Tension

First, I want to thank those of you who left comments or e-mailed me about my little incident. You'll be happy to hear that I am officially on the mend and my broken nose will be able to heal on its own without any further intervention. The scratches and bruises are starting to fade, and perhaps in another week it will be hard to tell that anything happened.

But you came here for knitting, right? Okay then, let's talk about knitting!

I did manage to find a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon to work on my Waiting for Rain, and I'm now ready to start the second short-row lace section. The rows are getting noticeably longer, and the yarn balls are starting to get smaller, so I can tell I'm making some significant progress.

This is a fun knit, but it's definitely one I need to pay attention to, at least when it comes to the lace sections. That made it not a good contender for my knitting on Sunday evening.

And why was that? Because on Sunday evening I was watching game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals, when my beloved Penguins finally clinched the title, and let's just say I was a little tense during the game. I had finished the first of the new design socks earlier in the day, so I cast on for sock number two to work on during the game. I'm sure that my gauge at the beginning of this sock is a little tighter than it was on the first sock as a result of my nerves.

These socks were also to blame for another injury I sustained over the weekend (luckily not nearly as dramatic as the injuries from earlier in the week). I have a tendency to push the tip of the right needle with the tip of my left index finger as I finish up a knit stitch, and I guess my hands were too dry and the needles I was using (size 0/2.0 mm Addi Sock Rockets) were too sharp. The result was that I managed to poke a hole in my finger -- basically the skin just split, more or less along a groove in my fingerprint. Ouch! No blood was shed and it was easy enough to put a bandage on it, but it was in a mighty inconvenient spot. I ended up leaving that finger pointing up in the air while knitting, as I do when I'm doing stranded colorwork and have a strand of yarn coming over that finger. It worked but was a little awkward. The wound has since healed, and I'm trying to be more mindful of my technique in an effort to keep it from happening again.

I'm hoping to cast on for at least one more project by the end of the week, the next in the collection of patterns. Incidentally, I put up a little notice about this collection in my Ravelry group, so if you're interested in test knitting, you might want to take a look. I will be very happy to be using some larger needles and thicker yarn for a bit!