Steady as she goes

I've had little time for fibery stuff, and have only allowed myself to knit/spin/look up fibery stuff on the internet until 10:30 p.m. at the latest. I've been getting so carried away and staying up so late that I'm a zombie at work (I've got a new-ish job, mind you, where I still have some impressing to do), and I have very little patience when I get home from work. Not good for the kiddies when I notice that I'm yelling at my 3-year old that I don't want to read "Goodnight Sweet Butterflies" for the third freakin' time.

So, although I love my fibery stuff, I need to spend more "enjoyable" time with my kids. All this really means is that I've been working on getting them to bed about 1/2 hour earlier. It seems to be working, because I've made considerable progress on my Cozy Cardi sleeves, I've managed to complete some projects at work, and I can read "Goodnight Sweet Butterflies" 4 times before I start yelling.

Since last we spoke, I had to rip back a considerable amount (all the way back to where I had only 5 inches of knitting left) since I noticed that I had left out the vertical lines of knit stiches inside the cable. I actually don't like these lines because they don't look right where they begin and end out of the cable. The illusion of going through the cable isn't very convincing. Maybe it'll look better blocked. I also had to drop a couple of stitches (seperately) allllll the way down about 12" and then hooked them back up to improve the looks of the underarm - I had come up with the idea of increasing in 2x2 rib. This brilliant idea is the fool-hardy result of my delusion that I can design on the fly like Meg Swansen.

Anyway, I knit till this thing was to my arm-pit. And I didn't make any more increases than I had since the 5 inches of knitting, so it's a pretty shapeless tube. I think it's alright on my arm, although I probably should have increased at a more gradual rate, and even still not as much as I have. But I'm sick of knitting stuff I've already knitted, so we're moving on. I got the 2nd sleeve started, baby, and I'm not changing a thing.

But I'm being sidetracked by my sock. I know I haven't mentioned it much since the last pic I took of it quite a while ago, but that's because I was underwhelmed by the barber-pole effect I was getting with the yarn. After struggling with the pattern for a bit, I also decided that I didn't want to have to concentrate on reading and keeping track of a pattern for my socks and that mindless knitting was the order of the day. So I ripped back to the ribbing and began nice, easy, soothing stocking stitch. And an amazing thing began to happen:
The color's doing really cool things. This actually isn't one of the better sides of the sock, but I'm intrigued with the colors. It's hard to put this down because I keep wanting to see what the yarn will do next. Because there is now no pattern to concentrate on, just a few minutes ago I was knitting on this thing while at the same time reading the Yarn Harlot's blog archives (I finished her 1st book and have ordered her other 2. I'm now on August 2004 of the archives, just in case anyone is tracking my Harlot addiction, too).

All hail mindless knitting, which fixes horrendous barber-pole effects on socks and enables the time-starved knitter the ability to feed two addictions at once. Now that's multi-tasking.

As for spinning, I've got half a bobbin-ful done of that self-dyed "dragonfire" silk/wool roving. You'll have to take my word for it because I don't have a picture. Soon, though. I promise.