Just in Time for a Warm-up

It seems that the key to getting the weather to finally feel like spring was to finish a new pair of socks! I wore them today anyway, because my feet are almost always cold, especially in my office.

Pattern: my basic vanilla sock, worked over 70 stitches
Yarn: ONline Supersocke 4-fach Season Color, color 2077, 0.84 skeins
Needles: 40 in. US 0 (2.0 mm) Knitter's Pride Karbonz, magic loop
Started/Completed: March 24/April 9

I think I did a pretty good job of getting the patterning to match up on both socks, though obviously with the machine printing, some of it isn't exact. There isn't too much to say about these, as they're just plain socks, but they are my fourth completed pair for the year and the first time I've knit with ONline sock yarn in probably close to a decade. As with most yarns of this type, I found this yarn not the softest to work with, but I know that these socks are going to wear like iron. And certainly the self-patterning made it fun to knit.

I am holding off on casting on a new pair for the time being because there are enough other projects on the needles. My lunchtime knitting is now the handspun crescent shawl, which is still just all cream. I'm hoping soon I will be ready to incorporate color. But I'm already thinking ahead to its being complete, as I picked up yarn over the weekend for the commercial yarn sample for this shawl (buying yarn for a design is kosher under the rules of the yarn diet, don't you think?):

This is Neighborhood Fiber Co. Rustic Fingering, a gorgeous superwash merino singles yarn with a generous 475 yards per skein. The colors I picked are Lauraville (the gray) and Station North (the deep red). I'm fairly certain that I'm going to use the gray for the main color and the red for the contrast, but I may change my mind before I actually go to cast on.

Meanwhile, I'm still chugging away on my Quill, and I got to a key point over the weekend. I finished all the parts of the body and joined the shoulders, and on Sunday evening, I picked up for the sleeves and started the short rows to shape the sleeve cap.

It's a bit hard to see, given the needles going everywhere, but it's moving right along, and I think once I get past the short rows, the sleeve is going to fly. The sleeves are stockinette with a garter cuff, and once they're done, all that will remain on the sweater is the big, squishy garter collar. I've heard that part might take a while, but at least I am now free from the charts.

I'm also still working on the self-patterning yarn Sockhead, but it doesn't look too different from the last time you saw it. It makes for good knitting in the dark when I'm putting Rainbow to bed.

I did not get as much reading done this weekend as I'd hoped to thanks to a lot of Passover preparations, but I'm more than 100 pages into The Underground Railroad (which, incidentally, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction yesterday) and am enjoying it. Somehow I managed to order the large print edition when I bought it on Amazon, so I laugh a little when I take out at night, but truth be told, my eyes are a bit thankful for the larger font after a long day of reading at work.