New Year knitting resolution

(Ok - I know it's Feb so I'm a little late. But Chinese New Year is Sat and I am Chinese so it counts.)

I haven't been knitting socks for very long. Sure, I owned sock needles and I even had a beaten up ball of Patons Kroy that I'd reknit a bazillion times. My friend (and co-blogger) gave me "Knitting on the Road" by Nancy Bush for my birthday last summer and it still didn't jumpstart my sock knitting.

I don't know what did. Perhaps, it was Socktoberfest or maybe I was finally tired of making scarves and mittens and I wanted other small projects to work on. In any case, I wanted to knit sox.

In Sept, I did some research and selected Wendy's Generic Toe-Up pattern (I like the idea of never running out of yarn before the foot's done). I ripped out the Kroy sock and tried again. I gave up fairly quickly because there were a million breaks in the yarn. I dug around in the stash and found the DG Confetti that I'd bought at Fibrefest International. In about a week, I had knit a complete pair of socks. These were gifted to a friend (hey, Pauline!).

And I haven't been able to stop. Twelve pairs (two pairs for my hubby's size 13 feet) and 3 singles later, I am addicted... With the exception of one single sock, all other socks are plain, boring, ho-hum stockinette. That leads me to my resolution... I want to knit non-plain stockinette socks. I want lacy, cable-y, interesting socks. My New Year resolution is (drumroll please) to knit non-stockinette socks. Pretty boring resolution, eh? I am going to try to knit all the socks that I like from Knitting on the Road - Canal Du Midi, Conwy, Dalarna, Denmark, Friday Harbor, New England, Spey Valley, Traveler's Stockings, Unst, and Whitby. I also have the book - "Knitting Vintage Socks" (also by Nancy Bush) so I may knit socks from there, too. We'll see how it goes.

Here is a picture of my second-to-last plain stockinette sock (I finished it today):

This sock was really annoying to knit - it pooled worse than the first one. There are sections where the colour repeats changed making it look like I had knit the sock from 3 different balls of yarn. The worst thing is that it doesn't match the first one at all. Sigh...

Cat picture of the day

We have a big sofa (almost 4ft deep, over 8 ft long, and big enough for my 6'4" husband). The back cushions are not attached and they're also down filled so they can be moulded to your body. Phoebe loves to sleep on top of the back cushions because there's enough softness to cradle her body but it's not so soft that she feels tippy. This is what stared back at me when I turned my head to the left:

Isn't she special? She looks mad because I wouldn't let her crawl into my lap. I was using the laptop and she tends to step on the touch pad/mouse buttons and mess things up. Maybe one day, I'll let her co-author a blog entry.