Thank you all for your suggestions and recommendations as to cast ons and needle types for my slippery, alpaca lace weight.  I’m looking forward to trying them out (probably more than once, knowing me!) and I will, of course, pass along the results.

A couple of nights ago, I stumbled - in my usual haphazard fashion - upon this pattern for Newborn Baby Socks and just had to give it a try.  Yikes, these are small!

These are done in Lionbrand Magic Stripe sock yarn and I even managed to get the repeats to reasonably coincide.  Took about an hour to knock out each one.  OF course, when those were finished, I had something else I just had to try :)

Koigu!

I realize this is hand wash wool, but the baby will probably outgrow them before they ever need to be cleaned and that ball of vivid colors was just sitting there, begging me to be some pretty little baby socks.  So what could I do?  I mean really…

I will be leaving for my trip next Wednesday morning and I’m going to be gone for 16 days this time :)  My father and I are flying down to Argentina where we will catch the Crystal Symphony at Buenos Aires and sail from there, with various stops, up to Miami, Florida.  Looks like this:

I have never been below the equator before and I’m quite looking forward to a whole sky full of new constellations!  Southern Cross (Crux) here I come!

Anyway, this is by way of letting you know that we will miss three Thursday Knitting Chatters before I get back and, of course, there will be no posts during that time.  The chat tomorrow night will be the last until we can resume on May 4th.  There will be a post this Friday but next week is up in the air because I am going to be busy getting things ready, keeping last minute appointments and deciding, not so much what yarn to bring with me, but what to leave home!  Always a difficult decision :)

Knitting Chatters is on for tomorrow night!  See you then :)

I met with my friend for brunch yesterday.  She had reached the heel of her sock and we negotiated the heel flap, turning the heel and picking up the gusset stitches.  She’s a natural, I’m telling you, and I can’t wait to see her finished footwear.  She’s using one of Wildfoote’s hand paints; it’s called Symphony and it’s a luscious blend of blue, teal, violet and fuchsia - these socks are going to be awesome!

It is such a pleasure to share a passion with someone else and not only have them understand, but catch it themselves!

Me?  Ahhh, well, I wasn’t nearly that ambitious.  I had wanted to work on the shawl but I need to set aside a fairly large block of time for that because of the length of the rows.  That never happened (though I have hopes for this afternoon!), but I did manage a couple of things for the Dulaan bag (cap, cheerfully modeled by one of Myria’s grapefruit):

Saturday night I sat up a lot longer than I should have trying to get a feel for working with lace weight alpaca.  I have quite a bit of a very lovely color and had hoped I could make a “cruise” project out of it.  It’s sinful feeling stuff but it’s so slippery I couldn’t get anywhere with it.  I cast on to both wood and bamboo needles in a variety of sizes with no notable success whatsoever.  It’s so slick that even the slip knot that I started the cast-ons with wouldn’t stay firm.  Right now I’m thinking that I’m going to have to strand it with something else to be able to use it at all.  Does anyone have any insight on this?  Velcro knitting needles, maybe?  Super glue?

Happy Monday!