I’ve decide to do the Sockdown Challenge on Ravelry this cycle around, mostly to keep myself honest and try some new patterns. There’s a pretty good list going for the coming year, and I’m looking forward to doing some new and different things.
September’s challenge is to do either an orange sock, or a Cookie A design. Since orange is my least favorite color, I’m going with Cookie A’s Maelstrom sock, which I cast on this afternoon. I’m using the Trekking Hand Art yarn I bought in York last week. I really liked how the blues were coming together when I balled it up, so it should look pretty good in the sock itself. I’ve only managed to get through the set up and first repeat of the ribbing pattern, so not much to report on the pattern itself yet.
The other thing I’ve had on the needles for about a week now (including much swatching) is the Brocade Leaves Pullover from the Fall ’08 Knitscene. I’m really liking it so far. The pattern is easy enough to memorize, though for some reason, I need to follow it along when transitioning between each row of leaves, because I’ve managed to get off on the first leaf row on all three rows I’ve done so far. It’s been easy to fix, and it only happens on those rows. Once you get them set up, it’s pretty easy to tell if you’re getting off in subsequent rows.
I’ve also started to do some serious planning for my coming Blueberry gift-giving. I’d resolved not to give Blueberry a quilt, but his older brother has been showing up in recent pictures with the quilt I made for him, which I’ll admit gives me some warm fuzzy feelings, so I decided to make one for Blueberry as well. I’ve located all my boy-appropriate flannel this weekend, and by Saturday will be narrowing it down to what I need to make the Yellow Brick Road pattern. It’s actually a very easy pattern, which I used to great effect for Kallina’s quilt (two baby quilts back). As you can see from above, I have plenty of fabric to choose from, so I’ll probably only need to pick up some backing fabric, and maybe something for the binding, depending on how I decide to handle that. I’ve got the week of September 15th off, so I figure the least I can do is get Blueberry’s quilt done during that time.
On a final note, the above is a picture of the three projects I currently have on my needles. Anyone care to hazard a guess of what my favorite color is?