I’ve been knitting madly on the latest sock. I’m having a ton of fun with this pattern. The intensely blue yarn definitely adds to the knitting enjoyment. I haven’t knit with anything this bright in a long time. And just look at the lovely patterning. Between the stitch pattern and the color shifts there’s a lot of interest in this sock.

The fact that it’s knitting up so fast doesn’t hurt, either.

The heel flap is done, the heel is turned, and I’ve started the gussets. The pattern continues down the heel flap. My centering scheme even worked. Woohoo!

I’m planning on making a bit of progress on those gussets at lunch, then again after dinner. I’ve been writing up instructions as I go, and plan to knit the second sock using them. We’ll see how I do. I’ll let you know when the pattern’s ready to go.

Other knitting news

I know you’ll be shocked, but I finally finished knitting Clapotis. Kristie helped me to pull out some of the dropped stitches when she was here visiting on Friday (we had tons of fun), but even with all her wonderful help, I still have tons of that to do. All this extra work is courtesy of the Tapestry yarn I’m using. It’s just fuzzy enough to catch on itself, and resist dropping stitches. Overall this is a good feature, just not one I happen to be fond of with all these intentionally dropped stitches.

Robin happened across these totally cool Rainbow Socks by Susanne Kitzmann in a recent issue of MagKnits. I may have to make them, too. We’ll see. The construction is similar to that in some of the sock in Cat Bordhi’s new book, New Pathways for Sock Knitters, or at least makes me think of the wildly made socks in Cat’s new book. Very creative.

Kristie has a copy of this amazing book already, and brought it over to share. All I can say is Wow. It’s an amazing book. If you’re looking for new sock construc­tion techniques, you’ll be amazed, astounded even. We certainly were. One of the most incredible things is that Cat’s planning on writing two more books in the series. Gads. Cat definitely gets geometry on a basic, internal, intrinsic level that goes way beyond doing calculations for angles or area.

Robin’s also been torturing herself with trying to learn entrelac recently, and found an online tutorial (complete with .pdf so you can print it out) by Knitty Otter that worked for her. As with lots of things, especially with entrelac, she found entrelac easy to do once she twisted her brain the right way. She found this tutorial to be quite helpful, so I thought I’d share it here in case you’re looking to learn the technique as well.

Fire update

Out of the 23 fires that started in the last week or so, all but four of them are completely contained at this point. The air is a lot easier to breathe here, though some areas are still quite smoky. The fire that’s closest to me, the Santiago fire, is still only 75% contained, though they’re obviously still making good progress on it. Full containment isn’t expected on this fire until November 4. It’s all those hills and canyons. Some of them are quite steep, making fire fighting conditions even more challenging. Yesterday’s sunrise was gorgeous. It was brighter before I got my camera in hand (naturally), but you can see a bit of it here.

People complain right and left about how long it’s taken to get the fires under control. I don’t know about them, but I sure wouldn’t want to be in charge of making the most effective use of manpower and other fire-fighting resources, especially with those shifty winds, and the public pressure to get them out quickly when resources are slim because of 20-something other fires going nearby at the same time. My heart and thanks go out to every single firefighter who put his or her life on the line trying to put these things out. You people rock.