Blog relaunch + socks

Hello there!  Thank you so much for your comments on my last post, they were incredibly sweet and supportive.  I've decided to relaunch this blog elsewhere - new space, new me, that sort of thing - and refocus towards the topics that are more relevant to where I'm at right now.  Writing, creativity, food, short vignettes from my life, adventures large and small, musings.  I'm much more of a "stories" kind of blogger than I am a "hey, lookit this cool thing I just made!" kinda blogger.  The latter feels awkward to me, and I don't possess great technical skills nor do I get adventurous with the latest patterns (the exact opposite, in fact, I am slower than slow to hop on bandwagons).  Trying to force this blog into that mold has left me feeling stymied.  Whereas I love telling stories and thinking about life, so that's where I'm taking things.  I still sew and knit and I still plan to blog about those projects now and then because they are still a large part of my creative life, they just won't be all that I blog about ... which is what I've felt like I'm "supposed" to do with a blog with the word "craft" in its title!

Anyhow, I've been a bit snowed under by other obligations, and I'm still trying to figure out which blog hosting service to use (probably Wordpress?  Gotta love the price tag on free!).  I am also taking a month long trip to Turkey and giving my mother a heart attack because I'm leaving in less than 2 weeks and haven't much of a clue of where I'm going or what I'll be doing.  I've got 6 nights in Istanbul booked for when I land, and beyond that?  Not sure.  Jodi was kind enough to provide some suggestions, but if anybody has been to the area, I'd love any and all recommendations!  But I will try to relaunch before then and to bring my camera uploader with me, so that I can post up some photos as I go.

In the meantime, I leave you with socks, because they have become my latest knitting obsession.  I spotted this great ball of Zauerball at a LYS a couple months ago and fell in love instantly.  It was one of those impulse, stash enhancing purchases, but after a tough week at work, I figured "treat yourself!" was in order.  The instant I finished the first pair and put them on, I was overcome with this intense desire to wear nothing but handknit socks to sleep.

Our house is cold in winter, so cold, in fact, that I finally sewed up some simple heat packs which I would pop into the microwave every evening, right before bed, and then slip them between the sheets to warm the bed as I brushed my teeth, just like they used to do back in the frontier days.  I would also layer a couple quilts upon my bed, and, on the nights when that failed to warm me up, I would pull a pillow beneath the blankets and squarely over my stomach, because when I was in college I found this was the single most effective way to get warm enough to be able to fall asleep.  The heat packs got me through January and February, and so did socks.

It sounds so melodramatic, but insomnia has rendered me a finicky sleeper.  Anyhow.  Socks are small, portable and fast, plus I love wearing them.  And to keep the project on the level of "autopilot," I picked one sock pattern and just kept making it, with little tweaks here and there.  I think I've got it memorized.  My second pair has cables, as you can tell.  They're not hard to shoehorn into the pattern, just take out two 3x1 repeats for each cable and put in a 6-stitch cable, with 1 purl on each side.  For now, I think this is as crazy as the socks will get.  I don't like monkeying around with cable needles and slipping stitches front and back, especially not on socks, where the repeats come up way too often (as opposed to, say, a sweater, where you've got miles of stockinette before you have to contend with the fiddly bits).

I love this third pair.  Props to my friend Rita for finding the pattern and suggesting a knit-along.  As I was knitting it up, I thought, "Wow, this is fugly."  And then I knit some more rows and thought, "Wow, this is getting fuglier by the row."  And then I knit some more rows and realized, "Holy crap, this is the awesomest sock I've ever knit!"  That fine line between fabulous and hideous, I do love it so much.