Knit One, Purr Too

Where were we again?

The last week has just kind of whizzed by a bit faster than I expected. We had a nasty wind storm in the area on Friday before last, which had the lovely benefit of knocking out the electricity in my office...which meant I got to go home and work on my design project instead of sitting around in the dark hoping the server would come back online at some point in the day. I spent a few days charting and recharting it, so that by the time I got home on Friday I could sit down with the final chart and the yarn and just plow right through it. Phew.

This past week has been a bit crazy, mainly because I was off at a meeting in Martinez all day on Tuesday, and then had to go San Franciso on Wednesday. The plus side of the San Francisco trip was that I took the train, and then the BART (light rail), which took me within a few blocks of our office down there, and gave me two hours to knit on the way down, and on the way back, instead of having to sit in traffic on the freeway. This also meant that I got a lot of sock knitting done, thus finishing up the very *last* pair of pink ribbon socks. Of course, I cannot cheer too much at this point because I realized yesterday that I made the feet too long, so I'm going to have to rip out about half an inch on each, but I am still counting them as done. Repairing socks is not the same as making them from the very beginning. It is going to be a very long time until I am in the mood to knit any pink socks again.

I also dragged out the unfinished Bear Skin Rug from where it's been languishing in the laundry room these past few months, and have been making a lot of progress on that. I'll admit that there has been an ulterior motive for finishing that, however; when I am done, I have plans for any leftover fun fur. That's because today I took a class focusing on making a very fat and adorable hedgehog, specifically because the pattern uses short rows to accomplish the shaping on the back (underneath all that fur), and short rows are one thing I'd not yet really figured out. So now I have a finished hedgehog 'shell', waiting to be tossed into the washing machine and felted, and he is so very cute that once the bear rug is done I am going to go rummaging in the stash to see what I have in the way of feltable wool and I suspect there will be at least one or two more of these little critters in my knitting future.

On the needles - a new pair of socks for Richard. I've also signed up for Socktoberfest because I intend to try to work my way through more than a few pairs of socks this month in an attempt to trim down the stash, despite the fact that free time for knitting is rapidly being scheduled away. There's a trip to Seattle next weekend to visit my little sister and my adorable niece, an afternoon of gaming the weekend after that, likely an entire day spent making pomegranate jelly on the 21st (and probably three or four evenings prior to that spent shucking the pomegrantes in preparation for the great jelly-making extravaganza), and this does not include the pile of music that I am supposed to be arranging for the little recorder ensemble I'm (nominally) in charge of, or the lace shawl I really need to finish by Thanksgiving for an early Christmas present, or going off to a reading by Terry Pratchett (one of my favorite authors), and of course squeezing in some time *somewhere* to track down some orange wool and knit up this.