Look what I got

New license plates arrived today:

But that's not the exciting news. The picture of this license plate was taken and sent with my new iPhone!

Idiot forgets knitting, makes do

Is anyone else thrown off by the timing of Thanksgiving this year? I intended to spend the week of Thanksgiving with my sister in Maine. Instead, I booked my flight for the week before. I have continued to confuse dates (when rescheduling a haircut, when signing out for the week on my work intranet, etc.)

I can't blame my date confusion for this blunder though: I left on vacation without my messenger bag. This means I brought no knitting with me on the trip (or books, but I had an extra book in my suitcase). I don't think I've flown without a knitting project since 2000. So a trip to the knitting shops was called for, and long story short:


The yarn is Halcyon's Botanica, a line I've never noticed before. It has beautiful stitch definition and an attractive pallet. My plan is to knit a mostly plain, olive-colored sweater, with a few maize-colored stripes for accent.

Downeast Maine is lovely this week: cold but sunny. The cold gives me an excuse to wear thick, handknit sweaters, and I'm looking forward to being able to wear sweaters like this one in progress on days like today.

Sock Updates

No posts since Halloween? Clearly, I'm too lazy and boring to sustain a blog.

Here's the current sock in progress:


Standard fare, following my own Lesser Evil sock instructions and adding a simple but elegant twist on the usual cuff ribbing.

After finishing my Francie socks, I hunkered down for a bit in my secret lab to figure out how to clone that pattern from the toe-up. Turns out that it's not too hard:

But that experiment lies abandoned because, while the Francie sock looks cool, the truth is you can feel the ridges on the soles of your feet, which I know will drive most of my loved ones crazy. I even suspect that in this particular yarn I'm using, the socks will quickly leave blisters. I'm evil because my sock genius will overpower you, not because I actually want to inflict physical, sock-based harm.