Knitting Catch Up - Socks. And the Dull Jumper.

Despite my good intentions I never seem to manage to put up knitting projects on here when they are finished, which I really should do to avoid lengthy catch up posts. I have recently embarked on a project to use up as much of my wool stash as I can while I enjoy my enforced rest from the Ph D. Happily I don't  think I am buying wool faster than I am using it up, so that's progress.

Anyway since Christmas I have knitted, amongst other things, five pairs of socks, all from wool in the stash  and here they are.

 Hated these when they were done. Actually I hated them before they were done because I bought the wool from someone on Ravelry thinking it was just my colours but in real life it turned out it wasn't. . I knitted it up straight away just to be rid of it, and I'm still not sure what to do with the resulting  socks, apart from not put them on my feet.

This wool came from the Knitting Goddess as part of the Discworld Revisited club. I had decided to pair it with a plain cream to make Steven West's Daybreak  shawl, which I thought would look fabulous. However after several false starts I gave up on Daybreak as the edges were just too tight. This seems to have been a common problem with people knitting it and various ways round it were suggested but I wasn't really in a frame of mind to start making alterations to a pattern to make it work when that is surely the job of the designer. I was given the pattern as a gift so I can't grumble about the money, but West sells this pattern and to my mind he should make sure it is knittable in the form in which it is sold, not in a form that has to be cobbled together by knitters trying to make it work. Given that it's a bright yarn, to say the least, it was the work of a moment to repurpose it for socks for the OH. 

It did however also feature in a pair of socks for me too

This is Ulf, a pattern I made for the OH years ago and I always wanted my own version so the cream and the Salamander Flash from the projected shawl both came into their own here. 

I bought this wool at the first Yarndale Festival so that was in 2013. Five years to knit it up then. In my defence the OH chose this and two other balls of the same type in different colours for socks for himself and the other two balls were knitted up into socks years ago. I'm not quite sure how this one got overlooked to be honest. Anyway on my Ravelry page they project has been christened At Last, because really, it was more than time ....

And finally for the socks, candy cane socks. I've become a bit of a West Yorkshire Spinners (WYS) junkie recently and my last yarn splurge, way back in February was on what you might call a 'fair bit' of their Signature 4 ply. A fair bit translates into six x 100 g balls,but  only five were actually for me. (As though that made it any better). I had missed out on their Christmas special edition, a candy cane stripe, so was pleased to find a last ball of it in a shop, and  bought both coral and green for contrasting toes and heels. First result as above. They are uncharacteristically bright for me but I do wear them. In fact Im wearing them as I type. 

Talking of WYS I have just finished a jumper for the OH in their The Croft Shetland Tweed Aran weight and here he is modelling it,  beside the thing that lets me off feeling guilty about my wool purchases

It is not in fact at all a 'Dull Jumper', but for reasons it would take too long to go into he apostrophised it as such while it was under construction, an action which led to a six week hiatus in its production. However it's finished now and really rather nice, I continued with my new practice of actually knitting a tension square before I started which meant it ended up as a good fit. And despite the 'dull' word having been slung about, he likes it now it is done which is the main thing.