itchy fingers

what a weekend. i had three parties to go to, it started friday night with a family one in sydney where the most interesting people were trents 17 and 16 year old half brothers. sad but true. i was most looking forward to the garden party scheduled for saturday evening for someones 50th but was struck down by something nasty from the night before. not a hang over, i swear. i usually have an iron constitution but something we ate didnt agree with both of us and by saurday afternoon we were exhausted. so we missed the garden party and im sure im in trouble. not happy jan.

sunday was the dog club christmas party, held in a big park in sydney. about half an hour before we got there the heavens opened. we tried to ignore it and huddled under a gazebo:


which proved not entirely rain proof so we gave up. even the dogs were over it:

on the way home i got very itchy under my wet clothes and am now covered in some sort of rash that is driving me CRAZY!! what the? its so bad i need to go buy some calomine lotion. good lord.

meanwhile i have chapter six of the pensky file to try and write this week. last week life interfered and i really only got to sketch out some dot points, so i have given myself about four and a half days to write 10,000 words. we'll see.

and all i really want to do is knit socks. i spent some time on the weekend deciding what to cast on post-waving lace (i still have the contrast mens socks to finish but they are the non-challenging, knit in the car socks.) i need something more complicated. this is all the sock wool i have to work with:

i want to do more lace, but am saving the pink dappled one up the back for the simple lace socks pattern in vintage knits. i have lots of cotton blend and a bamboo in there which seem to make sense for summer, so i thought about that front red and purple lana grossa millenweit for jaywalkers but i couldnt figure out how to do the required number of stitches over three needles not four. (if anyone has any ideas about that id be happy to hear it).

and then i remembered one of my SSS challenges was to try magic loop. i have some 2.25 knit picks circs and i thought i would try the jaywalkers with them, but then i discovered the cable was too short. so i looked through my Options set but the smallest tip is 3.5mm. then i saw that the cotton socks in IW Favourite Socks uses larger needles, so i thought i would knit a test magic loop swatch and try that technique with that pattern and the lana grossa:



magic loop proved to be not as hard as i thought and i managed to make this:

an egg sock.

but do you think i can get it to work for the actual sock pattern with 60 something stitches? nooooo. three cast ons and counting.

meanwhile, my fingers are getting VERY itchy.

k xx

edit: 6.05pm. i did four rounds of the flame wave pattern at lunch time but it got completely lost in the colours of this yarn. i think it needs a plain yarn. frogged it. so, i either do some serious maths this evening to work out whether i can do jaywalkers on 3.5mm using magic loop, or i go back to dpns. sigh.