Thursday morning

Officially in the garden next door but it also blesses my garden!

Thanks to an extra late (for me) Poirot that I hadn't seen before - Third Girl - plus knitting that kept me going, I wasn't in bed until just after 11 yesterday evening, had trouble getting to sleep despite the tiredness and, consequently, only finally woke at about 6:30 this morning.  Unheard of.

From the above you will deduce that socks won over cross stitch and DG and I wended our way to the retail park yesterday late morning.  He needed some card too or I would probably never had persuaded him to come!  It took ages to find a basic pattern: there were fancy sock patterns galore, in expensive books that seemed to assume that you knew all the tricks of the trade, so to speak, but I had to ask a nice shop assistant who was sitting at a desk (knitting pretty little bootees - the assistant, not the desk!) to help me in the end as I was getting nowhere and DG was getting a bit fed up.  Armed with pattern (also bloomin' expensive) I looked for yarn and plumped for some 'designer' yarn from Italy, supposedly by Kaffe Fasset.  Yeah, sure!  However, it was his colours - blues, purples and greens that look rather lovely when knitted up.  The effect is stripey, of course.  Expensively stripey though!  In fact, I'm a bit horrified when I consider quite how expensive these socks are but never mind.  Learning a new skill is never to be sniffed at, even if it is something as ridiculously unnecessary as knitting socks!!  And I did use what was left from some gift vouchers too.

I'm not so sure about the heel pattern.  Yes, it works, but I'm sure there's a different way to do it that could be a lot simpler, and maybe that's where Annabeth's fifth needle comes in (see yesterday's comments).  When I've finished this sock and its sister, I will do a  bit of experimenting, I think, and see.  Or perhaps I will wander down to Hobbycraft again and browse in those expensive sock books for inspiration.  For now I have enough to do.  There's a lorra knitting in a sock when using 4 ply yarn and I've just discovered I am a stitch short and I can't for the life of me see where it's gone.

Ho hum!