Peacock Redux

I know my blog has been kind of quiet lately. I ran into some food issues so that's thrown me all off. But I think I'm starting to feel a bit better, so yay! Not that feeling better will necessarily increase the frequency of my blog posting. There are pretty things in the yarn but I haven't taken many pictures to share (though I probably should!) and otherwise there's not too much going on other than knitting, and knitting takes time.

There is a slight bit of news today, though. Our air conditioner is broken. Oh dear.

It's currently 82°F in the house and getting warmer. I might have to escape outside soon - the pool makes hot weather much easier to take. Hopefully the a/c will be back up and running soon. With seven cats, I dare not open a window and honestly, doing that would just mean we'd get hotter inside faster. (It's easily ten degrees hotter outside.)

The only other excitement here has been knitting related, and honestly I'm not sure how many people will actually find it exciting, but I'm going to share anyway because it is a bit of a triumph for me.

In my last post I shared a picture of the yarn I had picked for my next sock project. Well, I knew the pattern I wanted to do (Jaywalker) because I had seen someone else make some chevron socks with this yarn and it looked fabulous. However, it didn't work out so well for me. Unfortunate color pooling was the result, not the fun mishmash of random colors. Boo.

So I tried another pattern (Hermione's Everyday Socks) and while the blocks of color were smaller, the pooling was still rather unfortunate. Double boo.

Then I tried another pattern (Dalekanium) and that one almost worked but not in an exciting way. More of a meh then a boo, but still.

At that point, I was kind of stuck and frustrated. Then Dan (knitting genius that he is) said 'wouldn't it work to do something where you knit in wedges so the pooling couldn't happen, like the ones you just did?'

Why yes, yes it would! See, he's a knitting genius.

Of course, this means that this is the third pair of socks that I will have knit using this pattern. Rarely do I ever enjoy a pattern enough to knit it twice, but this pattern seems to be one of the few. (Though really if you think about it, to make a matching pair of socks, I have to knit pattern twice, so maybe I don't have the dislike of repetition when it comes to socks? Which is good since I like matching socks.)

That isn't to say that I necessarily look forward to doing a pattern three times, especially twice in a row like I am doing right now. But it does help that I think this time I've finally cracked the code of what you are supposed to do at the end of a round in this pattern. (I think the first rows should be K2, w&t, P4, w&t and then you continue on working 4 sts past the last w&t until you work the last w&t 3 sts after, leaving 4 sts between the final wraps. This seems to lead to neater ends to the round and matches up the tall bit and the short bit of each wedge better. And even if it isn't what you are supposed to do, I'm liking it so I'll keep doing it.)

While learning something new does make repetition easier, I do think it will be a while before I do this pattern again. I'm pretty sure I will do it again, though - Dan expressed some interest in some of his own and I really can't say no to that.