Knitting Magic

I have several things to show off this week. Fist of all, I finished the Florida A/C Shawl. This had been the Lemonade Shawl, until I frogged it and tried a different pattern. I don't know why I resisted frogging this for so long. I guess I just hadn't wanted to admit defeat and give up on it. But I'm so much happier with the new pattern. I've been keeping this shawl out in the living room so that I curl up in it. It's so soft and pretty, I think I'm going to get a lot of use from it.
 

I also finished the Hedera socks Wednesday evening. It really is difficult to see the lace pattern in the picture. The variegated yarn gets most of the attention. (It's pretty yarn, so it deserves attention.) When the socks are worn, the lace blocks out really nice. I think this may be one of my favorite sock patterns so far. It was fun to knit, just difficult enough to be interesting but easy enough to memorize so that you could knit it in public.

I'll be casting on the second pattern from Cookie A's book, Knit.Socks.Love, soon.

 I think I mentioned the Emergency Hat in Friday's blog post. I did finish it early Saturday morning, and I've been wearing it almost everywhere. The Florida Fiber-In is next weekend (September 16-18), and one of the activities is a hat parade. I think I'm going to use this as my entry.

I didn't have the right size dpns when I knit this hat, so I had to make do with my KnitPicks Harmony circulars. I've done Magic Loop in the past. It's no big deal, I just prefer my dpns. Something this time just clicked, and I fell in love. Maybe it was the needles. Having a good wire and joint on the circulars makes a big difference. Maybe it was having a duck steal one of my dpns the other day. Whatever, I just really enjoyed knitting with Magic Loop.

After the Hedera socks, I had cast on a baby sock to knit as my purse project. Since I was missing a dpn anyway (darn that duck!), I decided to knit the second sock with magic loop. The first sock (on dpns) was finished Saturday. The second sock (using magic loop) was started on Saturday and finished on Sunday.

At this point, I think I've become obsessed. I decided to knit another pair of baby socks Sunday so that I could try doing two socks at a time. It looks like I can have these finished tonight.

As my Nana used to say, "Now I'm cooking with gas!"

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Blanket Update:

207 squares in 249 days

(Status: Sigh.)