The Gift of Unexpected Time

My plan for this past weekend was to take advantage of the fact that I would be home on Friday and Monday and get a lot of knitting and spinning done. What I did not expect, however, was another day off today! We woke up to freezing rain and a big mess outside. First Rainbow's school was on a two-hour delay, and the Mister volunteered to stay home with her because I'd taken the last two days off. But as I was slowly making my way up our street on my way to work (and I do mean slowly, because it was rather like walking across an ice rink in street shoes), my phone rang -- it was the automated notification from the school to say that they were closing due to the poor road conditions. So I turned around and headed home, and half an hour later I was in my sweatpants and sitting at my wheel.

But let's back up a bit. On Friday, Rainbow and I had a few errands to run, including a stop at Target to buy some big plastic bins. We spent part of the afternoon tossing and reorganizing my stash. I do not have a photo to show you, in part because I'm a little ashamed of just how much there is. In my defense, I will say that quite a lot of it is leftovers from other projects, and I'm planning to undertake a major charity knitting effort to use up a lot of them. I did throw out some smaller scraps (and scraps of yarn that I never liked knitting with in the first place) and earmarked some plain wool scraps for felted dryer balls. Rainbow also claimed some leftovers for her knitting.

On Saturday I pulled out my First Point of Libra to work on at my LYS, and I continued to work on it that evening and Sunday evening as well while I watched TV (it really is the best project to work on while watching something I need to pay attention to, because there's no chart and no counting). It's grown a bit since you saw it last, and now that the rows are less than 100 stitches long, it's moving along at a faster clip.

I am finding that I am enjoying knitting with the Shetland, though it is really rustic. It's just slightly thicker than the gradient yarn (it's a three ply as opposed to the two-ply gradient yarn), so the garter stitch fabric is a bit more robust. That means this shawl is going to be really cozy when it's done.

The most exciting moment of the weekend came shortly after dinner on Saturday, when I finally managed to finish my father-in-law's socks! Here is photographic evidence that they are, indeed, done:

One benefit of the cold weather is that our radiators are on full blast, and that meant that I was able to block these Saturday night, leave them on radiator overnight, and wake up to dry socks. They were then hand delivered on Sunday evening, when my in-laws came for dinner. The recipient was certainly appreciative, though I haven't yet gotten any feedback on whether or not they fit. (I'm assuming they do, as I made them the same size as a pair I made him years ago.) These represent half of my obligation sock knitting; I have dark brown yarn in my travel bag to start my father's socks during tomorrow's lunch break. I'm planning to change up the stitch pattern a bit, but they'll be essentially the same formula as these socks. If you'd like to see details, they're all over on my Ravelry project page.

Finally, there's my Zeccola Cowl, which is really starting to look big.

I've added two more repeats since taking this photo, and it's now measuring 36 inches long. I'm guessing that once I get to about 16 or 18 repeats, it'll be a good length (I'm counting on blocking to give me a bit more length; I want it to be long enough to double comfortably). The more I knit this, the more familiar I am with the stitch pattern, and I may just have it memorized by the time I'm done. Not that it will help me much at that point, of course. ;-)