Hello Monday and a pair of true monster socks (2015 FO# 11)

Last week flew by in a massive deadline blur. I honestly didn't even realise I'd missed a week of posting until I sat down now to type this. That's hopeless! The days and weeks feel like they're zooming so fast at the moment I can't even keep up. I am seriously tempted to buy one of these gorgeous colouring books to help me be a bit more mindful and slow down. (haha when would I find the time to do that. Bluergh.)

I did take a few minutes time out today to take pictures of my latest pair of socks. These are full-on monster socks, made out of the 5-10g balls of sock yarn left after a pair of socks have been finished.

To make these, I collected all of the similar weight and feel sock yarns I had and divided them each into two balls. I then cast on and spiralled two at a time all the way up the sock, using an afterthought heel.

One thing I didn't do which I probably should have was weigh the itty bitty balls. Although I followed the same yarn sequence for both socks, since some of the balls were much bigger than others, you can see that the colour changes occur at different places in each sock (the right one becomes a lot more blue faster than the right one does, for example).

These taught me a lot about coordinating colours in scrap yarn. If I were to do it again, I'd divde the balls into 'warm' and 'blue' and spiral accordingly, so there would always be a bit of contrast, rather than what I did which was randomly pick the closest ball to me whenever I needed to add a new yarn.

That said, they are super warm and comfortable and when they're on, the colour discrepancies aren't really obvious.

I have now packed these socks up with the helical stripes set and will drop them off at KOGO, hopefully tomorrow.

In other news:

I know I am not alone in feeling like this winter has been going forever. However, I was ecstatic when I popped outside to observe that some of the coriander seeds I planted before this recent cold snap have come up! I was certain that they would have been destroyed by the frost.

So, although spring hasn't actually sprung yet, there are signs that it might be coming soon. 

Hopefully, very very soon - I'm done with the cold (and so is Lucy).

FO Friday: Helical striped cowl and matching mitts (2015 FOs #9 and #10)

My life is extremely boring at the moment - write, edit, rinse, repeat. Last night, however, I went out! I went to a screening of Dirty Laundry Live - on a school night! After 10pm! What a wild child. It was very funny and it really was great to get out of the house and away from my computer (on a side note, I encourage everyone to get tickets to sit in the audience for TV shows once in a while. It's fun to see how things are done, it's free and sometimes they give you wine. For me, it's something a bit different to what I usually do and different is good).

We had 10 minutes to kill before leaving so I decided to take the opportunity to take some photos of two of the projects I've just finished. This was a bad idea! These photos are terrible and odd - they capture a lot of detail but tell you nothing at all about the project. Let me illustrate this in more detail.

This shot tells you nothing about how the cowl sits (it falls to just above my belly button).

In this shot, it is possible to see the desperation and exhaustion of a week of thesis work in the giant bags under my eyes.

This one's okay. The pattern is Mitt Envy - it's free and it's excellent. I added 10 rows extra to the cuff to provide extra under-jumper warmth.

The cowl can be worn in a long loop or doubled for a really warm, snuggly wrap.

(Oh, those bags!)

I'm not even sure what this shot was trying to demonstrate!

The wool I used was Heirloom Easy Care 5ply, four balls exactly. It was a bit rough to work with but softened up a lot on blocking and I think it will be really warm and durable. Now that it's done, I'm going to drop this project off at my local Lincraft KOGO collection point and hopefully it will find a good home where it is of some use to somebody.

Till next week :)