Basket case

After much fussing and ripping and re-knitting on Tuesday, I finally arrived at a new sock plan. The yarn: Mountain Colors Bearfoot in the Lodge Grass colorway. I started on the Conwy pattern (from Knitting on the Road), but after the success of the Elfine socks, decided I wanted to knit it toe-up instead of top-down. Figure-8 cast-on, knit knit knit, swear grumble rip. The Conwy pattern is kind of tricky to knit, and with the fuzzy mohair content and dark color of this yarn, I could tell all that fancy patterning was just going to vanish. So I poked around in Beautiful Knitting Patterns and tried a lace pattern, with the same effect. At this point I was at my first meeting of the Boulder Handknitting Guild. The meeting was a lot of fun; the people are really nice and I think I can learn a lot from them. As it happened, we had to move the meeting to the Borders cafe at the last minute. What does Borders sell? Yeah, that's right. I picked up a copy of Sensational Knitted Socks and flipped through it, and the result is this wonderful basketweave rib. It's easy, it looks great, and it highlights the colors, but the pattern doesn't fight with the yarn. I worked on it for hours last night at S&B and this is the result.

You may have noticed that I'm knitting these on a long #1 bamboo circular needle. This is one of the two that I picked up on the Denver expedition a few weeks ago. To my great annoyance, the #1.5 Addi Natura snapped right off at the join almost as soon as I started using it. These are from Crystal Palace, and while the join is a bit rough, it's not as much of a problem with magic loop technique and obviously my knitting is flying right along.