A little bit Nauti

Having to sing in two services for Easter morning, and then a two-hour car trip down to the in-laws for Easter dinner makes for lots of time to knit, such that I have turned the heel and now have only to pick up the side stitches and finish the foot for Sockpal000za sock #2, and I will be done.

But I did take a break from socks this weekend. Yesterday I whipped up a Nauti out of some self-striping green sock yarn and some random green acrylic that just happened to match perfectly.

I’d bought a pile of this stuff (the sock yarn, that is) a while back and even though it says it is superwash wool, a rather unfortunate experience involving three ribbed scarfs with curliques and three hats with pompoms made of identical yarn in brown and cream, and an encounter with a washing machine which felted the aforementioned hats and scarves suggests that the label, it lies. So ever since I have been trying to find ways to use up the remaining not-remotely-superwash-wool sock yarn, and making a cute little spiral-shelled nautilus certainly helped! In fact, I suspect I will need to make at least one more of these little critters, because they are very easy, and also pretty cute, and hey, using up stash yarn!

I also decided that now that I have made such great progress on my Sockpal000za socks, I could return to working on the FLAK cardigan. I brought it with me to the Yarn-Stricken meeting on Saturday afternoon and actually made some pretty good progress on it. I’m working on the sleeves now and I’m doing them both at (nearly) the same time, so that I can be trying them on as I go, in the hopes of avoiding any huge amount of frogging in my future. Basically this just entails having a ball of yarn hanging off either side, and doing 12 rows (or 4 pattern repeats and 2 decreases) on one sleeve, then swapping my needles over (hooray for Denise interchangeables) and repeating the same 12 row-4-pattern-2-decrease set on the other sleeve.

I managed to do some stash acquisition this weekend, without once setting a foot into a yarn or craft store, or spending a dime. One of the ladies who comes to Yarn-Stricken has been clearing out her stash and arrived with a large bag stuffed with crochet cotton – some of it not even opened. I tried to foist some of it off on other people, especially the other doily knitter in the group, but with one exception, no one wanted any. So I suspect that when I return from Ireland I am going to have to sit down and pick out a few doilies to make, if only to start chipping away at my ever-growing stash of crochet cotton (most of which, rather amusingly, I have obtained for free).