Smells Like A Battle

Within the next 24 hours Sock Wars will commence. I have my yarn ready



I should have the socks ready to take to the post office by Monday, so as to kill my first target. There are people on the forum talking about buying postage paid envelopes and mailing them at 24-hour post offices as soon as they get them done over the weekend, but I’m not stressing out that much about it. I do hope to move up at least once, though.

Would also like to finish my Time Traveler’s Wife project before time runs out. I’m making Lucy Neatby’s Paradox Mittens, in honor of the paradoxical nature of time travel. I had this project picked out before I started the book, and now I’m pleased that the mittens are appropriate to the story in another way: there are lots of references to cold and snow.

I have one mitten mostly done



the tip grafting and the thumb remain. I would have been done sooner, but I did the first two inches of the hand twice, after I found a mistake and ended up ripping it all out. Hopefully, that won’t happen on the second mitten. Actually, I learned a good lesson from that ripping: in color work, when you make a pattern mistake DO NOT try to drop down and fix it. Duplicate stitch over it when you’re done.

Another lesson learned with this project: Magic Loop. I got to the campground with my knitting kit and discovered that I didn’t have the pair of little circs I had planned to use for the mittens. I know I have them, because I bought them to try socks on two circs a long time ago, which I hated, but now there is only one in my kit. I guess the other is in a project somewhere. Don’t know where. The Magic Loop works really well, though. I like it much better than the two circs technique, though I don’t know if I like it better than dpns.

This mitten also represents more of my stash being used up: I’ve had that green Koigu (and the mitten pattern) for a long time (though I did not buy them for each other.) I just had to buy the black to go with it. I’m VERY pleased with how it is turning out. I had always planned to do the black and white the pattern was written with, but the shaded greens are so much better.

I had to buy yarn for Sock Wars, too, BTW. Have very little DK weight yarn in my stash, and what I do have is in sweater-appropriate amounts that I didn’t want to split up. The KnitPicks yarn is nice, though, and not expensive and got here quick.