Mossy Cottage Knits

Bloooooo Moooooooon, La La La La La La La La

[Quite a few Dear Readers have said that messages sent to my Yahoo email address have bounced back to them as spam. I’ve temporarily turned off all my spam-protection settings. If you’re still having problems, please let me know.]

Here’s my first sock using Blue Moon Fiber Arts "Socks that Rock" yarn, color "Lagoon" in the heavyweight weight and, as always, Evelyn Clark’s Railroad Rib pattern. (Aren’t you impressed by the artisanship shown in the second photo? I quit knitting for the briefest of seconds, slapped the sock on my thigh, took a snapshot, tossed the camera aside, and kept on knitting. Such heart I put into my work.)

This yarn is like…how do I describe it? Have you ever eaten home-made pasta? (Stick with me; I do have a point, even if I do seem to be soaring off into the stratosphere.) Not the dry stuff sold in a box with a cellophane window; not even the marginally better “fresh” stuff sold in the refrigerated section of the supermarket. I’m talking pasta you roll out on your kitchen counter, cut into thin ribbons, immediately plop into boiling water, and are eating three minutes later with butter, salt and pepper and a good dollop of thick marinara sauce. As fresh as fresh can get. If so, then you know that home-made pasta is airy, chewy and rich, more like eating fluffy, eggy dumplings than flat, bland, blah, cardboardy supermarket spaghetti. The sock yarn is like that—squishy, puffy, airy, rich, dense. Er, if not exactly eggy. It’s really lovely.

This is also, however, the yarn I was kvetching about in my last entry, in which I mentioned discovering that the difference of a mere 4 stitches can make the variegation go from making subtle, attractive, Gardens-of-Giverny smudges of color to strict, militant spiraling stripes. Four stitches, people! This is all the more disappointing since the socks are for a dude, and the smudges looked almost like upmarket camouflage, dude-esque yet tailored, and the stripes…not so much.

Other than that, life is quiet. Baseball season has started so TMK is all about the save and the bunt and the steal and the bad calls and the pop-ups and the slides and the curveballs and the stupid umps and the broken bats and the seventh-inning stretch. Me, I’m making like a giant mole in my garage, burrowing a large tunnel between the boxes of Avalanche yarn for the new washer and dryer (which I haven’t even bought yet, but all in good time, all in good time) and thanking God that whatever male cat it is that got into said garage decided to spray on the one pile of Dulaan items that were securely zipped up in a plastic blanket-storage bag. Everything has been much better secured now. No harm done. Although if I find the $%^!$%!* cat, harm may be done.