Victory and Defeat

I did in fact finish the second pair of socks Sunday night, and even got it kitchenered and the ends woven in, and now all the socks need is a washing before they go off to their permanent home. 3 FOs in one weekend, woohoo!

Last night, I decided to go ahead and cast on the Coffee Pot Rock socks, so that I would have them started to take around with me, and then I planned to get back to the Christmas knitting (my eyes are starting to slide right past the shawl so as to avoid the panic I feel over the short period I have left in which to finish it), but the socks did not cooperate. I wanted an easy pattern so I picked the bluebell rib from Sensational Knitted socks. I cast on and started a 3x3 rib at the cuff. I knitted and then I frowned, and then I knitted a little more, and then I panicked. The colors were not cooperating. I had a half and half sock. If I could have trusted it to stay that way I would have kept going, but I just didn't, so I pulled the whole thing back and went back to the pattern book, looking for something that would travel a little more and encourage the colors not to pool. I picked another pattern out of More Sensational Knitted Socks, and cast on again, but something wasn't working right and I went back to the chart of size vs. guage that tells you how many stitches to cast on, and it was different in MSKS than the one in SKS. Also, I had not paid adequate attention to a line in the directions so my stuff was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I pulled it out, cast on my usual 64 stitches, knit the cuff in 2x2 and went to plain stockinette after. The colors are now behaving as they should. -_- The stupid thing is that when I looked at how the colors all snugged pretty on the cast-on I thought to myself that maybe I should just do plain socks and enjoy the way the color melted together, rather than using a rib or something with texture that would break up that smoothness, and disregarded the impulse. Obviously, the yarn was trying to tell me something. Okay, okay, you win, plain stockinette it is.

Then I went to bed, and another day of Christmas knitting slipped by with no progress.