Too Many Projects, Too Little Time!

Last week, One of the conferences I organized was held and quickly became the conference from HELL!  One of those times where all the things I could not control went completely wrong.  This made it hard to concentrate on the things I could control and made me super tired.  Luckily, on Thursday, I had my Sweater University meeting with all the knitting ladies and they definitely lifted my spirit.  We also found out that next meeting we will be taped for a brief appearance in one of her new videos!  We'll be stars!

We started work on Staci's Mad Men Mittens which gave me the opportunity to learn fair isle.  I can't believe that I thought it was complicated.  It is a very easy technique and I am looking forward to working more fair isle projects into my upcoming projects.

I've had a round of starteritis going on.  A lot of large projects that will take a while to finish!  What am I thinking when I have a few birthday presents and lots of Christmas presents that need to be done. But I am loving all the projects I've got going on. I've especially loving my Monkey socks by Cookie A.  The pattern is really easy, but looks great!  It has been a relatively quick sock to knit which is good because I have found it hard to work on any other projects..

This picture doesn't do the sock justice.  I'm about a quarter of the way through the second sock...no second sock syndrome here!  The yarn is Cascade Heritage Paint in Campfire.  I love the colors, but have no idea what I am going to wear them with.  I guess I'll be forced to go by a new outfit...darn.

Friday I started what should be a super fast pattern to knit up for a special someone's birthday.

No, it is not thumb warmers, but you'll have to wait to see what it turns into.  The yarn is Blue Sky Sport Weight Baby Alpaca.  It maybe the softest yarn I've ever knit with and I love it.  It makes me happy when I am knitting with it!

Holy Sock

I've made good progress on my first toe up sock.  The other day I finished heel of the sock and was ready for the final push for the finish line.  Then, to my horror, I found a hole in the sock about an inch before the heel.  What to do?  At first I continued knitting and I thought about going back and fixing it after I completed the sock, but the more I worked on the sock and thought about it, the more it bothered me.   RIP, rip...I carefully took out my needles and ripped back past the hole.  Then I carefully picked up those live stitches and voila, I am ready to get going again.

I'm not going to talk about how to rip back to a problem spot.  There are plenty of videos and instructions available on the web for that.  As a new knitter, I use to get a horrible feeling in my belly when I would drop a stitch or had some other problem that needed to be corrected, but I've noticed lately that I have confidently gone about solving these problems.  While I am not super excited about having to reknit those two or three inches of work, I glad that I have the confidence to try and fix problems in my work.

I am almost ready to start working on the heel one more time, and oh yes, here is a photo of my wonderful hubby with his new cigar glove!

Now I just have to finish the second glove!

Sock it to Me!

Just in case there are any budding sock designers out there, my wonderful knitting instructor, Staci Perry, is judging a sock design contest at the Exercise Before Knitting blog.

Blogger Elinor Brown has gotten some wonderful baskets together for the winners.  I wish I had the experience to design a sock...or anything for that matter.  The deadline for entering is April 19, 2010.

This year I'll just have to knit some of the winning designs and maybe next year I'll have some mad knitting design skills to share.