pact that we would just get regular gifts for each other and not feel guilty in the slightest about it. :) After all, we spent the day alone together, and we're doing lots of other exciting things this year (like springing for a small vacation this summer for the first time since our honeymoon), so no one can say that we aren't marking this auspicious year for us by doing some really neat stuff.
His present to me, incidentally, was five skeins of Cascade 220 in a really nice red. I decided to make Quadrat for myself out of it. I tried briefly not to be distracted by it, but had cast on by the Friday night immediately following the anniversary. It was blocking by the time I went to bed last night:
Hm. Now what can I use to distract me?...
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