Holiday

It's been a while since I posted. That's because I was here:

The family and I went on our first real vacation in ten years. Yep, ten years. (The last time was my honeymoon in Cozumel.) We had an absolute blast.

Naturally, knitting occurred while we were there. In fact, the night before leaving, I had all the projects I wanted to take all nicely laid out with all the yarn, needles and pattern printouts I would need.

DH said, "Wow. That's a lot of knitting."

I said, in all sincerity, "Yeah...I don't know if it'll be enough!"

He collapsed into laughter.

Turns out that he was right - I didn't even get to about half the projects I brought. But I strongly feel that it is very important to take more knitting than you'll realistically need as insurance...you know, if the car breaks down during the trip, or if it rains the whole time you're there, or something else happens which will add more hours of knitting time to your holiday.

Anyway, none of those things actually happened, but I still accomplished a lot.

Firstly, I got these socks done in the first 24 hours. They're for DD2. The pattern is First Grade by Marina Hayes, from Petite Purls.

Just completed:


On the recipient's feet:

Yarn is "On Your Toes Bamboo" from S.R. Kertzer, which I bought from my LYS right before the trip for this express purpose.

Most of the rest of the week was devoted to making these next socks for DD1. It would have taken a lot less time, but I ended up doing a lot of frogging, firstly because I got started and realised they were going to be way too huge, and secondly because I was trying to make the second sock's self-striping match up perfectly with the first sock, which didn't go too well because my gauge down the leg of the second sock was way off from that of the first sock. After ripping back at least twice, I gave up and just kept going because DD1 swore up and down that she didn't give a hoot whether the two socks were exactly the same. (Isn't she nice?)

The pattern is Outside In by Janice Kang, from Knitty.

Just completed:


On the recipient's feet:

Yarn is "On Your Toes 4 Ply with Aloe Vera" from S.R. Kertzer, again bought right before the vacation.

After the socks were done, I did do a little bit of work on the frilly scarf I'm making as a midwife gift, but then at one point, I was looking at the leftover yarns from the socks, and suddenly got really, really inspired with a pattern idea. And we all know how pathetic I am at resisting inspirations for pattern ideas. So the scarf got dumped pretty fast in favour of a lot of charting and swatching and instructions-writing. I'm planning to submit it somewhere, so I'm not going to say any more than that just yet, but I am pretty excited about it, so stay tuned!

The new pattern idea did have to be put on hold, though, because I really do need to finish the sample piece with the yarn support that I wrote about last time. I got back into it today and it is still coming along nicely. Hooray.

Finally, for anyone wondering about the baby, I am at 36 weeks today. I believe it "dropped" over the holiday, so I am feeling more uncomfortable and am starting to get very panicked about all the things I have to do in preparation for the baby as compared to how much time I probably have left before it actually gets here. I suspect knitting (and blogging about knitting) may have to fall by the wayside for a bit. You have been warned!