WIP Wednesday #15

 

I was well and goodly convinced that, despite having finished my Camden Place Cardigan over the weekend, I was going to have SOMETHING new on the needles to show off this week.  Anything.  The vanilla socks for dad, yeah, they’re still on the needles, but they are clearly not new.  They are so not new I have literally been working on them for TWO MONTHS. Continuously!  For real, I don’t think a pair of socks has taken me two months EVER.  Not even when I was new to sock knitting.  Two months and I haven’t even turned the 2nd heel yet! ACK! Ridiculous! Look at the pathetic progress…

I think I did finally figure it out, at least. I hate the yarn. It feels OK, it knits up without being too splitty, the pattern in the self patterning yarn isn’t terribly offensive, perhaps not perfect FIL material, but it’ll do… The problem is, it keeps puking up hairballs.

You know those annoying little bumbs that magically form around a bit of yarn? That will float along indefinitely if you pull them down the working strand as you knit? Yeah, those. They keep causing the center of my center pull ball to kick out little lumps of yarn barf and are generally annoying. Which is making me hate the yarn. And the worst part is I don’t even know if I still have the ball band to tell you, dear reader, what brand it is or avoid repurchasing it myself.  Its a skein I bought shortly after my indoctrination introduction to the big girl yarn store and I bought it because I was still puckering a bit lot over the price of the big girl yarn at the big girl yarn store.  So it was probably under $15 for the skein. A skein big enough to knit a whole PAIR of socks. On the up side, I no longer pucker so much at the price (well, up side where my stash is concerned, maybe not so much where my wallet is concerned…) so there’s little danger that I’d worry so much about the low price.

I also know that this yarn, whatever brand it is, was a factory wound center pull skein when I purchased it. This has also become an uncommon way for me to purchase yarn.  Cascade 220 Superwash is about the only thing I buy in pre-wound form anymore. So this is another bit of good news in that it reduces the likelihood of accidental repurchase. Cuz for real… I do not love the yarn and it’s making it really hard to work on the socks. But I have a goal. We are slated to have dinner and see the new Spielberg Lincoln movie with friends Saturday night.  Since knitting in the dark is no challenge at all anymore, at least where plain stockinette in the round is concerned, I would very much like to take my sock to the movies with me. In order for this to work, though, I need to knit a gusset and turn a heel between now and Saturday evening.

I started the gusset Tuesday night while Mr.Me was getting his hairs cut. Then we got home and I finished knitting his new hat. Which was so much more enjoyable than this damned cursed  simple sock.  And the hat came off the needles with minutes to spare before bed time so I had no time to cast on another. Or anything else, for that matter, so I think I am going to torture myself be a good little knitter tonight and, if necessary, tomorrow and possibly Friday, and I’m going to finish the gusset and turn the heel.  Because 2 hours of uninterrupted knitting time Saturday night means I will conquer a good chunk, if not all, of the leg of this thing. And then they will be finished and I can move on to something interesting mark another item off both the Year of Projects and Christmas knitting lists. I can turn them in for detention points in the House Cup, too.  And then I won’t have to think about the plain vanilla socks during staycation next week.

I am SO ready to move on…