Beach Knitting

It was a quiet week at the beach. It took over six hours to get down there ("there" being Southern Shores in the Outer Banks in North Carolina) last Saturday because traffic around Richmond and Williamsburg was incredibly slow. Tom decided he wanted to finish reading his current book, so I drove. That wouldn't have been too bad, except he read for all of about 20 minutes. The rest of the time he did...nothing! Ack! All that prime knitting time going to waste!

It rained most of Sunday, so I worked on the sock. The weather the rest of the week was nice and I worked on the sock. Time actually spent on the beach? About three hours, primarily because I forgot my hat, I forgot my high-octane sunscreen, and we didn't bring the beach umbrella. Ordinarily, that wouldn't have deterred me, but I remembered that the medication I'm on is one of those that make you photosensitive, so I erred on the side of caution. Yes, I know...I could have bought a hat, bought sunscreen, and bought an umbrella. But that meant spending money to buy stuff I already had and besides, I wanted to save my pennies for yarn at Knitting Addiction.

If you visit the Outer Banks, you should try to stop by. The shop is very nice. It's spacious and she has a nice selection of luxury fibers as well as the standards. This is her second year in business, I think, and she has added a shop kitty, Purrl, who is the sweetest little cat. It's at this shop that I introduced my sister-in-law, Reide, to baby alpaca.

Reide has been knitting for about year and she has turned out a prodigious number of scarves knit with novelty yarns. Reide has a good eye for color and texture and the scarves are quite nice. She decided to learn a little more about knitting and asked me to teach her how to make a hat. And that's where the baby alpaca comes in. The shop had a basic ski cap knitted up (with pattern available) and it was so soft that Reide just had to get it. So we got circular needles and a set of DPNs and later that evening, Reide learned the long tail cast on, how to join without twisting, and how to decrease. By the end of the next day, she had a hat and was ready to knit another one. So back to the yarn shop we went to get more yarn. There was this really nifty hand-dyed super bulky yarn that would make a great hat and Reide was eyeing that, but decided it was too expensive, so she got another skein of baby alpaca. I've started her down the slippery slope of yummy yarn. Bwah-ha-ha!

So, about the sock...



I finished it on the way home yesterday. And despite my best efforts with the heel, I had to rip the blasted thing out because stitches (especially the yarn overs) kept leaping off the needles like lemmings leaping off a cliff. It took about three hours to knit the toe, which seems like a lot of time to knit such a small area. The sock is a little short for my husband's foot; I'll make the next one a little longer. Now all I have to do it get the motivation to knit sock #2.

Progress on the Fern Leaf shawl? I had to tink about seven rows because I forgot to knit more than one row after knitting pattern rows. Sigh...that's what I get for letting my mind wander during my knitting.