More Cold, More Knitting

Here is a view of the last several feet before my back door. Solid ice, minimum three quarters of an inch thick. I have been trying to break it up. Attacking the ice with my booted feet has always been a sort of hobby/guilty pleasure. It's so satisfying to get a big crack. You can see the cement where I've made a little progress at either end. This is just way too thick to take care of the fun way. Of course, I haven't gotten out there with an ice-breaking-up-tool. See the doormat? I've managed to break up enough ice from that so that there's a spot of safe territory. But last time I worked on it, I tried to pry it off the ground and it ripped. Oops. I think, this is a deferred maintenance problem it's because I need a new roof. The water melts off the roof and settles there because there is a lowish spot. I don't actually get puddles there when it's warm. It's not that low. So until there is no snow on the roof or the weather warms up, more ice will form whenever a little snow melts off the roof. It's an adventure in walking. So far I haven't fallen. Whee!

When I finished the happy fuzzy big success angora luxury socks, I knit a bit on a few things. I ripped back all the way to the color bar on Niko's Manly sweater because I had started the vee-neck way too low. I think I frogged 6 or seven inches. I've knit about 4 or 5 back now I think. I'm not sure because I haven't picked it up in a while. I knit a couple of rows around on the quilty baby blanket. I'm thinking about picking up on the ends and adding some length before proceeding around again.
I think I saw something somewhere on how to knit log cabin style without picking up stitches. While I could figure something out, I'm sure the instructions are much better than my clumsy finagling will be. I think I saw the instructions on Yarnival. Yarnival is new to me. It seems to be a magazine-like compilation of particularly good blog posts. There are links to the blog posts rather than having them on the blog where the table of contents is. I've added it to my Favorites menu under knitting magazines. I'm looking forward to reading the articles (posts).
I also knit a beanie with a 2x2 edge as a demo for my knitting class. But I impusively gave it away to somebody on a really cold day. She wasn't cold or in need or anything. That is what I mean by impulsively. I was working on a dog sweater for one of my students in Wool-Ease to see how the pattern worked up that I modified from the Internet .

The last few days I've been working on my Jitterbug socks. I had started these quite a while ago but I had trouble with the heel and so I put them away. I was trying to make a flap heel from a new pattern in the Winter Knitty. I didn't trust the directions and thought I was screwed. I e-mailed the designer and she got back to me right away, but it was too late. I had fizzled. Now that I picked them up again, I'm just going for the basic afterthought heel. In the pictures the reddish yarn is my temporary place holder for the heel stitches. It is actually my other color of Jitterbug yarn. I had a lot of trouble settling on the design for the cuff of the sock. I tried all manner of diagonal ribs, like Knitty's RPM and my own (except not any lacy ones) and a couple of zig zags. The first picture shows the last zig-zag attempt. I had wanted to try and break up the striping. Those stitch patterns did break up the stripes but not enough to warrant the difficulty of keeping the pattern going on small, dark yarn. It was too hard to see and they weren't pulling in.

For the hell of it I thought to try a plain old 2x2 straight rib, et voila! Not only is it easy, the yarn likes it and it feels very nice. It looks good, too. Go figure. The stripes are a little wider and slightly helixical (izzata word?).