Ladybugs & Yarn

Tomorrow morning, just after dawn, there’ll be a van stuffed with boxes and furniture zooming along Route 11 South, toward Elmwood. I had a promise made to me that it would all work out, and it was kept.

It’ll be 7-10 days before the internet gets hooked up in the flat, so I shall speak to you all again after Labour Day.

Here we go.

It’s been a panic-stricken few days here at Chez Kay, as things that were supposed to have been approved were not approved and financial arrangements fell through. I though I had run out of options, but my father is bound and determined to get me through this degree and moving on with my life, and I can’t even fathom how I possibly deserve all that he’s given me up to this point, let alone what he’s prepared to do this year so I can finish my education. He tells me not to worry about it and to let him handle it for a few days, because he’s going to figure it out, but of course that’s like telling the rain not to fall.

I’m far from at ease, but I’m continuing to pack and make plans (with some alterations). If things can be accomplished through sheer force of will, this will happen. At the moment, I’m trying to focus on the things that are within my scope of influence–I’m sealing and labelling my boxes, and checking my list to make sure I don’t leave anything vital behind. I’m doing a good job so far of packing things together in some form of organisation… so far.

I’m kind of excited about my kitchen & bathroom (and living room too, really), because things match now so I don’t feel like a straight-out-of-high-school student who’s cobbled together everything that they could find secondhand or pillage from the parents’ house. My first apartment had a white lacquered dining room table, a lot of milk crates as end tables, and a brown-and-orange flowered sofa that my parents bought when they were married in 1972. I didn’t care at the time, and truthfully, I wouldn’t care now if that’s what I was taking with me again, but there is something rather nice about looking at a room that’s your own and having it coordinate and have some form of decor. I’ve been slowly acquiring furniture and other household items since that first place, but most of them have been kept in storage and/or corners of the basement waiting for me, so it didn’t hit me until I started packing that hey, it all goes together.

The apartment decor was a stroke of luck–the kitchen is black & white, and all of my tools/small appliances are red/black/white (very retro), plus, the bathroom is white with gold trim and the bathroom stuff (gifts from my mother–lovely ones, too) is beige with white & gold. My bedroom furniture is a black & mahogany-coloured set I bought a few years ago; parts of it (my computer desk and bookshelves) are going in the living room with the black & mahogany end tables from my parents’ house. The sofa that I’m taking with me, pillaged from the basement here, is black and beige, so even that’ll coordinate. I might have a small streak of interior decorator in me somewhere–I love moving in and unpacking and choosing where things will go.

The cat tree is a violent green and won’t match anything. <3 But the kittens love it, and I’m going to place it near the living room window so they have a comfortable perch.

I went to the work-attire store today to find scrubs and a lab coat, and they had neither that matched the specifications of my course. There’s another store I can check, and I can also order them straight from the college if nothing else works out. I’d be perfectly content to work in scrubs the rest of my career, but it depends on where I work–hospital pharmacies allow scrubs, but most retail pharmacies don’t.

On a knitting-related note, I went to a get-together at the beach last night with the knitting night girls, as it was the LYS’s fourth birthday. There was tons of food, wine, maniacal laughter, and of course knitting. It was such a gorgeous area of the beach, too, at a cottage owned by one of the women on the outer curve of the bay, so that when you look across the water in one direction you can see the faint outline of the Gaspé coast. The other direction is open sea.

To my utter surprise… I got presents! Since I’m leaving. First, there was a lovely little spinning wheel pin. Next, there was a skein of Fleece Artist merino in gorgeous rainbow colours. Last, there was an awesome spiral-bound knitting design journal–it has pages for writing up patterns, little sketch templates to draw designs, and chart paper that’s not square, but is proportioned like knitting stitches are.

Okay, it’s about time for me to be settling in–tomorrow is the start of my last stretch of work. Five days from now, I’ll be done.

On a final note, I have my new address now if anyone wants/needs it.

Before I get to the FO… thank you, you lovely people, for the comments to my last post. The warm fuzzies were much appreciated. I do always feel a little bit guilty about not responding to things either personally or in a timely manner, but under the circumstances I feel I will be forgiven. <3 I have fifty thousand things to sort out in the next week and a half, and I should be in full-on panic mode, but I'm... not. Perhaps that, in itself, is a good sign.

So! Socks.

Pattern: Pattern? What pattern?
Yarn: Opal Rainforest 6ply in Flamingo
Needles: 3.0mm circs

And here’s the product of those long queues/wait times. Plain ol’ stockinette socks in cute self-patterning yarn, finished with enough yarn left over to knit another pair. They were worked over 56 sts with a 1×1 rib cuff, an Eye of Partridge heel flap, and a flat toe. I have them on my feet already, of course.

Excuse the recent blog silence. I’ve been running around like the proverbial headless chicken, as I have just two and a half weeks left and I’m trying to get packed and organised. I’m rubbish at packing–a few boxes will be organised, I’m sure, but the rest’ll be unlabelled chaos.

I’ve managed a bit of knitting during waiting times at banks/doctors/government offices. One of the Opal Flamingo socks is done and I’m going to cast on for the other the next time I get a few spare moments. I’m still stockpiling knitted dishcloths/washcloths for the apartment, too.

I’ve managed some reading during those waiting times, too. The last thing (or things, actually) was Star Trek’s Crucible trilogy. I loved McCoy’s book (starts just before “The City on the Edge of Forever” and follows two parallel lifetimes, both McCoy’s, one in which history was restored and one in which it wasn’t), really liked Spock’s book, and Kirk’s… well, I sort of wanted to throw it against a wall. Hard.

I’ve been a bad Kay lately, and haven’t replied to e-mails and comments yet. I’ll get to it! I promise. <3

Time to resume running around.

I’ve been doing a lot of sock-knitting this week. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been productive sock-knitting. First I had a too-tight Bordello sock, then I had a too-loose Austrian sock. I cast on for a regular 64-st stockinette sock with my usual 3mm needles, and found out that yep, my gauge has altered enough so that I’m going to have to go down a needle size to 2.75mm for a basic sock. Except that I have no 2.75mm circs, because I’ve never needed any.

The gauge changing, though, that’s a good thing. I’ve always been a tight knitter and am still leaning toward more tight than loose, but I used to have such a deathgrip on my needles that I’d get 8 sts per inch on 3.25mm needles with sport-weight yarn. And for the record, any sort of decrease is hell on wheels when you’re knitting like that. Knitting with lace-weight yarns helped, I believe, because they felt so fragile at first that I was afraid to snap the strands by tugging too hard. Anyhow! So I guess 2.75mm needles for sock-knitting are something closer to average size, and my hands & wrists don’t hurt after half an hour anymore.

Back to the sock mojo. Due to the lack of 2.75mm needles, and also due to the fact that a lovely pink ball of sport-weight Rainforest sock yarn has been sitting in plain view for weeks, I cast on for a pair of basic 56-sts stockinette socks on 3mm needles and the fit is perfect. The density of the knitted fabric pleases me, too. There’s only one less stitch and a couple less rows per inch, but sport-weight socks seem to work up so much faster, don’t they? I just turned the heel on the first of these Flamingo socks and I only started them late yesterday evening.

And while I’m on the subject, the needles I’m using–KnitPicks Classic Circs–just sing. I love them for socks. I have the Options set, which I use almost to the exclusion of any other needles, and I’ve been trying to get more Classic Circs, but the sizes I need haven’t, so far, been available when I’m able to place an order. (I’d love to be able to squeak out one last small order before I move, to get those circs and a copy of Fitted Knits.)

I might be only window-shopping as far as yarn is concerned, but I should mention that WEBS has some fabulous close-out sales on.

I’m probably breaking some law of sock-pr0n, but I’m going to use my STR Lightweight in Downpour to knit a Falling Water scarf–I downloaded the pattern somewhere online and am hoping it’ll show off the lovely subtle yarn colours well.

I’m rambling. There’s one thing I’d love to talk about (design work eee!), and one thing I need to talk about (my inability to allow pride in certain types of accomplishments) but I’m avoiding both for different reasons.

I’m also going to avoid waffling on any longer, and am going back to the Flamingos.