Not Quite As Clever As I Thought I Was

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I've been knitting lots of socks lately. So when I pulled out the clown yarn, I thought to myself, "Myself, you've been knitting lots of socks lately. Let's see if you can just knit this one up without a lot of fuss and pattern reading."

Heh.

What's that they say about a group of lions and a precipitous decline?

I cast on my 68 stitches and chugged right down the leg. Got to the six inch mark and took the 34 stitches on the back needle and did my heel flap. Yesterday, while sitting at The Black Sheep and bathing my soul in fibery vibes and wooly goodness and friendly chat, I turned the heel, with a little help from a copy of the Yarn Harlot's Knitting Rules. Picked up the first set of gusset stitches and then knit across half of the instep stitches...let's see, half of 68 is 34...half of 34 is 17. Knit across 17 stitches, switch needles and knit across the second 17...wait a minute...I only seem to have 13 stitches here on the second half. I must have miscounted.....ummmmm, no.

Huh.

I seem to have 34 stitches on the back needle and 30 stitches on the front needle. Well, that's weird!

I counted my cast-on three times....let me repeat that....THREE times! But somehow I seem to have only cast on 64 stitches, not 68. I am mindboggled.

But Tracy, up at The Black Sheep, encouraged me not to rip the whole thing out. I'm just going to keep going on it. And try to remember to do the second one the same way.

What an idiot.

But here's a picture anyway.


I came home from The Black Sheep with a few skeins of yarn...how could I not? Some Claudia's in the Walk in the Woods colorway and some Aracaunia Ranco in the most scrumptious shades of red and rose and pink and coral. And this book: Little Sweet Peas. It has some adorable sweaters in it, and the sizes go up to 7. Cute, cute, cute.

Current Reading

Mostly I'm reading snatches of this and that. Mr. Pointy Sticks and I are trying to cut down on the number of books in the house and I am trying to be ruthless about getting rid of books I don't think I'll ever read or that I've read once and won't want to read again. So far, we've taken 7 or 8 cartons of books to the library as donations. And there'll be more to follow. So I am trying some of the books that I think I might want to read before we get rid of them. Mostly, they are going into the donation boxes.

But...I am reading one book I like a lot. Winter Wood, by Stephen Augarde. It's the third in a series that started with The Various and continued in Celandine. Good English fantasy. Reminds me of William Mayne or early Alan Garner.