Ravel and Unravel*

It's shaping up to be a heck of a busy week. The calm of the summer at work has passed, and now I've got more work to do than time. So I look forward to my brief breaks to knit more than ever.

I finished these socks over the weekend. I had sent off the pattern to my tech editor on Friday, so I figured I should really finish the second sock so I could take pattern photos and have them ready for when she gets the edited pattern back to me. I'm happy with them but am even happier to have them done.

I am still working on my Rhinebeck sweater and it doesn't look much different, but because the socks were finished I needed a new work project. I decided to resurrect a very old project. Some longtime readers may remember that when I was pregnant with Rainbow, I started making a bunch of log cabin blanket squares with leftover scraps of fingering weight yarn, thinking that I'd have enough to have a blanket complete by the time she arrived. Unfortunately I ran out of yarn before that happened, and then she was born and I didn't have time to knit much, so the squares got put away for about a decade. But since then I've collected quite a lot of scraps and Rainbow has proven herself to be quite knitworthy, so I though it would be a good project to work on again. And for a very busy time at work, garter stitch worked flat is the perfect mindless knitting.

This was what I accomplished during my lunch break yesterday. It isn't much, but it was soothing knitting. The yarn is some leftover Fibernymph Dye Works Bedazzled in Sad Panda (self-striping, hence the color changes). It was one of the bigger balls leftover, and my plan is to knit with it until it runs out or the square is done, whichever comes first.

Meanwhile, there has been some unraveling here the past couple of days. I decided that one of the first sweaters I made wasn't really my style anymore and the yarn could be put to better use. I'm also not buying yarn from that company anymore. So I unraveled it. Here's what it looked like most of the way through the process:

I've got five skeins of various sizes that have now gotten a bath in some warm water and Soak and are drying and un-kinking a bit. I plan to use this yarn to make some Snow Day Mittens to donate, using some leftover scraps of superwash yarn for the cuffs. I'm not sure that using up yarn that was already in a sweater counts as knitting down the stash, but at least there's some more room in the sweater drawer for something I will wear!

*The title is taken from a poem of the same name by Jorie Graham, which I read years ago. It's about Penelope in the Odyssey, and how each night she unraveled the weaving she had done during the day in an effort to ward off her many suitors as she awaited the hoped-for return of Odysseus.