A Few Distractions

What's been keeping me? One might well ask.

Well, there's been a little bit of this. Enjoying the company of our little visitor, all tuckered out in this picture.

Like any dog, she's always good for some entertainment. One evening, I found her curled up next to a red potato. Where she got this treasure, I don't know. And why. But don't the two of them seem cozy together?

And there's been some of this. Hosting family for the holiday. That's always great fun, though it does take a little time away from the knitting schedule.

But it's well worth it. There's much hilarity, not to mention the traditional making of blue lipstick out of robin's egg malted milk candies.

There's been some of this. Visiting the in-laws, who a few years ago got restless and betook themselves to a warmer place, where some of the trees wear Spanish moss for jewelry, others spike their hair in fronds, and the golf carts run wild.





There also, unaccount- ably, are some of these. For no obvious reason, their community keeps a small herd of pet buffalo. Yes, buffalo. I hear tell that they have a soft, downy undercoat that's lovely for spinning, but I wasn't even tempted to pluck these fellows.

One of the highlights of the trip was feeding the buffalo some carrots, about which they seem quite enthusiastic. One shoulders the others out of the way for a chance at the vegetables. He takes a carrot gently, showing a neat, even row of lower teeth, and occasionally sticks out a black, leathery tongue to help things along.

On the way, there was plenty of time in places like this (it took flight delays to make it look so deserted and calm). Airport time brought the travel knitting project back into play.

My travel knitting project of the moment is a pair of Merino Lace socks from the Favorite Socks book, using Schaefer Anne yarn on US size 1 needles. The yarn is a little thinner than the one the pattern calls for, but I thought the design might be stretchy enough that it wouldn't matter. It seemed to have lots of give when I tugged on the partial cuff. I whizzed along on the first sock until the heel was turned and then tried it on, just to be sure.

The stitch patterns looked nice, but the sock was a little too tight. I could have persevered and left it as is, but I would never really have been happy with it. I took a picture to remember it by, took a deep breath, and ripped out every last stitch, much to the amusement of my in-laws' cats, a minor complication I hadn't anticipated. But we got it done without any serious mishap.

I didn't think this yarn would work well in a larger gauge, so I stuck with the US size 1 needles, added some ribs to the design to gain a dozen stitches in girth and started over. That seems to be working out fine. I'll take a picture when it gets a little further along.

Happy trails!