First, and most importantly, it is ONE MONTH until my birthday! See how I'm helpfully reminding you with plenty of shopping time left? I thought that was considerate of me. Here's a helpful tip: I like yarn. There are also several knitting books I'd like to get (Knit Fix, A Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns, Victorian Lace Today, A Gathering of Lace...you get the idea.) Also, yarn!

Ok, public service announcements aside, exciting things are afoot at Monkey Pants and Hippo Dignity. First of all, there's a contest coming soon! Possibly some time this week - depends on what my schedule's like. Details to follow as soon as I know what the contest is. Prize will be yarn. (Mmm, yarn.) (Sorry, all my non knitting friends who read this blog. If you win I'll buy you a drink or something.) Also, did you know I have an RSS feed? I do! 10 people have figured that out - are you one of them?

Ok, seriously, I'll stop pimping myself out now. On to the real point of this post - the body of Rogue is done! And for once I remembered to take photos BEFORE Jamie went to bed, so they aren't bathroom mirror shots. Unfortunately, Jamie likes to fiddle with camera settings a LOT so they're pictures of me looking irritated with how many photos have been taken. Maybe I should learn how to use the self timer.

As mentioned, I had a ridiculously slothful second half of my weekend, which also included yesterday. I finished season 1 of House (great show! Hugh Laurie is awesome and alarmingly hot), and also finished the body of Rogue. Pay no attention to the needles hanging down all willy-nilly - the hood comes out of the neck cables, so the stitches there are still live. (I know it looks lopsided in places, but I wasn't standing straight on, because these pictures were taken in our small and mess front hall because it has the best light, so we're at weird angles to each other.)



That also makes it hard to see the neck cable, which is too bad because it looks pretty good.



Here's the thing about Rogue. Those lovely side cables (which also make for some very nice and well-fitting shaping) are really damn hard to take pictures of without looking like a total dork.



See? Eventually we opted to just cut my head out of the photo entirely so you couldn't see how silly I looked while flailing my hand up above my head.



Since I totally ignored pretty much any other responsibilities for two days in order to make progress (not entirely true, I did the dishes and a load of laundry), I neglected all the other knitting on the needles. You know, the ones with deadlines. A certain due date is looming, but more pressing is my sock pal's socks!

So once I finished Rogue's body, I set it aside and got to work on the socks. And I made excellent progress!



The observant among you may be thinking "progress my foot." At first glance, you're not wrong. The photo from January 25th shows this.



Compare the two, and I'm only about one stripe further along.

But the REALLY observant among you will notice different needles in the two photos. Yup, I frogged it. The whole damn sock. So this is sock pal sock take 2, and I'm already past where I was with the first version after frogging it on Friday. It was just going to be too snug on the Addi 0s, so I've moved to my KP size 1, and am happy with the change. (Not least because knitting on 1s is a LOT faster.) I liked the fabric a lot on the 0s, but I didn't like the fit. And it's looking good on the 1s, too. Here's hoping I can hit the heel by the end of the week. I'm going to Barenaked Ladies tomorrow night, which will not offer me much knitting time, and Thursday I'm working late. Hopefully the weekend will give me some time to really tackle it. I love the yarn, and I love the pattern, and they're absolutely perfect together. I hope snowdrop likes it as much as I do!

Labels: Birthday, Contest, Rogue, Sock Pal