My mission while I was in Seattle attending that work conference was to power through a pair of socks for the Philosopher. These are another pair from the Blue Moon Fiber Arts surprise bag. The Philosopher has commented that the cuffs felt a little loose so for this pair I tried something slightly different: a 1x1 rib rather than a 2x2 rib. Yes, for the whole cuff and the top of the foot on both socks. No, I'm not batty after doing it--though I did have to correct a lot because I'm so used to defaulting to 2x2 ribbing.
As you can see, it's striping/pooling. The 1x1 rib breaks that up a little bit. It makes the pools seem smaller with half of the pool hidden in the purl stitches I think.
This is the closest color I could get. I really have to photograph these outside on a sunny day...
Now that I'm home I've gotten almost no work done on the Philosofive Socks (yes, it's his 5th pair), which is a shame because I don't have that much further to go. The first sock is three rows and then a toe from being done; the second sock is about 2/3rds of the way down the foot. I averaged about half a sock a day in Seattle, what with plane rides and lots of listening to do.
And yes, I went yarn shopping in Seattle. I didn't get out to stores far from the convention center mostly due to a lack of concentrated hours during the day. I had an hour here or there but not the three-four hours that I'd need to take the ferry, or the two hours to leave time for bus navigation etc. I wouldn't mind going back to see other yarn stores and BMFA in the wild.
As it was, I only visited two shops and bought one skein of yarn. The one shop was more of a general purpose crafts shop and only a Cascade house. Fine, if you're local, but not really special. The other shop I went to was So Much Yarn. It's a wonderfully inviting shop, with regulars tucked in at a table and lots of yarns to explore. I think the woman the day I went was not used to conferences that brought in lots of customers, she seemed a little flustered at the regularity with which the librarians were trickling in. My one disappointment was that they didn't have much in the way of local yarn: some handspun that wasn't to my taste and some brown alpaca. So I opted for a newish indie dyer that I really like: Baah!
Day-glo, isn't it? This is closer to the true color of the Philosofive Socks above, at least in the green. It's not quite that yellow. I've knit up one pair of socks from Baah! yarn and bought one other skein. I assume these will make nice socks as well. Certainly whatever this turns into will be vibrant.
Do you suppose that being so good in Seattle warrants a BMFA shopping spree? *looks at the piles of wool here at home* Yeah, I didn't think so either but hey, one has to consider.
I'm hosting a national conference locally this week, which will hopefully mean some knitting time. I realized late Sunday night that I hadn't prepared any knitting at all for the conference and my two current sock projects aren't at stages appropriate for long swaths of conference knitting. Fortunately, I had a skein of Berroco Sox already started on size 0 needles standing by and that will be my work for this week. Those will take for-bleeding-ever so an active conference will be the perfect time to make a dent.
Finally, I was a good knitter and gave up two skeins of sock yarn leftovers to the Philosopher over the weekend. He's working on some knot tying and needed something to work with. Partial skeins of Colinette and Fiber Optics were sacrificed to the cause. Hopefully there will be a smidge of them left. I'm thinking of starting an afghan of sock remainder squares because of all the memories that go with the yarns.
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