What I have been up to

First and foremost, a welcome to the newest member of the family. This is the first version of Jackie's pet snake. She got it a few weeks ago but I've just downloaded the pics from the camera. She now has a new version of Crystal. The first one visited the pet shop to see why it wasn't eating. Turns out Jackie had been playing with it too much and it was too stressed to eat. She now has a replacement and I assume that the original snake is now in a nice quiet cage taking lots of snakey Prozac.

Now on to the knitting. Here are the two pairs of socks that will have the ends darned in once I find my needle or purchase a replacement. The white one is from the Six Sox knitalong, the striped one I did as a practice run of a toe-up pattern I got from the sock pattern generator here. I wanted to use the same pattern for Pomatomus but was less concerned about ripping a plain stocking stitch sock if things didn't work out. This sock kept me sane on a particularly tedious course. I knitted the straight bits in the class, turned the heels while watching TV, and even did some knitting while at the movies. This is the fastest I have ever finished a pair of socks. All in all it must have taken me a little over a week.

Here's Pomatomus. I'm doing this one sock at a time as the pattern mentions the need to move stitches around and that's much easier to do on DPNs than one circular needle with two socks on it. This was the bluest yarn I could find in my stash, and I'm wondering if the striping doesn't detract too much from the pattern. Then again, it isn't THAT obvious and in a way I think it adds to the overall effect.

This is a little pink number that I'm making for Jackie (who had her first knitting lesson this evening) with the same basic principle as Glampyre's minisweater or boobholder. You might want to turn your sound down as this thing just SCREAMS "I'm 6, I love Barbie, I love pink, I love fluffy!" at the top of it's voice.

Finally, these are my Fisherman's socks from one of the MANY sock knitting groups I'm signed up for. Can't really remember which one right now but will post when I remember. This is my first use of cabling without a cable needle which I learned by looking here and here. It was a bit fiddly at first but it's getting easier all the time.

Hopefully that will satisfy Gina who moaned about the lack of photos in the comments.