The Weekend

Well this weekend was kind of messed up. The whole family were suppose to go to VA Beach to visit my dad on Sat. We had very good intentions. We started out of the house at 5 to 8 am. We wanted a head start to beat the traffic. We are 5 minutes on the road and Lars says well I have to get gas and then we can stop at McDonalds. I am thinking ok there goes 30 minutes of our trip that's cutting it too close. We stop for gas and there is some problem with the bank and Lars has to spend 20 minutes on the phone to get it straight so we can get gas. Sooooo we ended up not really leaving til 9:15. I told Lars we are going to hit traffic. He said nah its too cold people wont want to go to the beach today. Everything was fine and dandy til we got to Williamsburg, BAM traffic. We road in that for an hour and 20 minutes. No end in site that I could see and we couldn't find a radio station that was talking about the traffic. We were still 11 miles from Hampton and at this rate we would have gotten to the beach by 3 or 4. We turned around and headed home. I wasn't about to sit in traffic all day. Sooooo bad news no beach pictures. Good news during this I finished my 2nd sock! I am fairly happy with the way they turned out. The secound sock is soooo much better then the first, but I am not about to rip it apart just for a few mistakes. I will just chalk it up to my first sock experience and enjoy wearing them. I put them on and they are very comfortable.

I have started on my Purple Monkey sock. I wanted to do a toe up sock this time and since I don't have a crochet hook and am too lazy to go get a crochet hook I had to start the toe a little different. I tried the make a rectangle and then pick up stitches. Yeah didn't work. I hate hate hate picking up stitches. Not sure why but I just do. It seems very tedious to me to do on such tiny little stitches. Next I tried the figure 8 CO method. LOL Ok that was a total flop. I just could not get it to work. I tried it about 80 million times before I went back to the net and searched for another method. Lastly I tried the Turkish CO method. I have to say this one is fairly simple and straight forward. I could keep the tension tight and it just seems the easiest. After I CO I had to start the toe increases. Let me tell you I am an absolute pro at this Turkish CO now since I had to rip out the toe and do it over about 6 times. I just couldn't figure out how to do it. Then silly me I got out my Knitters Companion and hey lookie here PICTURES! on how to do the increases.

Now I am going to talk about this little book Knitters Companion. I don't care if you are the most experienced knitter there ever was you need this book! It is awesome. It has anything you ever wanted to know on how to cast on to how to decrease and increase to what size head a child of 6 months has. I highly recommend this book. It is hard back and flips completely open so you can lean it on itself kind of like a flip book or lay it completely flat. It is also small enough to fit into a knitting bag. The only complaint I have is the index isn't big enough. I like indexes that index every word you possibly would need to look up something and this book only has a one page index. A little small. That is ok the rest of the goodie in the book out weight the small, teeny, tiny, microscopic (did I mention the index is small?) index.