WIP Wednesday - On the Needles and Between the Pages

On the Needles
Still working on my vanilla socks. I finished the first one and am about 1/3 through the second one. Still not terribly keen on the yarn, but never mind :) The fish-lips-kiss heel works really well for toe-up socks. Granted, mine is a bit big, but that is 100% my own fault, as I accidentally knit past the starting point of the heel, and was too lazy to rip back ;) It's perfect purse-knitting though.

Thanks to being on vacation the second set of Sleeves (by Martina Behm) has seen quite a bit of progress. I'm about 75% done with the first sleeve, and love the colours and the yarn just as much the second time around :)

On the other hand, the Thirty Valentines shawl has seen very little progress. I'd have thought it would have been perfect plane knitting, but apparently I get really lazy when on planes and just want mindless knitting rather than check-the-chart-for-every-few-stitches knitting.

Between the Pages
I didn't really plan it, but I seem to be making my way through an informal read-through of the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. I finished "Voyager" while on vacation and am currently listening to "Dragonfly in Amber" and reading "Drums of Autumn". (Yes, I know I'm reading them out of order, but DiA is my least favourite, so I'm hoping listening to it instead of reading it will improve my opinion of it).

I got lucky :) I found "Things I Learned From Knitting" in The Strand, NYC and obviously had to get it. It wasn't until I got back home and started reading it, that I discovered it was a signed copy!! Awesome! :)

Stash Stories
Souvenir yarn doesn't count as real stash, right? At least that's what I'm telling myself, because I did go kind of nuts while abroad. But fancy yarn is SO much cheaper in the US than in Denmark! So really I saved a lot of money!! Yeah, that's my story and I'm sticking to it :) But Knitty City in New York City and Looped Yarn Works in Washington D.C. are now my two new favourite yarn shops :) I highly recommend both of them. ESPECIALLY Knitty City as the employees are extremely friendly and the entire shop has more of a community feel than a shop feel. One of the employees even took the time to give me an impromptu spinning lesson when she heard I was interested :) :) :)

All in all I ended up with 7 skeins of yarn, 1 Turkish drop spindle, 1 braid of BLF roving and 1 bag of corrigale roving :) I've spun up 50g of the corrigale already, and it's currently resting so I should be able to ply it tomorrow. It's uneven as and totally ugly, but I don't even care - it's MINE :D :D :D

I also ended up buying "Socktopus", and am blaming this entirely on Minding My Own Stitches! After having seen all of her gorgeous socks I just couldn't help myself :) And of course I did need some new patters for all the gorgeous new sock yarn I'd gotten hold of, right? Of course right :)