Late Night Knitting and More Socks

I did a bad thing last night. I stayed up until 3:30 am KNITTING! Well, knitting and rolling my Seaweed silk into a ball. It got a mongo tangle at the end there and I spent two hours carefully undoing it, not wanting to waste one precious inch of the delicious fiber.

If I didn't work and didn't have kids, that's how I'd live. I'd probably stay up until 1:00 or 2:00 every night, then wake up at 9:00 or 10:00. I know you early birds frown on and even sometimes silently disdain such behavior, but in the words of one of my first true heroes, Popeye, "I yam what I yam" (insert distinct Popeye cackle here).

Here is a pic of the seaweed sock I began fashioning in the wee hours:
If you click on it, you can probably see the texture a bit better. By the way, does anyone besides me LOVE the Britanny 5" dpns? OK, so they are not much more than cocktail toothpicks, but I adore them.

This was my inspiration for the sock. Love you, Barbara Walker! See how she shows both sides so you can choose which side you want for the "public" side? She's cool like that! Anyway, knowing that great minds think alike, I searched the Internet to see if someone had already done the footwork (har har)for this pattern. Turns out, someone had -- at one time, Nancy McGlynn, at a site called Knitting Now had designed a pair of socks using this pattern. The links now give a no access message, so I'm not sure what happened. In any case, I found this great tutorial that built on Nancy's pattern for how to convert them into clog socks here at Fiber Fool. It is a great tutorial and I think that I shall make them clog socks! Thanks, Kristi!

In other knitting news, I don't know if you remember this particular evening when I had so much fun knitting with my friend, Victoria. (Hi Victoria!) But I just could not hang with the two socks at one time on two circs. Too fiddly. Too much navigation and time spent circumnavigating the inevitable tangle of balls and cords. I attempted to reduce this inevitability by transferring it to the magic loop method, a 47" Addi Turbo size 1. This is better, still not ideal. The fiddling has been transferred to constant cord-watching and maneuvering, because if you forget to keep the cords "just so", with ample cordage sticking out at both sides of the "sock clothesline" (that's how I think of it), you end up with one sock that has wandered over to the "danger zone" and gets itself "wound around the bend." This I'm sure makes Absolutely No Sense to one who has not yet traveled the way of the Magic Loop. However, you Magic Loopers probably know what I'm talking about. Tips? Pointers? (Har har, again! What is up with me and the puns today?!)
So there you have it. The eternal dilemma of socks, as I see it. You are either faced with the dreaded second sock syndrome, which does not bode well for us ADD types. Though I am sure that it is somehow a wonderful lesson in follow-through (Baby Steps! Baby Steps! -- who remembers that hilarious movie, What About Bob with Bill Murray?) Do I really want to have to learn the harsh lesson of self-discipline and follow-through in my knitting? Sadly, the alternative is circumnavigating the inevitable resultant tangles and what I am positive is intentional with malice aforethought non-cooperation of the needles and yarn. I'll finish this one out, but I think I'm going to go back to practicing self-discipline (dpns) for the time being.

To top it all off, the way it is pooling is not to my liking.

Son's comment when he saw these socks: "So....why would anyone put THOSE colors together?"

Me: (all defensive) Well, it looked like it would look good knitted up at the time I bought it.

Son: (inspecting ball of yarn) Umm...Mom? This is just a bunch of colors all mixed together. They don't GO together."

I have to say I actually kind of agree with him.Close up of the sock-in-progress.
Close-up of the yarn ball. Since the colors are separated by lengths of blue/purple, the only way I can see that you could really mix them is by interchanging balls. That or make a really fat sock. Not going to happen.