I did indeed receive a swift for Christmas. Lets not talk about from whom, or why, or how.
In any case, the swift is awesome. Winding yarn into a ball is no longer the dread task it was. I do not have to spend hours with my yarn looped over my knees or random objects praying the cat won’t discover it. I still don’t believe in ball winders or center pull stuff, but now I can roll up my pretty old fashioned round balls without being immobilized for the duration!
Astoundingly I also got yarn for Christmas, really nice stuff too, from Dadzilla and his Girl-du-jour! So nice, in fact, that I have had to hide it away while I concentrate on knitting a couple pairs of socks off my plate!
Speaking of socks…I had a bit of an epic fail at increasing. It was laziness on my part really, but because of the odd skinny shape of my sisters feet I have had to do some tricky knitting to make sure they fit nicely. This is a girl who is so incredibly picky about socks and sock positioning that when we were kids it would take her at LEAST 15 minutes, if not more, to get that offensive toe seam in just the right position before she could ease her shoes on. With this in mind I shortrowed the toes! Not a seam in sight. Now I have to knit roughly 54 inches total of sock (Lorna Laces, Lakeview) so she can have a slim pair of over the knee eyelet socks to be worn with her “Bad guy Boots”
The problem lies in the tricky increase between the narrow ball of her foot and the wider heel circumference. Between here and there I have to sneak in an extra 20 stitches for a cozy tailored fit – I just got lazy and decided to do them all in one go and ended up with ANGLES on a sock foot body. Disgraceful, I should have known better, as I know what an increase like that looks like when you make a toe. I’ve fixed it, but I lost about an inch and a day of progress. Le sigh.
Also I am currently deeply coveting Kim Hargreaves Heartfelt: The Dark House Collection. Have you SEEN THIS? It’s amazing, its’ a book of patterns I would knit at least 75% of. Which means I feel justified in buying it! Usually looking for a pattern book is painful – the designs are not usually classic, elegant, fitted or at all adaptable and it’s usually easier to get a “recipe” type book and learn “how” and then venture out on my own. This collection (having seen only the results on the pages) looks fantastic as it’s a book I might knit directly out of, save for the necessary yarn substitutions. I like the longer cleaner shapes like “Darcy,” “Emily,” “Amory,” and “Calm” but I can easily see myself knitting the other designs for hipper relatives. I may have to break down and order this for myself, as painful as it seems to spend all that money on an import *sigh*
One more boring note and I’m done, I swear. I’m on Ravelry now! Petitmains is my username, of course, but there we are. Back to stealth knitting at work…
