Pattern: Monkey socks by Cookie A Raveled here
Yarn: Butternut Woolens Super Sock Yarn (this yarn is being discontinued so no extra facts)
Needles: US 2 (2.75mm) knitpicks harmony fixed circular

Mods: I knit a short row heel with the pattern flowing down into the heel. Since I took my FO pics this week, I was unable to get my heel in the picture. I also allowed the pattern to descend into the toe a bit more. I really had fun working the decreases in the toe along with the pattern.

Facts to remember: You might “know” the pattern but do you really. I somehow forgot half the pattern and made the repeat about half as many rows. I kept wondering why the pattern was flowing so fast and stiffly. Then I figured it out and groaned as I ripped out 2 repeats of the first sock. My DPN gauge and magic loop gauge are just a bit off, enough that one sock pooled and the other barber poled. Also I need to remember there is a too tight sock gauge. I first tried this on US 1 (2.5mm) needles and was confused at the cardboard texture. I think it did not help that I was knitting a woolie wool in Houston as the weather begins to heat up. The yarn was more enjoyable to knit once I was back in the NW.

Things I Love: Doing a simple easy pattern that allows me to design while knitting and that flew off my needles when I neglected it so much.

Reaction of the recipient: I don’t know yet, but these and a whole mess of packages are being shipped out on Monday.

Many of you are probably here to find out about Alisa. Sadly, I feel I need to delay release. The three smallest sizes work, but the largest two sizes are having problems. My test knitter Erica is on it. So I guess this is a WIP. Erica talks about it over on her blog. The new date is only a few days away. Since a few of you probably will wait to purchase when the contest ends, the new release date is Saturday May 3rd. So sorry everyone. I want this pattern to fit everyone right so please be patient.

My monkeys are flying along. These socks are turning out to be more of a winter weight pair of socks than summer socks. Since my pal lives in the Northern half of the US, I hope that it is all ok.

I just received another present. I won a blog contest and I was allowed to choose from a list of books. Since I missed the Yarn Harlot’s visit to town, I requested her new book. Churchable and I will enjoy reading it.

Have a great day and I hope your week has been good. Our little pocket of Washington has been enjoying clear sunny skies.

Last week you saw the start of this little monkey sock. Well it flew off the needles just as fast as everyone says they should. Yes I cast-on Tuesday last week but had to rip what I had done twice. I seem to have forgotten the pattern in the 6 1/2 months since I finished the last pair of monkeys. Well all is well now and the first sock was done on DPNs since my 2.75mm circulars were back in Washington. Now that I am home, I switched the second sock onto my 2.75mm circular. I guess this is the test of a gauge change from one knitting method to another.

As you probably notice, the last few WIP posts have been taken outside. It is all in compliance with PS3: Earth. Greens, Browns & Metallics rule the day. Don’t you love the green flowers on my tree. They are so funky. I have no clue what they are. If anyone knows I would love an answer.

The Endpaper Mitts have been pulled out again. I told myself I had to finish a UFO before I could start my skirt. I really want to cast-on for it. I have 3 balls of yarn wound and my friend is planning on knitting it with me. This weekend may show a new pair of mitts to wear at the coast.

Don’t forget to check back on Saturday for my contest. I have decided that there are many levels to enter yourself and each level gets you another chance at winning. There will be 3 prizes. Something for every kind of knitter.

Alisa is chugging along. Not too fast but at least I am making progress and I still have a week and a half before my must be done or panic date. There will be preview pictures of Alisa posted on my birthday April 26th. I am sure I will be done before next week starts since I will be at a retreat all weekend and what do you do at a retreat but listen to people talk and knit while listening. It is such a nice relaxing activity. Can you get a sense of the beauty that Alisa will be? Knittymuggins who just finished testing it, fell in love with it when she tried it on. I can’t wait to show ya’ll the perfect spring top. Ok well maybe not perfect but comfy and cool top.

I seem to have a new sock sitting here in the dirt. Might it mean that I am done with a certain troublesome sock?!?! Well you will have to wait till Friday to check out the FOs that have climbed off my needles. The new sock is being a bit shy. First it made me think that it would knit up nicely on 2.5mm sock needles. Well maybe a st st sock, but not a fancy monkey in need of flexibility to do its monkey antics. So I switched it up to a 2.75mm DPN set. Hopefully this size works out better. Right now the lovely wool of Butternut woolens is not so nice here in the heat of Houston. I kind of need the cool Washington weather to knit on these. For a moment I thought I had grabbed some strange acrylic sock yarn to knit with, which I knew was false but man does the humidity get me here. I feel sorry for Texas knitters.

I have been busy. I have been documenting my time with photos but whenever I log on and sit down to edit photos and upload photos, things crash and so thus I have bided my time.

I attended the PDX blogger Holiday Knit-a-thon. It was really fun to meet everyone and catch up with other. Here is a photo to prove I was there. We met at Gino’s which is owned by one of our members. Thanks again Deb.

I knit on my Tree Jacket while I was there. I am knitting it along with the Sexy Knitters Club. I had gotten to the end of the garter stitch section that day. Someone took a photo of me with it on and the neck around my face, but so far no one is fessing up. Since then I have taken pics for WIP Wednesday, which had a computer crash while I was uploading pics and editing them. And I finished it on Saturday night at church. It is currently blocking its little heart out. This is were I was on Wednesday.

We also held a yarn swap at the knit-a-thon. I got 4 skeins of yarn. Only 3 are shown below because, the other one was a simple skein of TOFUtsies that I took pity on and brought home.

I also have been working on socks for my Brother-in-law and his two boys for Christmas.

I also purchased my first skein of Malabrigo. I love the color. I hope ya’ll like this sexy yarn photo. If you would like more, click on the pic and there are more on flickr.

My monkey pal flaked on me. Amazingly the angels jumped on it and the packages pummeled my front door the week of Thanksgiving.

I received a little monkey name Hoodwinked, which I thought was so aptly named since I missed out on getting a proper package. The socks were a lovely color of Koigu but they did not fit me, they fit churchable.

The last bits that I have to show you are my FOs for the week. I actually spent quite a bit of time in front of my sewing machine.

First up: A simple black A-line skirt

This is a simple skirt that I drafted from my measurements with a invisible side zipper and a faced waist. I don’t know what the fabric is but it did not melt at the almost cotton heat setting. Most of my fabric stash is unmarked except that each box has a color grouping.

Second: Reversible Place mats

These are to be given to the bride and groom of the wedding we attended in Arizona. The reason we went on a big road trip to Utah and beyond. They were going to be folding a 1,000 cranes for their wedding, so I gathered inspiration from this. The fabric is quilting cotton from the local quilt store. Simple no pattern place mats.

Boxed and ready to go

Spread out. The other side of all the place mats is the color of the napkin.

Third: Pillows for a friend

I was kind of productive last week which means I did not work on my design projects as much, but hey I just turned one in today. Two more to go. Yeah.

We have a few members missing from this illustrious blog. One is finished and one is hiding in the WIP basket (he realizes that I am bored with him – I guess I will have to find a time when I need something mindless to do and I can knit the little bugger.)

So that leaves us with our little monkey, how she grows.

The monkey pattern is fairly easy. It actually is part of the pattern that I am knitting for Si, my sil. It is super simple and is very intuitive. The monkey has been walking around town with me while I run errands and wait in lines. It grew the longest when I went to the Performing Arts Center in Portland with churchable last week. I got to the heel and started working on something else since I had not decided what heel to do. I did a short row heel since my pal has never gotten the opportunity to try out this heel on her feet. Personally it is my favorite of the standard heels, but that could change when I start messing around with Cat Bordhi’s new structures.

If you want to see the progress I have made with Si’s Christmas present, you will have to hop over to my ravelry project page. I really am glad that I am done with the lace portion of it and I am excited to be doing plain st st. I am onto the smaller pieces and have a sleeve and the top portion to finish. This project is going fairly smoothly.

The last project on the needles that is of interest to my dear readers is the Entrelec sock. I don’t spend much time on this beauty. I just lost the motivation when they turned out not to be knee-high length. But I am still working on them.

That is it for now. Look forward to a FO post and new projects jumping on the needles. There are several sock yarns jockeying for time, which one will get first dips (Hint: I have a skein of each type of STR. Will I give in to the wiles of the Silkie or go for a buffer sock?)

Houston we have a problem. This UFO has surfaced in the general vicinity of the mending basket. Is there really a mending basket or is it the place clothing goes to die a sad lonely death?

This here vision of oranginess has been hanging out since the afternoon of churchable’s surprise 30th bday party. That was almost 2 years ago. I love orange but this here goddess of loveliness has a problem. A big ok minor problem of strap length so that the girls are decently accentuated.

See that makes a big difference. I don’t know why I forgot this sweet maiden but I am in desperate need of FO land. Ok yes I get high on FOs. I like them. What? you mean that there is joy in the process of knitting. I was there once, but then I learned to knit fast and became a FO addict. Mu…st ha…ve fin..ish..ed ……..ob…ject NOW.

Oh you want to know the name of this simple little tank. It has a plain name since the translators don’t really care for fanciness in the Rebecca magazines. It is simply called the pale green top # 13 in Issue 12.

Um Oh hi! I got distracted over on the Rebecca website looking at the new issue. I started dreaming about cabled shorts. Ok seriously I would not wear them in public. I am not sure if my inner self could take it, but think about sleep shorts. Oooohhhhh… They even have a poncho that is crying out to me. Now that is just wrong. Me? a poncho? Picture, go lie to some skinny model that they would look good in it. Not me.

Well I will babble on about Rebecca and the siren call of weird but oddly compelling German knitting fashion on Friday. Um was I seriously scarred by my year in High School in Germany to like their fashion? I came away with a serious love of German techno music. Did it effect my fashion sense? Well I can tell you that I would never knit the cow sweater or cave women dress. (FYI you can still buy the cow sweater mag. I wonder why it is not sold out?)

On to happier shinier almost finished items.

The tube top is coming along nicely. Isn’t it grand? I have one skein left. I almost want to forget about the other projects and cheat on them and only knit this baby. Well we will see. Just to show how much I am in love I will leave you with two more pics at the end of the post.

My monkey sock is coming along nicely. It has caused me to abandon my other socks. Hmmm…. I have not been bitten by the monkey but I do realize that I need to have some interest in my sock patterning or I don’t care about them. Now a message to all you socks and socks to be. Don’t ask to be plain vanilla socks. I will turn up Lime and Violet high enough not to hear you. If you are wondering what color my monkeys are, don’t ask I can’t tell you? (the answer is at the very bottom.)

Hello Anonymous commenter. If you are my secret pal, please email me and I will be happy to answer your questions there instead of here on my blog. Thanks.

This has been a melancholy day. My mood matches the weather. It has been a long time since I have allowed this to happen, but right now I am taking a day off. I am allowing things to happen. I am not bothering with stuff unless it is necessary. Is food really necessary?

The day started out with a bang literally. I woke up at 5:30 am thinking someone was breaking into my house. Come to find out it was only my shelf of cookbooks with their glass shelf falling to the ground with a resounding bang. Not really my chosen way to wake up on a morning alone. I crawled back into bed and slept until the dogs got annoyed and stated that they needed to use the backyard. I let them out and crawled back into my warmth and phoned a friend – A great friend, an artist and confidant, Care-bear. She talked me out my mood and told me that she talked to her company and she might be able to move back out here that cheered my morning. I can’t wait for her visit in October. We are going to spend time exploring our art together. Maybe we can create somethings together to be placed in her etsy store.

I did not do much today. I got up and went walking with my friend Carolyn, who is blogless and computerless. No worries she is a great friend and moral support. I slept, which felt so good. I did not realize that I have been running my sleep battery ragged. I started a new project with the yarn I got last night for free. I read the new Cat Bordhi book. I watched a movie about Beatrix Potter. It was a nice day. It was ok.

Last night I was in Portland for an event. An event put on by Blue Moon Fiber Arts. This event was the big launch for Cat Bordhi’s book on sock architectures. The PDX Bloggers met up early and sat in the front row since we are all such wall flowers. It was a lovely event where we got to spend time talking because traffic had detained many people. We played a game to find unusual items in your knitting bag – the prize was free yarn. I had post-it notes in my bag, which was the first item that was on the list that Tina and the gang had compiled. You still got yarn if it was unusual and not on the list. Kathy from Vast Amount of Spare Time had the most unusual item. Since my camera died as the event started, I will recommend that you look at my fellow bloggers entries. As the event ended, we were informed that the first edition has been sold out and the second printing will not be available until October.

Now since I have been Blog Hopping it this week, ya’ll have missed out on my knitting. What have I been doing? It does not feel like much but I have been busily knitting my work project at every possible moment. I feel the looming deadlines. Oh how I hate thee. Well they are a fact of life. But I have a few things that I can show you. My plan to knit on things in segments has been working. All my projects have been progressing.

My favorite one so far is the Coquette Lace Tube Top. My mannequin who is modeling it for me is a little smaller in the cup size than I am now so it doesn’t look so smoking on her. I added Short Row bust darts across the front while I attended a drag race last week with churchable. As you can see I am almost to the waist with the second ball of yarn. I have already started the third ball and I am almost ready to start the ribbing around the hips.

My secret knitting for Christmas has brought me to finish one panel and start the second. I have been bad and not actually finished the second ball of yarn. I am loving the pattern. It is really easy to follow and I hope it looks great on her for Christmas.

My Entrelec sock has cheated me. It did not want to be knee length. It demanded that I stop at the top of the ankle. So I have started the toe of the second sock and plan on doing this pattern again with a different sock yarn.

Churchable’s mariner socks are coming along nicely. They get some play whenever the projects near a switch point. For some reason, it refused to pose for the camera. It kept coming out fuzzy.

Lastly I mentioned that I cast on something new. I joined the crazy masses that have become Monkey crazed. After finally figuring out Churchable’s fit and understanding things about socks, I decided to join the next sock swap whatever it may be and to put my knowledge to use. I joined the Monkey Sock Swap 3 this month. I think you can still join. I got the rather fortune opportunity to knit for the hostess of this lovely swap – Rebecca of socks for mum. Thus I get to post wacked out photos to throw her off the scent.

What do you think? Is this picture odd enough? I have finished the first lace repeat. I would like to say this is a super easy pattern. I had the lace memorized before I was finished with round 4. Since it is my first monkey, I am not messing with the pattern much. I prefer knitting toe up but maybe I will give it a try next time. Or I could knit one top down and the other toe up. Hmmm. We shall see.

Edited to add new links to the Cat Bordhi event.