Happy new year, everyone! Have you recovered from the holidays yet? I spent 10 days with only dialup for internet (barring a few desperate excursions to a café) so I am still catching up. I spent part of yesterday catching up on podcasts and... OMG! I got a mention on Stringchronicity! Maire wisely googles her show from time to time and thus caught my previous mention. *waves* Hi!

She also called me on being a slacker blogger. Yep, I'm pretty bad. I think of lots of things to write about and even start planning out what I want to say, but a lot of that doesn't ever make it out into the world. Part of this is because these things tend to occur to me while I'm at work or zipping down the interstate at 70mph and shouldn't really drop everything to write up my yarn adventures. (And then Very Important Work Things occur to me when I'm in the shower or just about to fall asleep. Of course.) That and the bouts of dialup are my only excuse.

So today's post is a catch-up of topics that don't require pictures. Yes, I am too lazy to upload pics right now. Come on, my camera is all the way on the other side of the room inside my bag. ;)

One of this year's goals, like last year, is some serious destashing. I had planned to have another Personal Sock Club (which I totally thought of before Stephanie Pearl-McPhee mentioned hers on her blog!) and complete at least one sock a month. That way I'm 6 pairs happier in my sock drawer and 12 skeins smaller in my yarn bins by next January. This worked well last year and left me plenty of time for other things, so I'm doing it again. Then I ran across the 12in2011 Ravelry group, a support group/cheering section for those who need to destash and to get things out of their Ravelry queue that have been sitting around too long. Since that's only six more FOs than my plan - and surely I'll complete six other things in 300-some days! - I joined up. One FO per month should be the very least I can do.

With all this destashing talk, anyone who has followed me here from Ravelry is probably wondering why I just added about 5 squidillion skeins to my stash there. Part of this project is being honest with myself about what I have. This will also add to my sense of accomplishment when Ravelry ticks something over from "stashed" to "used". The stuff I added was only one giant bag from the closet o' doom, where craft things go to languish indefinitely. There is still uncatalogued stuff in the plastic storage drawers that I hope will eventually contain the entire stash.

I am working on some socks in a KnitPicks yarn that is cursed. That definitely deserves its own post, so I'll just say that the rest of you are safe because the colorway is long discontinued. I'm not even sure if the second skein has the same curse or just the one I'm using right now. The only way to know is to soldier on until I get this first sock cast off, take a deep breath, and charge ahead with Sock #2. I'm tempted to light candles or incense or something before I start it. ;)

Last January, I managed to do a whole pair of socks in one month, leaving me space to focus on my Ravelympics hats in February. Those socks were much less problematic, so if I want a January FO, it's going to have to be something fairly simple. Thus I started a Jesse's Christmas Hat yesterday, and am over halfway through it. This is a very simple, quick pattern that yields a lovely unisex hat (depending on your color choice) that is stretchy enough to fit almost anyone.

I am considering having a re-do of Ravelympics on my own this year, maybe for only one week this time, and probably in February. I did so well, despite some crazy stuff that went on, that I would like to duplicate that level of productivity. In fact, having a goal that I needed to focus on probably helped me keep churning out hats instead of feeling sorry for myself. It won't hurt for me to drop out of tv watching, fanfic reading, and Ravelry boards for one week. Any catching up I have to do from that will probably be outweighed by the relief from stash guilt.

Watson is so close to being done! I had some slight hope he would be finished last weekend, just sliding in at the one-month mark and qualifying as a personal NaKniSweMo. Alas, it was not meant to be. Near the end of the second sleeve, I bothered to count stitches and realized that I had increased an entire ribbing section too many. (For those who haven't lived with this thing for weeks on end, that's 16 sts total, or 32 rounds of increases.) I'm down to only one real workout a week, so my upper arms do not need that much room. Not that they did this time last year either, but you see my point.

Back went Sleeve 2, more than two repeats. Out came the bind-off of Sleeve 1 and back more than 3 repeats. Unladylike language may have been uttered during this process. I'm a bit proud that I did not cry. I wasn't on a real deadline, at least. I have worked my way back up Sleeve 2, bound it off, and gone back to Sleeve 1, which is now lacking slightly over two pattern repeats.

So of course, being so close to finished with a truly massive project, I have developed a case of start-itis. I am dying (dying, I say!) to cast on the Blueberry Waffle Socks. I thought having a podcast to knit to might help me chug along on the last of the sleeve, so I downloaded all the episodes of Stringchronicity that I wasn't caught up on and went to town. If you listen to Stringchronicity at all, you know that its previous incarnation was SockTart. Yes, our beloved Maire spends a good bit of her time talking about socks. For some reason, this does not help repress my sock urge. Way to go, me.

I am not allowed to start a new project until I have finished this sweater and several things I have planned for a craft fair in a couple weeks. Mostly I will be selling dishcloths, since I had some made up and stashed away, a hat or two, and I am throwing together a few crocheted "infinity" scarves with some stash I have honestly been meaning to unload anyway and wasn't sure how. It's super-bulky machine washable stuff (read: 80% acrylic) so it ticks the boxes for the current fashion trend of chunky knits and for low-maintenance, which is always a plus with gifts. Next, I get to figure out pricing on all these things that strikes a balance between being fair to me for the work and being in a price range that people will actually go for. But not before I sleep, because somehow it got really late.

This is how I spent my Tuesday night, or at least part of it. Watson and I found ourselves in a tornado warning, so we picked up dinner and retreated to the bathroom. I watched tv radar through a crack in the door and sat on the counter to eat and work on the sleeve. Despite rushing to plug in my phone and mp3 player so I would have phone and radio when the power inevitably went out, the lights stayed on. This may be a sign that there is some disturbance in the order of the universe, though, because our power always goes out when it storms, and fairly often when it doesn’t. (Ah, local utility board, how we loathe thee.)

I finished the sleeve increases Thursday night and am on to the last few inches of pattern-only knitting. Yay! The sleeve has been more addictive that the body because you also get the instant gratification of much shorter rounds. I am absolutely not allowed to start the second one until I finish the flat-knitted portions. It can be my reward for all that purling.

Due to poor judgment, I wound up with my cable rows for the flat-knitted portion as purl rows. This is not as crazy to work as it may sound, but I have definitely learned my lesson about paying attention to what is about to happen in a pattern as well as what I’m working right now. I hope I can get it together enough soon to do some pics and tutorials for this and my “oh no, missed a cable!” fix (which has now averted disaster twice).

I am also behind in my reading for the Sherlock Holmes read-along at the Baker Street Supper Club forums (you should check them out, btw!) and have War Horse by Michael Morpurgo out on interlibrary loan so I can have it read before the rush of people wanting it closer to the movie release. Maybe I should spend less time online and more time actually getting things done?

As a long-time Sherlock Holmes fangirl, I had to watch the new BBC Sherlock and enjoyed it immensely. The biggest flaw in the show, aside from the fact there are only three episodes, is the astounding lack of knitwear to stare at and copy. The exception to this is Watson's sweater in the first episode, "A Study in Pink". Here's a better look at the stitch pattern, though the image is flipped, since the cables are all left-crossed in the episode.

A few people on Ravelry suggested similar sweaters, but of course none of those matched quite right. Then TexturedKnitter posted an outline/ recipe for an Elementary! Watson Sweater. If I knew anything at all about building a sweater, I would already have the yarn ordered for this one. I'm quite sure someone else will pick it up long before I reach that level, but the charts are not without interest.

The beautiful thing about charts is that you can take them and plug them into just about any garment (or other knitted object) as long as you can make the stitch counts work. Since I'm on a hat kick, I decided to try these with a hat. The stitch count for 3 repeats seemed a little high for worsted weight, but I gave it a try and, after fussing with the decreases a lot I had a not-bad hat that fit me fairly well but will probably work better for a man. Okay, I was planning on giving it away anyway.

My next attempt was 2 chart repeats with bulky yarn. This turned out about the same size, and my re-reworking of the decreases looks a lot less funky. Look, Ma, I wrote a pattern! I'm pretty darn proud of myself, even if it was mostly borrowed.

It will be a few days yet before I'm ready to post a final pattern. I need to do one more test knit to make sure the pattern works with the weight yarn I want and the decreases look good. (I've only changed the decreases about 6 times now.) I want to see how the cables relax once they have been washed and dried. Then I need to take loads of pictures of hats looking good, and a few of what not to do. But I'm excited!

I just counted and I completed 20 hats for Ravelympics. Twenty! That's an average of more that one a day! I'm really not sure how I did it. Four were pretty quick bulky crochet hats, but others took some frogging and pattern re-reading, and I had some other delays. In fact, I would have called those delays significant because they took up several hours each night for more than half the time. (More on that later.)

But still... Wow, y'all! That's awesome! Now I just have to wash and tag and mail all those puppies off. I can't wait to see what the other fiber athletes accomplished. But first, sleep. *yawn*