Where I Left Off

A number of things got put on hold this month while I worked on finishing my Mad May projects. Chief among those was spinning, and I've been making up for lost time with my wheel during much of this week. I've also been ignoring the project that was my main focus before May 1: my Sople. It actually had gotten quite a bit bigger since last you saw it; I have to double check the pattern, but if my memory serves me well, I'm somewhere in the middle of the waist decreases.

I really love the stitch pattern on the back -- a fairly simple combination of stockinette, reverse stockinette, and cables.

I will be picking this up again this week, even though there's no deadline to finish (and obviously I won't be wearing it for quite some time). I am one of those crazy knitters who works on sweaters in the summer, though, and believe it or not, I have another one all ready to go when this one is done.

Also temporarily put on hold these days are my handspun Falkland socks. I finished the first one up before the start of the holiday weekend and I'm quite pleased with it, simple though it might be.

My new sock "thing" seems to be working gusset increases at the same time as the heel flap (so that I end up working back and forth under the heel and getting a greater reinforced area in that part of the foot). This time, I played around a bit with the placement of those increases, adding them to a section on the top of the foot rather than at the sides. I quite like the effect.

And why have these been put on hold? Well, last week some yarn support arrived from Knit Picks -- specifically, a skein of their newest sock yarn, Hawthorne. This is a yummy two-ply wool/nylon blend that's hand painted and thus likely to pool, so I'm knitting it into a new sock using a simple knit/purl pattern designed to break up the pooling visually.

I cast on for this sock at the baseball game on Sunday and am already into the foot. Once this one and its mate are done, I'll get back to the handspun pair.