Sunday, April 20, 2008

It's nice to have friends

Yesterday The Mister and I had a lovely Saturday together. We made it a whole "date day. " We decided to head out to the Plum Island Reservation. Neither one of us had ever been out there, so we went all the way down the 6 miles to the very end of the island. It's awesome! The weather was fantastic and, although there was quite a number of people out tootling around, it was relaxing and quiet. The raptors are doing their yearly migration about now, passing over Plum Island in the process, so there were alot of bird watchers around, eyes glued to their binoculars and tally boards in hand. Apparently last weekend something over 400 hawks of various species were spotted passing in one day! Imagine that!

We went into downtown Newburyport to think about an early dinner and ran into blogless Sarah and her family and chatted for a bit. She has the cutest little boys. And her husband is no slouch either! ;-) I love a man who can sew...

We also ran into our friend Hillary and her husband on their way back from delivering a wedding cake. Hillary did our wedding cake for us last year and I can tell you that she is fantastic!

And then there was that strange moment of knitting stardom...

While the four of us were chatting on the sidewalk, a trio of very nice young ladies popped in and asked "excuse us, but did you knit that sweater?" Why...yes, I did! "Is that a Rogue?" Why, yes! Yes it is!

There commenced much happy conversation and greetings as the knitting sisterhood went public. It's so funny to run into other knitters in a crowd of muggles. The muggles always look a bit confused, and then mostly amused. You just never know when one of your otherwise "normal" friends could turn out to have the knitting skeleton in their closet. ;-)

The best part of the story - without even thinking about it, we introduced ourselves by our Ravelry names! ha! It wasn't until later that evening, when I got home and logged onto Ravelry, that I got her given name! So hello to wineNwool and I hope to run into you again soon! If you have any trouble with your Rogue, give a holler. I have a couple of good tips passed down to me from Julia. ;-)

Once on our way again we decided to stop in and have an early dinner at our friend Denise's restaurant Aquatini. We had been given a gift certificate for a wedding gift almost a year ago, and figured that it was now or never! The dinner was amazing, as always, and Holly's service just can't be beat. We had so much fun that we asked Denise if Chef Alex would like to make us a special First Anniversary dinner... and he said YES! I'm so excited! We had just a couple of little special requests, which he was happy to oblige, but the bulk of the menu is totally up to him. That's going to be the best part - the surprise! I hope Chef Alex has as much fun planning and creating our special dinner as I know we're going to have enjoying it!

Today started out with casting on for the American in China socks for The Mister. Five times. I'd never used Judy's Magic Cast On before, so that accounted for a couple of the false starts. But the main problem was the pattern. My toe just did not look like the toe in the pictures. I kept trying... still not right. I went onto Ravely looking for errata, and found one, but it was for much further up the foot than I was getting. Check other people's projects. Nothing. In desperation I went back to Knitty's site and...

...there were alterations to the pattern listed in red. Right where I suspected they might be. :-(

I cursed the site good and proper for sneaking those errata in after I'd printed out my copy, and never mentioning them anywhere. Darn you, Knitty! *shakes fist* Darn yoooou!!

But I got over it, annotated my copy, and carried on. In the end, I think I have beat it into submission.

















The pattern is for a man's foot with a 8.5" circumference. The Mister, being a tall guy, has bigger feet than that, so some adjustments had to be made in writing on the pattern and on the fly with the linen stitch repeats to accommodate his 9.5" feet. I've tried them on him as best I can with the needles in and I think it will be alright. He also has a very high instep, so I think it will all work out if it seems a tiny bit large now. But the main thing is this yarn. It looks so cool in the pattern. It's Spunky Eclectic Beefy Sock in Good Morning. It looks so great, it deserves a closeup.













Everyone together now - Oooo! Aaaaah!

These are going to be soooo cool...

1 comment:

KT said...

That Spunky Eclectic is knitting up SO beautifully! Nice choice of pattern! :)