@#$*(@*$(#@*$(@#!!!!

I mean seriously. I think I've had an error on pretty much every row of every lace section in this silly blanket. I started this in July 2009, intending it for one baby; quickly realized I wasn't going to finish it in time, so I thought, okay, it'll be for this other baby... yeah, that didn't happen either. I'm not going to curse it now by determining what baby it'll be for. Maybe it'll be for me, in my dotage, to warm my ancient bones when I turn 99 or so…

The sad thing is how tired and uneven my stitches look when they've been ripped and reknitted 85 jillion times. Hoping it gets a bit better in the blocking:

Anyway, got the dratted thing straightened out again for the umpteenth time and we'll see how it goes.

You know what I love? I love these socks:

Charade by Sandra Park. Utterly fabulous, addictive herringbone pattern (shown here sideways):

Wouldn't it make the handsomest man's scarf, too? I have managed not to make any booboos on these so far (knocking on wood now!), and I have a feeling I'll make several pairs (as I did with the lovely Conwy socks) because they're so mesmerizing and wearable. Plus a nice 64-stitch sock for my loose-knittin' fingers.

Tub saga

Happy New Year all! It's been a while. I didn't knit as much over December as I might have liked. I don't really know why – I even had two weeks off of work — but I seem to have spent the time off differently than by knitting. While I was doing whatever it was I was doing, workman came and removed this:

Ok, I admit that looks pretty reasonable in that picture, but if you looked closely at the surface of the tub, you'd see the whole thing actually looked like this:

and if you stepped in it, you'd find the soft spots, and if you stepped in the wrong spot you were going to go through to the kitchen. I knew where this wrong spot was, and avoided it, but guests didn't, and I really didn't want guests raining into my kitchen over the holidays.

So the postman first delivered this:



I was quite excited, but it turned out to be cast defectively and had to be returned. Sadly, the old tub was already removed by the time we discovered this, so I was tubless for, in the end, three weeks. Fortunately we have a stall shower in our master bathroom. But I missed my baths.

It took a while, and the guests had to use our shower in the end because the tub wasn't done, but now I have this:




I'm pretty happy :-) The bathtub has a lovely, comfy sloping back and I love the little gold tiles I picked out to decorate the otherwise plain white.

I did finish this pair of socks for a friend recently:

They're Cookie's Hedera socks, done in Cookie's leftover yarn (she destashed it and I bought it). For some reason I had a lot of trouble somewhere in the middle of these, so it took me a few YEARS to finish them. Poor Pat was waiting a long time for her socks, but hurrah, they are done and fit!

I do have a couple other knitting triumphs to show you, but I'll wait for another post :-)