I did finally get the heels in this pair of socks.  I will just stick to the heel I was taught until I feel that I have mastered it and can move on to different sock heels :P.   Now it’s just the feet and toes which will hopefully not take as long as the heels.

I have been lazy in finishing the heels, no not really lazy, unmotivated is more like it.  I lost a child right after Mother’s Day almost 8 years ago, and this time of year leaves me lacking the desire to do things.  I know he’s with our Heavenly Father, I just miss him. It just hits harder at this time of year, maybe because it’s so close to the anniversary of his death and the combination of it being so close to Mother’s Day.  I try to keep everything tucked in so it’s not apparent to others that my emotions are trying to leak out as tears.  Some people tend to think, because it’s been more than a year,  you don’t grieve anymore (sure we do) or that you can just pick yourself up and get back into your old life.  Well life is never quite the same after a death, it changes everything in your life, it turns everything upside down and it will never really be back to normal again, like that picture on the wall that never sits quite straight again after it falls.  Oh it does eventually get easier to handle during other times of the year as the years pass, but there are still those very tender times during the year that are hard for others to understand because you tend to isolate yourself so others won’t see your pain.  Times when you miss his phone calls, or miss laughing at something silly he said or did.  I know I will see him again when my time comes to return to our Father in Heaven, but until then, I just miss him.

Well we got about 1 to 1 1/2 inches of snow last week end, Sunday April 8th, evening and over night.  Close to the same is suppose to hit us tonight into tomorrow.  Sigh, we hit almost 70 this past Thursday and now we are in the lower 40’s today, cold relative to Thursday’s temps.  Tho’, in all honesty it’s not really considered cold in IA :P.  The picture was taken during the early part of the storm and it melted off by mid Monday afternoon.

First, I’m sad to say I did have to frog the heel in the Hermione’s Every Day socks, sigh.  I will just go back to the heel I’m use to, the one this pattern called for made no sense to me, but I’m not an experienced sock knitter, yet :P.

This picture is of a sale yarn I ordered from Knit Picks, it is their Hawthorne Fingering Klamath Falls Tonal Hand Paint colorway (I like when sock yarn is on sale so I can afford a skein of sock yarn for special things.)  I wish my camera would get a realistic picture of yarn colors, but it doesn’t.  It is a dark blue but it has some brighter highlights that just aren’t showing up.  Because it is 100 grams but only 357 yards instead of 400, it’s a little heavier, and that makes me I wonder if I should go down a needle size and if I will have to play yarn chicken with the socks :(.  I bought this so that when I am finally finished with the socks on my needles now, I can start these for my dad for Father’s Day.

Hope you are all having a great week end.  I’m watching a Star Wars marathon on TNT. 🙂

 I finished my socks with The Lemonade Shop yarn Bad Day.  It’s  a beautiful yarn 438 yards, 100 gms, 75/20/5 Superwash Merino/Nylon/Stelliana, and I love it.  The pattern was a personal vanilla sock pattern  from a friend from the Fiber Pusher Podcast on Ravelry.  I still need, tho, to either go down another size needle or maybe cast on 60 instead of 64 stitches, I’ll figure it out.

These socks were fun to knit but I took way to long to get them done, my fault – I had to stop to do some Christmas knitting and then finish a blanket for a friend’s son who had asked.  Unfortunately I forgot to get a picture of the blanket.  I just used the Tara Shawl pattern from Lion Brand Yarns, changing the number of cast on from 60 to 90 so that I had a shorter wider end project instead of the longer shawl shape.  It’s a very easy mindless knit that takes 3 skeins of Homespun yarn from Lion Brand Yarns.

I have started a shawl for comfort for my oldest son’s fiancee, who lost her mother recently.  I chose the Heat Advisory Shawl by Maura Clement  because it looked beautiful and didn’t look like it would take a year to knit :).  This is a paid pattern.  I thought I would use the new yarn that I mentioned in my previous post, but it is a sock weight and the pattern calls for a dk weight, so I went stash diving.  Fortunately a friend from my church was preparing for a move and de-stashed her yarn to me, woot woot, I had beautiful dk weight yarn I could use :).   You can see the yarn in the picture, it is called Ardilla Bouquet and is from Spain.  It is 69% acrilic/21% wool/10% mohair  50 g, 105 m.  I have started the shawl, and it seems very easy and at this point is an enjoyable to knit.  The yarn, like most mohair, sheds and is fuzzy, but I think it will be a beautiful shawl. 🙂  I have 10 skeins of this yarn and have wound off into balls, 2 skeins to start with, I’m sure it will take about 3 or 4 skeins.

I’m comfortable at this time with just one project going.  I am not one of those knitters who have tons of projects going at the same time.  I might have 2 or 3 projects at the same time but any more than that is stressful to me.  I intend to do this shawl pattern again after finishing this project, for a gift for a little one’s teacher for the end of the year.  She has had both him and his sister and has been a wonderful teacher.  I’m sure pleasant surprises after a year of teaching little ones is nice ;).  For his sister’s teacher I’m thinking of  pretty pair fingerless mitts, those are always nice to have in our winter months :).   *UPDATE* Ran out of time and did fingerless mitts for both teachers.

We have had an absolutely gorgeous Feb this year.  Yesterday we had a record high of 67.  More like our April temps, tho we have had blizzards in April too, lol.  The temps are going back down into the 40’s today and colder than that on Friday and beyond, but I certainly enjoyed the brief warmer weather and it gave me an emotional pick me up from the drudgery of winter :).