off

It is an off day for me. The second of my two conferences is over, and my presentation is done. My flight leaves at 5 in the afternoon here, so I have some 4+ odd hours to fill before worrying about taxis and etc. Since I have no laptop charger (of all the damned things to forget at home) and I only have 2 hours of battery life left, I am snuggled into bed at the hotel, reading knitting blog archives and checking out the changing faces of the mountains from the window. Soon I'll go down and get some breakfast, take a shower, and knit on my sweater (hoping to finish the body before I get on the airplane today--there's only an inch or two left, and I have to figure out some sort of edging/bindoff that will prevent it from rolling and not ride up my hips), drop a box off to be mailed from the front desk, leave my luggage as I check out, arrange my transportation, and go to a local museum for an hour or two. Then I'll fly for one billion hours and get some sleep and knit some lace or some socks.

I do have some (read: 400) papers to read as new references from the conference. But that's all right, I will worry about them later.

What all am I knitting? For this trip I brought my in-progress sweater, the damnblue socks, and my current purple lace. I figured I only had 1 ball of sweater yarn left so I'd probably run out of it, and then I thought I would get more done on the socks during the actual conference itself (lots of time to knit during 10 hours of talks, but it turns out I was busy taking notes, running programs, and writing my very brief presentation). The lace was for variety, and it's a small project. I hope to work on it on the 10 hour plane ride back, and I've written down the pattern to that purpose.

The problem with the damnblue socks is that I've been working on them since the last conference, and I've had to rip them back about 4 times now. Not because of the pattern (Chevrolace, from Knitty)--it's a very cute pattern. Not because of the yarn, either:



It's a lovely blue yarn from Trekking, in this gorgeous sky blue color, and it's sproingy and a little stiff but it softens up lovely after a wash, and it doesn't split and it works very nicely on my size 1s or 0s.

No, mainly I've ripped back due to incompetence. The first time I did the sock as directed and it was too big, so I took out a pattern repeat and tried again. That was better, but then in the midst of the last conference I had to improvise a short-row heel and three inches later I discovered it was too tight. Rip, rip, rip. I left it alone for two weeks in frustration and came back to it on the airplane, did a flap and wrap-and-turn heel, picked up stitches for the gusset, knit an inch during the current conference, and figured out that the ankle was too big. So now I'm about to do more decreasing for a couple of inches before starting the pattern.

The pattern is a 12 row repeat; perhaps that's the issue. It's a bit long, so it makes things either too big or too small. I suspect that after decreasing 12 stitches I will now find the ankle is too small, whereupon I will throw this beautiful yarn out the airplane, laughing maniacally as it disappears into the equally beautiful sky right before the air pressure difference sucks me out too.