Yes, that’s right, I’m back from my two-week-long family trip to California! I had fun in Chico and Lake Almanor, but there’s nothing better than sleeping in your own bed after couches and one rapidly deflating air mattress. However, even with the long lull blog access and multi-hour periods of driving, I do not have much knitting to show. Apparently, my feet are too big for standard Jaywalkers in this particular yarn and needles, which I found out after trying to force the first one onto my foot on completion of the heel. So, those have been sent to the frog pond (for you non-knitters, ‘frogging’ is the act of unraveling an [unsatisfactory at best] knitted object, although I’m not sure what the origins of the term are). Oh wow look at me, showing my addiction to parentheses once again, using a pair of them inside another. ANYWAY, back to the main topic! (yes, this is why I call my writing ‘ramblings’…you probably have noticed by now how many tangents I go on) After rescuing the offending sock yarn, I proceeded provisional-cast on the toe for some toe-up razor shell lace socks, which are turning out to be almost Jaywalker-esque, but stretchier and a little bit less slanty.

Hopefully they will have a better fate, putting aside the fact that I haven’t picked them up in the last week. The Mitts are still on hiatus, although they can’t be for much longer because I need to finish them in time for their recipient’s birthday.
I also have been dabbling in the design for a top secret sweater, which I am going to be careful about posting pictures of until I can submit the pattern to a certain online knitting magazine. You might get a teeny peek once it’s progressed more, but right now it’s not really worth the disk space, which I am incidentally running low on.
In non-knitting affairs, I read through my aunt’s copy of The Devil Wears Prada, and my parents took all of the cousins and my sister and I to see the very first showing of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” in the adjacent rural town of Susanville, where there is not much else to do than go to Wal-Mart (my severe dislike of that particular corporation I will not go into) or the movie theater. As for the book I read, I liked the movie better, and as for the movie I saw, I liked the book better. “That’s all”…
I also am working through recycling the yarn from a 70/30 wool and angora sweater that I bought at New to You (a nice consignment shop in a close by town) that contains thousands of yards of yarn for around $15, a huge bargain considering that if you bought something similar to that (such as Classic Elite Lush) in that quantity, the cost would be more than I would ever be able to fathom with my teenager’s allowance money.

This is only the yarn unraveled from part of one sleeve, so there will be much, much more to do in the coming days, and I’ll need to take the kinks out somehow. I’m not sure how much I like the icy blue color (which is sort of the color I imagine our carpets looked when this house was first built…now they’re sort of grayish and stained). What I do know is that whatever I do with it, it’ll have nice stitch definition, because the original sweater has a big, nice looking aran pattern on the front.