To take my mind off my issues, I have done two things. One is that I went to the LYS to see if I needed to teach anything. I didn't, so I settled in to knit, but, naturally, I ended up helping folks. Even got paid for one, and since my Spanish is very bad and the lady from Peru's English is not so good, I earned my pay on that one. I will help her some more next week. In the meantime, I will look up more knitting words in Spanish. I sound really good in Spanish, but have never talked about knitting much, so that slows me down a lot. The poor lady wants to make something that should be easy, a feather and fan afghan, but the instructions are so poorly written and the increases and decreases so counter-intuitive that even a good English reader would have problems with them. Yep, my work was cut out for me. I can see why I decided to not be a professional translator.
I also was very proud of myself for helping a woman figure out the pattern to an Aran-style poncho she wanted to re-create. I figured out the whole thing, and even wrote out instructions for a cable pattern we could not find in a book. Not bad. I helped her knit on it for a long time, before my friend and I went to Starbucks for some uninterrupted conversation. Sometimes you just want to chat!
The other thing I've been doing this weekend is work on the new socks I've been designing. I had this shiny blue yarn that looked sort of wet, and wanted to make socks with a theme to match them. I found a pattern of umbrellas (parasols) and a pattern of raindrops, and when I saw they were each 12-row patterns, I figured it would not be too hard to use them in socks. You can see how far along I am now. The hardest part was that I decided it would be easier to knit the patterns all together, rather than splitting the pattern that centers across the sides of the sock in half. writing out how to rearrange the needles as simply as possible has been an interesting challenge.
When I finish this sock, I will knit the second one according to the instructions, to be sure they work (seems prudent). Then, I hope to share the instructions in case anyone else wants to make Rainy Day Socks!
I can't wait to see the finished socks! They sound very cool and the yarn is pretty. I kind of think that way too, with the yarn giving me ideas as to what pattern makes sense.
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