Sweater, Interrupted

Hello, everyone! I've been meaning to blog for several days now, but the weekend got hectic, as it always seems to do. As soon as J got home on Friday evening we had to change and rush off to wedding, and then yesterday I was up bright and early to go to my first wedding dress fitting(!) and run errands. Today should have been a relaxing day, but somehow we didn't manage to wake up until 10, and by the time we got ourselves moving, the day was already half gone. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), I've got three loads of laundry to do today, so at least I'll be able to catch up on all the knitting-related activities I've put off the past two days, including this post.

Let's go back a couple days to where I left off. Last Wednesday was clearly a fun knit night and I made decent progress on Aidan's sweater despite only half paying attention to it while talking to the girls and laughing hysterically. Thursday night I spent some time tidying up the house and then sat down to work seriously on the sweater. I was able to finish the body and weave in all the ends from the striping around the bottom:

I was all ready to pick up stitches for the first sleeve when I looked in my needle drawer and realized that the one US 5 circular needle I was using for the body is the only size 5 needle I own. I had thought I had a set of dpns, but I looked at the inventory list I'd made of my needle collection a while back and it looks like a 5 is the only size I don't have (and my dpns range from size 000 to a size 9).

Since I couldn't work any further on the sweater, and since J's gray ribbed socks are kind of boring, I decided to cast on for my own pair of Embossed Leaves socks in the Koigu I bought a month ago specifically for them.

You must understand that I've had Koigu in my stash for quite some time (I bought my first skeins of it more than a year ago), but this is the first time I'd actually knit with any of it. I didn't know what knitted bliss I was missing! This is the most luxurious sock yarn I've ever knit with, and aside from the feel of it the colors are just gorgeous. Now I understand what all the fuss is about! I've been forcing myself to work on J's socks this weekend to get them done (I have ony about five inches of the second sock to go), but all the while I'm tempted to cheat on them with the Koigu socks. Can you blame me?

I did stop by Knit One yesterday to pick up the needed size 5 dpns -- and I did mean to only buy the dpns -- but I couldn't help but take home this lonely skein of sock yarn that jumped into my hands and begged me to take it to meet the rest of the stash:

This is Lana Grossa Mega Boots Stretch, and the color is what really drew my attention. Obviously I didn't do a great job of capturing it on camera; in real life, it's an olive-y green plied with other shades of green, purples, and blues. I think it'll have a subtle striping effect when knitted, but I'm going to exercise restraint and put it away for a bit, since there are plenty of other things to knit right now.

I hope you're all enjoying your weekend! I will be doing my best to finish up the sweater for Aidan this week and keep you updated.

ETA: Forgot to mention that I started a Flickr group called Socks for Men, for those of you who knit socks for the guys in your life. I know that my guy loves hand-knitted socks but is very picky about what he'll wear (you all know he's a fan of the shades of gray). I'm hoping that if you are a knitter of socks for men, you'll join the group and share the man-friendly patterns and yarns you've used!