Quickie

I don't have any pictures today of all of the knitting I've been doing, but I realized that if I stopped to take pictures, I wouldn't ever get to writing a post, so I'm just dropping in quickly.  We got some serious rain on Friday night and throughout the day yesterday, which gave me the perfect excuse to hole up at home (I didn't put any shoes on or go outside all day yesterday, and today's looking to end up the same way) and make some progress, in an entirely relaxing and renewing sort of way, on some projects.  I finished the book I was reading (I love the fact that an ereader stays open while I knit!), and got all the laundry in the house done (how often do I get to say that?), and made a huge pot of chili (which we forgot to put in the fridge last night before going to bed, so that was a wasted effort, alas).

On the fibrous front, I finished the back of my mom's sweater, as well as the first sleeve.  Hooray!  I now have two fronts, a back, and a sleeve finished, and I'll cast on for the second sleeve this afternoon.  With luck, I can have that done this week, then next weekend I will seam the sweater and knit the high collar.  I really do need some buttons, though...  Just as a reminder, I'm knitting Moonstruck, in the colorway pictured there, out of Gaea yarn, which is a pleasantly squishy merino.  It's nice to think that this might actually get finished in time for my mom's birthday (she says, ducking and waiting for the knitting gods to smite her).  I need to be a grown-up and go to the post office to get a box for it, as well as envelopes for mailing my aunt's socks (remember those? the ones I finished a month ago?  pitiful) and my hats for the Warm Hats Not Hot Heads project.  (I wish I understood what my aversion is to the post office specifically, and to running errands like that in general, but there it is.)

Yup, I said "hats".  I finished the second hat for the project; it turned out that I had enough yarn from the skein for the first hat to knit another Paris-Roubaix hat, this time a bit longer and bigger.  I played around with these a little bit; with one of them, I carried the pattern through the decreases at the top, with the other I didn't.  They're both nice, though; I would wear either of them, in public, and that seems like a reasonable criterion for sending them off.  So the second one (being bigger) will go to Rep. Darrell Issa, and the first one will go to Rep. Susan Davis.  Depending on how the second sweater sleeve goes, I may see if I can finish one more before the deadline; we'll see.

I am also spinning; I have finished the second third of the fiber that I posted a picture of last time, the lovely top of superwash BFL from Sincere Sheep that I got at the Dixon Fiber Festival in October.  Once the last third is spun, I'll be able to ply.  I'm trying to decide what socks to knit out of it (it may depend very much on how many yards I end up with).  Right now I'm dithering among three choices: another pair of the Kimono socks (because you can't have too many pairs of those, right?); a pair of Hyacinth socks (which have the advantage of being short), or a pair of Rivendell socks (for which I have had the pattern for literally years, waiting for a chance to knit them).  Meanwhile, I can dither pleasingly whilst spinning.  Which is what I am off to do!