I could go on.

The sock blank is a truly wondrous thing; its swift changes of color heed not the worrisome siren call of the Fraternal Twin Sock Syndrome, creating a thing of beauty that is, in fact, paralleled by the other thing of beauty right next to it. And knitting two socks at the same time, toe-up, is equally awesome (in the original sense of the word, “something fantastic that inspires awe,” rather than in the Bill-And-Ted’s-Excellent-Adventure sense of the word, “something random that makes Keanu Reeves say, ‘Whoa!’”). The two things together?

Apparently, two rights make a wrong. A very big one.

Things were humming along swimmingly until I hit the heel turn and started to use yarn from one strand at a different rate than yarn from the other. I’m halfway through the heel turn on one sock and have had to slip stitches across to the other heel to work on it just to bring the second, long, unwieldy, difficult, wearisome, obstreperous strand into the world of seemly, appropriate yarn behavior.

As usual, life and art imitate each other, so the week, too, has been twisted, torturous, snarled, chaotic, wearisome and obstreperous. As a reminder that my wounded knitting and wounded week will eventually work themselves out, however, I have full use of my faculties. And my thesaurus.

Today, I made up for it with both knitting and dyeing. The former was relaxing, mindless and entirely satisfying, done on a pair of 2×2 rib socks with my forked heel using my own hand-dyed yarn. The latter? Well, let’s just say I needed a little heartburn to go with my Pepto Bismol.

A brief pictorial recap:

Not good. Not good at all, particularly for a woman who eschews pink, mauve, lilac, lavender and many other pastel staples of the I’m-A-Barbie-Girl lifestyle. Thankfully, I have superhero friends. Nicole, of All Buttoned Up, who’s a quiet administrator by day, moonlights as The Dastardly Dyer, and she rallied her considerable powers in service of a good cause: de-Barbie-fying my Pepto yarn.

The dyepot alone was enough to help heal the retinal burns I suffered from simply transferring the original Pepto yarn from its storage bin to a paper bag for transportation to and from The Dastardly Dyer’s lair.

But the finished product? Its burgundy depths have character. Each strand exhibits a vibrant glow that belies its original sickly-sweet color, even though its likely that the final color would never have been possible without that awful intermediate step.

I may just call this color “Heartburn.”

Friday’s trip took me off of the gerbil wheel and on an almost overwhelmingly sentimental trip to one of the biggest landmarks in a geek’s life: Frys. There were, admittedly, a few non-geek things thrown in for good measure, including a very satisfying trip to an Ann Taylor store that resulted in one of the most coveted shopping experiences a well-endowed woman can have (a good-quality perfectly fitted white button-down shirt in the right size, on sale for less than $20). Still, the indisputable stars of the day were the fumes of computery goodness in that most precious of geek meccas.

On those rare instances when I do set foot off of the gerbil wheel, it’s always a little strange, a little limiting, to come back to it, especially when a trip to Frys feels just a little bit like a homecoming. It’s times like this when I appreciate more than ever one of the projects I undertook at the beginning of the year: a pictorial of change to remind me that my gerbil wheel is as much a thing of beauty as the unchanging haven of silicon that is Frys.

These three photos are all from October of this year, taken from my living-room window, spaced evenly 2 weeks apart. It’s amazing how much can change in the space of a month.

Equally amazing is the lack of knitting that has gone on in the last week, but that is a post best saved for tomorrow.

The pesto is colorful, and it’s in single-serving ice-cube format. How cute!

The knitting has come down to socks, socks, socks and more socks.

The socks are even more colorful! They’re very pretty and one of them is even the product of my own hand-dye.

I’m probably going to rip back the hand-dyed version, though, because I want to put together another pattern with the forked heel in several different sizes. The issue at hand is how to do the ribbing so that the sock pattern itself is a worthwhile contribution to any sock knitter’s repertoire, rather than merely a vehicle for the forked heel. Chemgrrl suggested a column of 3×1 interspersed with 3 columns of 1×1. What do you think?

Your heart might grow too. I’m off to go install a plug in for charity.

which looks like this now:

and, with nothing but walnuty goodness and boiling water, brought these into the knitting world:

was (and still is) extremely pleasant as well as eminently talented.

The only thing that went wrong? Mmmmmm. Pepto-Bismol. I will have to rectify this. It was supposed to be an icy pink, but even limiting the dye called for in a “pale” color to less than 1/8 of a teaspoon, coupled with a mere 5 minutes in tepid water, turned off-white wool/silk into, well, a color that is very nearly unwearable unless you’re 3 and wearing a tiara and a tutu. While I won’t have the cherry-blossom pink yarn I wanted for a modified cardigan version of the Hanami Stole, I have learned a lesson about icy just-barely-not-white-anymore colors that I will not soon forget, and I likewise had a weekend I won’t soon forget.

The weather was perfect; the company was fantastic; the slowly darkening walnuts smelled of cookies, leaving trails of steam wherever the dye pot went. There were picturesque falling leaves cascading in waves of yellow and orange around our heads (along with slightly harder walnuts falling from trees overhead), and dappled sunlight wafting in rays across the newly dyed yarny goodness as it dried outdoors in the warm afternoon air. In such surroundings, the Pepto-Bismol yarn–and the walnuts falling perilously, percussively, and concussively, close to the deck–were absolute necessities. I’m convinced that it’s these tiny little imperfections which elevate a day from simply great to unsurpassingly, beautifully, uncompromisingly real, and real is oh-so-much better than perfect….

Two ordinary skeins of sock yarn turned into art. Or at least potential art.

Chemgrrl is throwing a Fall To Dye For dyeing party for my fantastic knitting group (Blogless Norma and Huan-Hua are sadly not attending due to previously arranged absences). Thankfully, it’s not a dying party, or I’d be bringing a coffin instead of pre-knit stockinette swatches designed to become beautifully hand-dyed socks.

This will be my first real foray into hand-dyed yarn in a serious kind of way. I’ve done some experimentation with Kool-Aid and even less with acid dyes (just one skein of self-striping yarn for a work project), and I’m really looking forward to seeing natural dyes like indigo and walnut in action. Still more exciting is the chance to try some patterning on these KnitPicks-inspired sock blanks made out of ShibuiKnits’ 100% superwash merino Sock. I’m not a big fan of anything with nylon, so while the KnitPicks Sock Blanks concept makes the geek in me squeal, the fiber content doesn’t so much appeal to the yarn snob in me.

Here’s hoping the resultant hand-dyed yarn will be fodder for another design that uses the spiffy new forked heel I designed over the summer. At the very least, I will learn more about the worm content of walnuts, though perhaps I might come to regret such an education….

As a result, it’s a little shocking that I didn’t get even the littlest, tiniest bit of crap when I whipped out my knitting for the first time at movie night. Truly a tribute to the imperturbability of my friends here. The only worry I really have is whether or not these socks are going to be evil when they grow up, thanks to the environment in which they were brought into the world.

My guess? These socks will likely bring about the end of the universe. But I’m sorta OK with that. They’re pretty. Fashion before safety, right?

*Last night, it was Broken Arrow, in which John Travolta plays an insane Stealth-bomber pilot who bare-knuckle boxes his good-guy co-pilot Christian Slater into submission before being symbolically penetrated by a giant nuclear bomb.

Now available at Ravelry!

This brand-new heel turn technique, the “forked heel,” will win over die-hard devotees of short-row and heel-flap techniques alike, thanks to the extra heel room and more anatomically correct shape.

To compliment the devilishly clever forked-heel technique, saucy forked-tongue flames lick up the sides of the instep and the cuff, warming you up in spirit even as the days cool down.

The pattern is available for sale for $5.95 through Ravelry.

I went to bed on Friday night at 9 pm, and I would characterize the next 24 hours as one long nap interrupted by brief, and very unwelcome, periods of wakefulness. I nearly finished a sleeve Saturday night, went back to bed, and woke up refreshed.

So refreshed, in fact that, after prepping the 5 books I need to read in the next few days for electronic reading, I got all ambitious and decided to put together a bookshelf that’s been taunting me for the last few months. (Gimme a break, the taunting was very quiet. The bookshelf doesn’t have vocal chords. Or lungs.)

I understand now why I put it off. The thing is taller than me. And wider than it is tall. And heavier than…. Um, than someone who is 20 pounds lighter than me…. And it was a bitch to put together. I had to get angry and kick it at one point to get it square so I could drill the brackets into place.

But I won! I beat the inanimate object, and I beat it on my terms, one-on-one, without having to resort to following the directions*** that suggested a bookshelf of this size should not be assembled by one person.

Next up: putting stuff into the bookshelf. I might need another nap….

*Apologies to Dylan Thomas. And Shakespeare. And probably the cast of Dead Poets Society.**
**Or perhaps I’m thinking of the wrong Robin Williams movie, and he quotes that line in Good Will Hunting. Screw it, not important enough to look up.
***Directions are for people who like their limbs intact and unbruised. Sissies….