Saturday, December 3, 2016

The saga of socks

Okay, so where have I been??? Have I been sick? On vacation?? Kidnapped by aliens???

None of the above... no excuse... I just haven't been posting... sorry...

With Thanksgiving behind me I've moved into full Christmas mode. I have my tree up... my outside lights on... bought a new 7.5 ft inflatable snowman for the side yard (I'll see if I can take a pic of him in the dark... his body is kaleidoscopic...oooooohhhh... pretty) ... and the majority of my inside decorating is complete.  A lot of the old stuff and a few new things... I'll show the new things in a day or two.

But the event I was waiting for with bated breath was the opening of the first door of my Opal Advent Calendar....




I had pre knit two cuffs (they are perched on the top of the box) to start some Frankensocks... some nice charcoal gray Fabel that I thought would be a good neutral... at the stroke of midnight on Thursday December 1 (and I'm not kidding it was 12:00) I opened door number 1... and I must be truthful... I was a bit disappointed. Oh it is a cute little 15 gram skein but my first door skein was brown... not on my list of favorite colors... oh it has its place in the world but in my world it is mostly banished to a small dark corner in the basement furnace room...sigh...I had feelings similar to those I had as a kid when I opened a beautifully wrapped present to find it contained... underwear...ugh!!!

But I persevered and started knitting the brown skein... it was really really brown...okay.. it is a nice mottled yarn but it doesn't make my heart sing. I could see that the interior of the skein had a section of black and white which was intriguing. I LOVE those faux fair isle patterns Opal is so good at, and I continued and this is how that section knitted up...



Okay, it is kinda handsome but it isn't what I wanted... insert stompy foot, frowny face, holding my breath temper tantrum behavior... oh I'm so adult...

Onto Day 2...now this is what I'm longing for ... I love this little pink/turquoise/blue/purple skein... a HAPPY skein of yarn...


And Day 3 has dawned colorful too... purple... I hardly ever buy yarn that is purple but I like it...



So what happened to the Day 1 yarn?  I unravelled it and put it in time out... I was going to show a pic but my son remarked that it now looks like something Big Dude left in the litter box... I'll leave you with that mental image and move on...


So 2 out of 3 days were happy little skeins of yarn... that's a pretty good percentage. I've been looking at what others have gotten in their Opal Advent Calendars on Instagram... you can check them out here... and here.... it turns out that the calendars don't have the same yarn in each day so I'm assuming that the pretties I'm seeing that others have found will show up in my calendar later in the month... I hope so!!!

The plan I started with was I was going to knit 5 rounds from each skein alternating from one sock to another. One sock would be the odd days and the other sock the even day... but 5 rounds isn't enough to show the pattern well... so I changed the plan to 10 rounds... and that wasn't enough for me either... so right now the plan is to knit till the skein tells me to stop... sensible, dontcha think??? ( Remember I am happy happy happy in my delusional little bubble fueled by yarn fumes and the click of my needles... my happy place...LOL!)

I'm a day late but I'll be linking up with Patchwork Times knitting post On the Needles... fun stuff over there too...

And before I forget...which I did... when I'm not posting here I sometimes do post on Instagram... you can click on this link anytime and see what I'm up to... if I got around to posting there... and I'm not always good about that either. I'm carolfun53 on Instagram if you want to follow me. Instagram is my new Pinterest... I can spend hours there looking at stuff... and when I find cool stuff I pin it to my boards on Pinterest which makes this activity a continuous loop of time wasting... I'm really really good at time wasting... almost as good as I am at starting new projects... God has given me many talents... LOL!!!

Hope you have a nice weekend ahead... I'm off to do some grocery shopping for dinner tomorrow. The weather has turned truly cold... may see some snow flurries next week... ugh... already planning my Spring gardening... my way of denying winter exists... another delusional little world I visit...

happy knitting -
carol fun



8 comments:

  1. Glad you've been in a mostly happy corner of your own little world, lol, minus the brown! I happen to love brown but have noted a general dislike of brown among many crafters. Holiday decorations are going up here today--just about to break out the stockings. I've been in timeout from Pinterest and have avoided Instagram for the reasons you mention, but that hasn't stopped me from Bloglovin!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh MAN! I actually liked the way that first brown bit was coming along! Darn, you unravelled it! Oh well, I like the other two also. Hope you like all the rest! I've done the little bit of decorating I'm going to do. Did you get the snowman at Walmart or Home Depot. Seems like I saw him at one of those places. He's big!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sorry about the brown yarn, hopefully you got the least desirable yarn out of the way and just have jolly colors to look forward to

    ReplyDelete
  4. It sounds like your delusional little bubble is a pretty good place to be. Glad it allows you to reemerge every now and then and make contact with the rest of us. :) Looking forward to seeing your new snowman...if you get snow, maybe he's the reason. Snowmen seem to like that stuff. :) I have two that live on top of my hot water heater this time of the year. Thankfully they're not the melting kind.
    I love brown, but then again, I haven't met a color I don't like. May the rest of your advent doors bring only fun surprises!

    ReplyDelete
  5. I've been known to hold my breath and double-fist-pound my imaginary high-chair tray while kicking wildly with my feet so I know exactly how you feel!

    ReplyDelete
  6. All of your Christmas decorations sound delightful. I hope you can get a photo of that snowman. I am finally getting pretty well finished. I call this the decorating time of year. I go from Fall, to Halloween, back to Fall with a Thanksgiving twist, and finally Christmas. I hope all the rest of the Advent yarn makes you smile!

    ReplyDelete
  7. I'm with you on brown. I even have a hard time buying brown shoes! But having said that, your first start on the sock with the brown didn't look bad at all. I would have probably kept going, I hate to frog anything. Now I'm sorry I didn't know about this wonderful Advent calendar from Opal thing. Wonder if they will still send them. I guess I should go on their site to check, right? Like I need another thing to distract me from my to do list before Christmas. But then, I deserve to be in a happy place like you.!lol Be sure to show us what's behind each door. I love these little size surprises. Can't imagine how they came up with such tiny skeins and packaged them just like their bigger parents. FUN FUN.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I found your site through Instagram. Your sock posts gave me the idea of giving someone socks for Christmas. I had to do a bit of searching to find toe socks.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for stopping by. I really enjoy reading your comments. They make my day!
If Google won't let you leave a comment feel free to email me at cfunliu@aol.com