Assorted FOs, if one is liberal with the definition of "FO," as one, one hopes, will choose to be.

First, the promised Corazon mittens from the Knitty pattern. I used, as I noted below, an alpaca/silk blend from Knit Picks, and its shininess made it largely camera-proof. Mittens, it turns out, are rather awkward to photograph. In any case, my experience doing the colorwork vastly improved once I got it into my head how to knit without tangling the yarn: always keep one color under and the other over. It's slower at first, but you don't have to untangle the yarn every row or whatever. I did not come up with a good picture of the palm. I was frankly a bit relieved about that because the back is noticeably uneven. The colors, as you can see if you follow the pattern link, switch every stitch and I found it very difficult for about the first mitten and a quarter of the second to keep it looking as nice as I wanted to. That improved somewhat once I was able to keep my yarn straight.

Here's a close-up of the stitchwork on a mystery hat. As you can see (I hope), I did my first cables. I looooove cables, you guys. They're total genius. It was a hell of a breakthrough for me once I was able to comprehend that you don't have to knit stitches in the same order. That's all a basic cable is: stitches knitted out of order. I think for my next fancy sock, I'll use Nancy Bush's Conwy pattern, which features tiny braided cables. I did the hat in a worsted weight alpaca I purchased from the Inter-America Group on eBay. I think that the next time I do a hat, though, I will use bamboo needles, which are of course much lighter than metal ones. The metal ones were heavy enough to cramp my wrists a little bit.

Finally, I offer you two lonely socks. One is the Eclipse sock I've been blogging about forever; I've just finished the gusset decreases on its mate, so "all" I've got left is the long, slow march to the toe. My progress on this sock has been hampered by its tedium. I desperately want the pair to be done so that I can start another plain stockinette pair in Meilenweit Colortweed, of which I, um, have three different shades. The other sock is my Vintage Sock project, the Child's French sock. It is nigh impossible to photograph it adequately, so I hope you will take it on faith that it is as it ought to be. I am extremely worried about blocking this sock; since it's not a superwash wool, I can't count on the drier to shrink it back to size if it grows. I suspect that it's going to grow quite badly because the pattern called for 72 stitches across 2.5mm needles, which equals a lot of extra yarn for a sock. I am waiting to block it until I finish the pair (I am working on the heel flap of the second right now) because if it blows, I'll never finish and I'll just have this loose thread hanging over my life forever and on my death bed I'll say, I should've finished those goddamn socks, and I'll find out that hell is really just me tediously working on the other sock forever knowing that there were no elephants in hell to wear this huge never-to-be-finished goddamn sock [redacted for length and increasing hysteria].

One kind of gross thing is that this yarn proved to be a frigging beacon for cat hair. My cats are awesome, but I really don't feel the need to knit anything from their fur. As a side note, I'm using Knit Picks DPNs and they are really excellent. (As for the color of the sock, the picture of the full sock represents the color much better than in the close-up.)