book it

The time has come, the knitter said, to talk of many things—of shoes, and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. Or not. But the time has come to wind this little contest down. Tomorrow is the last day to enter, so if you haven’t done it yet, be sure to read this post and add your comment. I’ll announce the winners here on June 2 and ship out all these goodies next week.

Now that the baby items are done (and joyfully received, I'm happy to say), I’m back to working intermittently on Lotus Blossom and Pomatomus. LBT is giving me quite a fit—I bought an extra ball of yarn and I’m still worried it won’t be enough. It seems like a small enough shirt, but it’s wolfing down yarn like there’s no tomorrow. So we’ll see—if I have to order another ball, it’ll be another extended hiatus.
Pomatomus is not particularly stressful, just slow going always checking the chart, losing my place, doing the YOs before purl stitches wrong and having to un-knit and fix them. But the first sock is almost done! Then I might have a self-imposed bout of second sock syndrome, as I need to do some Christmas gift socks and the Windowpane Socks that for some reason I think I can knit successfully, and I've yet to do anything about the fact that I only have one set of sock DPNs.
I’m also working on a few kitchen-y items for the Knit It Forward swap.

I’ve commented a few times about my ever-growing Rav queue and how I can’t possibly hope to knit everything on it before I die. Well, the obvious answer to that is to buy even MORE knitting books, so that’s just what I did. I got Favorite Socks, which I love (and absolutely don’t need, given how many free sock patterns are available, not to mention the snail's pace at which I knit socks), and another which, sadly, I don’t love: Norah Gaughan’s Knitting Nature. I really should’ve read up a bit on it before forking over my hard earned cash, but you know what they say, hindsight is 20/20. There’s really nothing wrong with the book, it’s just not my style—the knitting nature concept (ie, knitting objects based on shapes found in nature—hexagons, spirals, and so on) is a bit too, well, out there for me, as perhaps all “concept” books are—it’s great for the designer to have inspiration, but I just want my patterns to be, well, pretty. And wearable. So now, what to do with this book, which has a grand total of 2 patterns I might knit? Maybe I’ll hold on to it until I’m ready to run another contest . . . (although if anyone is desperate to have it right this very second, send me a message!)