Fingerless Gloves

My first fingerless gloves! Definitely won't be the last; my daughter Meghan has already requested these:

in this yarn:

Fun!

This past weekend I headed out to a fiber festival and only bought one skein!

The wool is from Francis - a resident sheep at Knox Farm in East Aurora, NY (where the festival was held). The temptation to buy buy buy was huge, but I just kept reminding myself of all the yarns I have patiently waiting for me at home and I was able to resist going overboard.

I find that it stresses me out to have all this 'stuff' and not the time to do work with it. I almost feel wasteful. And then on top of that, I ran into my old friends from the Amherst Museum Lace Guild, and started feeling horrible thinking about all my lace bobbins and threads and lace UFOs that are hibernating in my studio-yikes. Anyway....

Aren't these knitted fish hysterical?
Enjoy your day and knit as much and as often as you dare!

MoNKeY mAdNeSs

Love this pattern!

It's the Monkey Socks from Cookie A. I really wasn't too sure I would be able to do it, since the pattern is a chart and I (in my limited knitting knowledge) had no clue on charts. Luckily the dears over at the knittingdaily.com KAL were of immense help as I stalked their KAL postings.

One suggestion was to write out the instructions and ignore the chart completely; another color-coded the different stitches so the chart resembled a tile mosaic. I did type up the pattern in the standard p4-k3-yo type of morse code of knitting, but found I was able to decipher the chart without any problem at all. What a thrill it was to get to the end of each row and have the right amount of stitches! Yippee!

I was afraid the solid color yarn would be a yawn and I would get bored. Nope. Quite the opposite. The pattern keeps urging me on - 'come on, one more row....' All was good, until.....

You have GOT to be kidding me! So Annoying!! When I told my mom about it, she immediately said "well, don't you re-wind your skein before you begin?" Um, no. Never even thought about that. I will now.

But I was happy that I know enough about knitting now to be able to un-do a row and fix this weak link. I'm down to the shaping of the gusset on the second sock and I find myself looking ahead to the next pattern I want to try and deciding which yarn in my stash would be best with which pattern. Oh, the possibilities are endless!

I'm just itching to get back to it, but to do so I need to disturb my new little one who has taken a liking to my knitting bag.


Oh, I guess I can wait a little bit ........