Mission accomplished!

Welcome to the sunny North Carolina mountains where life is so quiet and placid that knitting gets done all of its own accord. Here are the Dungaree Socks I cast on on Wednesday (after I had finished knitting the entire back of the Donna sweater on Tuesday during the long day of delayed airline travel). These socks are enjoying the view of the Smoky Mountains from the vantage point of my parents' front deck. It's not at all like the view from my Brooklyn apartment. duh.

Ok, so in NC everything moves slowly except knitting because by Thursday night/Friday morning (while I waited for my husband to arrive in NC after a TWENTY-SEVEN hour delay,) I had this:





Pattern: Dungaree Socks
Yarn: Louet Gems Fingering in Violet and Purple
Yarn enabler: Knit New York in January, 2007 Knit on: One long Knitpicks Size O, Magic Looped. Time I spent knitting these when I had nothing else to do but talk to my parents: 3 Days

What to say about these socks. They were a down-and-dirty effort that served their purposes for me: 1) To use the Louet yarn which I am pretty much in love with for stitch-definition, feel in the hand, and color. 2) To have a small project to finish knitting quickly. 3) To work on two-color knitting. In this case, it was mosaic knitting.

Ok, let's talk about this mosaic knitting with two colors for a moment and how I am not at all a good knitter. I picked two colors that were (on sale, to be honest) harmonious but whose values (is that the right word?) were not different enough to provide sharper contrast in this wavy pattern. Also, I haven't mastered how to do the tension right for the slip stitches in mosaic technique. When I read this tutorial, it said that things should be loose, which is easy for me since I'm a loose knitter to beat the band. The other thing I got from the tutorial is that things will work themselves out in the blocking. I never block socks, but I blocked these because the colorwork looked like a puckered raisiny mess when I finished. They don't look so bad now, but the pattern is still not as sharply defined as I would've liked and the lovely definition of the Louet yarn is showing off my knitting inadequacies quite well thank you. Oh, well. That's what happens on your first attempt at a new technique, right?

In the meantime, airline travel sucks except that it provides lots of knitting time for when your head is exploding from the travel delays of bad weather, broken airlines, crazy gate agents (well, just the one who luckily went away. The other Asheville gate agent was a prince--I should have taken his picture and gotten his address so that I could send him the socks I was working on), and line-sitting while you try to get back to NY. My parents told us that there's a Chinatown bus that goes from Asheville-NYC. As far as I'm concerned, I'll take the vagaries of Fung Wah over Delta's Atlanta hellhole any day.

All total, here's what I've knit in the last week: one entire pair of socks, the back of a sweater, the sleeves for the sweater, and the feet (well, almost) of another pair of socks. Yikes--I'm a fast knitter, but let me reiterate that NC is a little slow (ie, boring) and that Delta travel is even slower.

Donna has been seamed up and is awaiting a neckline, and then I'll show you her mysteries and give you a quick insight into yarn shopping in Asheville another day.