a day of progress

The best place to take pictures chez jennie is on one of my two porches. The weathered wood backdrop really offsets the colors of the knit and it's really the only place I get good light. So today, I bundled up against the wind and cold and dragged my knitting onto the porch to examine my progress in the light of day. here is what I found:


My elfines... slow going. I have mixed feelings about magic loop and knitting two socks at once. I'm very much a dpn kind of girl -- I use them whenever possible. I feel like they help me plug along. That said, I also definitely suffer a little from the second-sock-itis. So it's nice to know that I'm done with both socks, up to a certain point. But it is also much slower going to knit two at once, particularly using magic loop when you're used to dpns, and I think I'm having some stamina issues. Anyway, I'm following Lisa's lead and shooting for one lace repeat a day. I need to get these babies finished. They're so pretty, really, which should be enough to get me through.


But, to keep myself feeling productive (and to get me closer to my desired goal of knitting myself a pair of socks out of my new Socks that Rock yarn) I cast on for Sara's jaywalkers. Now these I'm really excited about. First of all, after knitting on the elfines (and, probably, because these will be jaywalkers #3), these seem to knit up so quickly. Also, I'm very, very pleased with the colors. Sara loves purple, and at first, I was a little disappointed in how much yellow there was (on the other side of the sock, there is a much larger pool of yellow). But today, in the light of nature, I realized that these are perfect. Since my sophmore year of college, when Sara dressed in a batman costume for holloween, all of my friends have referred to her as Batman. Now, this is not a joking, use it every once and a while kind of nickname. It has replaced her name. I call her house and ask for "batman." We refer to her car as the "batmobile" (and her mom as the "batmom"). These socks are the PERFECT batman socks -- they've got the purple that sara loves, and the black and yellow of batman. i'm very excited. Had I really thought things through (and not been so in love with jaywalkers around christmas) I would have knit her real batman socks. But for someone who is only a few months away from being a lawyer, maybe subtle batman socks are better...


And lastly, my most exciting project, the much loved Andean Silk hourglass sweater. I love it. There are not enough words. It's taking huge amounts of restraint to not hop on the website and buy enough Andean Silk (in a color that will actually look goodon me) to make myself one... I meant this to be my unofficial Olympics project, but I got too excited and cast on early. I knew I couldn't join the olympics anyway... I have too much work to do and too many jams and concerts to go to in the next two weeks to dedicate myself to a challenge of a project. My challenge is to finish the hourglass and the elfines (and, in a perfect universe, the bat socks too) by the end of February. Then I'm allowed a big-commitment project for myself (I haven't decided yet what this will be, but I'm pretty sure it's gonna be a cardigan. I love cardigans!) Any suggestions?