Better

To start off, I must apologize for all the bitching and moaning in yesterday's post. I blame it on a lethal combination of high hormone levels, stress at work, lack of sleep, and being deprived from my once-a-month knitting get-together with other knitters (somehow knitting every night while J putters on his laptop isn't as satisfying). For lack of a friend or significant other to listen to me, you got to be the audience to my kvetch session. I hope I haven't lost any readers* because of it (not that I think I had that many readers to begin with ...)

Things did get better last night, what with the wine, the good TV, and the knitting. I made decent progress on the navy socks, although the combination of the wine and the exhaustion slowed my knitting speed down a bit and I didn't get as far as I'd like. Setting up for the heel flaps was also really fiddly, as I had to use two dpns to move all the stitches to where I wanted them (as I said to J when he got home, do you realize how many needle points I was dealing with at that point? It's a wonder I didn't hurt myself, which I always manage to do in really odd ways -- like this morning, when I made my left thumb bleed by washing my hands.) But I digress, or ramble, or whatever. Since I had no photos for you yesterday, today I've decided to put in the obligatory and entirely unexciting progress shot on the socks:

Roughly six more rows to knit on the flaps before I turn the heel. I've been working these on both socks at the same time, but I'll turn the heels individually before moving on to the gussets. Should get in to them tonight, as J and I are having a quiet dinner at home -- a "real, adult" dinner, meaning at the dining room table instead of at the coffee table in front of the TV! -- and catching up on our DVRed shows, namely Lost.

An interesting coincidence has occurred as I've been knitting my socks. This is my first time doing both socks at once, and while the regular knitting wasn't so hard to wrap my head around, figuring out how to manipulate the right stitches to have them in the right position for the heels and gussets and then for the feet has been somewhat of a challenge. I've been referring a lot to Kenny's tutorial (technically for working both socks on one long circular, but the general concept is the same). Meanwhile, the past few days Kenny and I have been having an e-mail conversation about a good yarn for a sweater he wants to knit. I had commented on his blog about Elsebeth Lavold Silky Tweed (which you know I just bought a lot of for a sweater for J), and he e-mailed me back to ask some more specific questions. Fortuitous coincidence, no? Since he has helped me with this two-socks-at-once thing, I thought the least I could do is try to help him.

Here, dear readers, is where you come in. Please share your yarn opinions and expertise! Kenny is thinking of something tweedy, and fairly substantial (needle size at least a US 5 -- he doesn't want to grow old knitting this sweater!). He is not much of an Internet yarn buyer, as he likes to feel/pet his yarn in person before purchasing; however, he acknowledges that there are some good deals on the Web that just can't be had at an LYS. I'm sure that he'd appreciate any sort of review or guidance you can give him on specific yarns. Please, go visit his blog (see especially this post) and help him out if you can. Thanks!

I'm off to get dinner ready for sweetie. Have a great weekend!

*Sockret Pal, thank you for the sweet comment you left me yesterday! I can hardly wait to see what you're putting together. I hope you won't take yesterday's post as representative of this blog and come back again!