I feel a little like the blog is hopeless right now, and I hope you’ll all bear with me over the next couple of weeks while my attention wanders. This book is sucking up almost everything I’ve got (my sanity, my time, knitting and otherwise) and if I sit down to write or work, my focus keeps going back there, not here…which is a shame, sort of, because this is usually way more fun. (You can work on a book all you like, but when you finish a story nobody leaves comments telling you what they think, or if you suck, or if your grammar is pathetic – not that I’m sure that the last one there really helps me a whole lot, but I suppose it’s still feedback.) As a result of the cosmic life-sinkhole that is that last few terrifying weeks of a book, I don’t have much to show you. Just this.

This is a redo of the sock I started the other day, the one that tragically, hit the frogpond going a thousand miles an hour while it was still mostly in the toe phase. The yarn is STR lightweight, in Ravenscroft from Tina’s (sort of new) Raven Clan series. (It’s blacker in person. I lost a camera war.) I was telling her that I wanted to make an elegant cabled sock with my precious skein, and from nowhere, she produced this pattern by Sivia Harding. (I worship Sivia, and the Diamond Fantasy pattern is one of my favourites reasons. An edge produced as you go. Surely the woman is so blessed by the knit fates that she walks on silver slippers. My version is here.)

Turns out that she’s putting together a book of patterns to support the series, and this will be one of them. It’s not ready for release yet, and I said that I would sort of test-knit it…. if we use the words “test knit” here to mean “I shall attempt to tell the difference between the millions of mistakes I make all the time from the very slim possibility that Sivia has made one”. So far, the pattern is perfect, and I am stupid, exactly as expected. I made two mistakes reading the pattern, which I would like to pretend is because it isn’t formatted yet, and is really because I, as I mentioned, am apparently as smart as a streetcar. I failed to actually read the pattern and assumed that the first size was a size small, which it wasn’t. (It will be, by the time it gets to you.) It was a medium, and I managed to ignore virtually every instinct I had that the beast was too big for a really good long time. Then I arsed up the twisted rib. (Knit one purl two. Tricky that. )

(The colour here is a little closer.) So far, the second time appears to be the charm, although my ability to reinterpret Sivia’s genius into error should not be underestimated, especially while I’m flipped out this far on a deadline. (Proof: Last night I had to frog the back of the Urban Aran three times for a failure to count. TO THREE.)

Sigh. I can’t wait until this is over. The minute this ends, the tour starts (I’ll be adding an Oak Lawn IL event later today, although details are here for you if you can’t wait for me to wrestle the server into compliance) and should I survive that, I have some primo time set aside for gibbering in the foetal position. Good times, big plans.