Six month socks

There they are, finally finished, the Tofutsie socks. Right after I took this picture I put them on and wore them... and they're nice socks. But they took me six stinkin' months to finish. With my not having a job, you'd think they would have been finished more quickly, but I've been trying very hard to not sit around the house knitting and stewing about employment (there's not much in this town for a Phd -- and I am not occupying the one job that brought me here). I guess it's a miracle that I have finished anything... but I started The Next Sock right away.

This is one of two balls of Filatura Di Crosa Maxime Print, which are knitting up really quickly. It's a really nice yarn; I'm becoming a fan of Filatura Di Crosa generally as it seems that everything I've seen that they produce is lovely and easy to work with. I've also got a pair of purple striped socks on the needles for the Emperor for Christmas. Trying to work on them when he's not around is not so easy.

About eight months ago one of my work colleagues de-stashed and went around the office offering glops of yarn to other knitters. She gave me about seven hundred yards of a lightly spun chunky weight wool/alpaca/acrylic blend, and I obligingly put it in my own stash. Then, the new Knitty came out and with it, the pattern for Abrazo, which called for about that amount of chunky yarn. Like that bird that I am, the new shiny object drew my attention and within a couple of hours, I had a substantial amount of knitting on the needles.

The fact that chunky yarn knits up at the speed of lightning should not be ignored. I'm about three-quarters of the way finished with this project, and when it's finished I plan to bring it to my writing office, which for some reason is as chilly as a refrigerator. I'm not usually a fan of chunky yarn, being a largish person myself, but there's something about this vest that I find appealing. Let's see how I feel when I try it on...