Year of Projects 6: Week 30

Although the second of my Vallisneria Socks is well underway, there's still most of the foot to knit so I'll hold off on more photos until next week. They should be done by then!

In the mean time I've made a bit of progress on other fronts...

I took a good long hard look at the MKAL socks that I had on the needles and decided to frog. I didn't like the toe, I didn't love the instep pattern, I didn't like the wide columns of purls on each side of the instep, and when Clue 3 showed that the width of the purl columns would be doubled up the leg, I cried "uncle" and frogged. I couldn't bring myself to go any further with them. That yarn can be put to better use.

I impulsively signed up for a sneak peak/test knit of another sock pattern on Ravelry. The pattern is named "Swirling Ribbons" and will be released on Ravelry next month. It's quite similar to a number of other patterns I've knit, including Pomatamus Socks and Tidal Wave Socks. It knits up pretty quickly with nary a cable stitch or knit through the back loop in sight! The designer suggested that the "dancing" stitch pattern would work well with high contrast yarns, so I dug through the stash to find this very loud yarn. It looks pretty fun, huh?

The plan for this week is to finish my Vallisneria Socks and at least the first of my Swirling Ribbon Socks. Time permitting I'll try to get Gavin's socks back on the needles. And, of course, painting workshop class two. Class one was sooooo fun! In the first class the instructor asked us to create as many tints and shades as we could from two colours plus white and black. I chose to mix blue and yellow. Then she asked us to zero in on the mixture of colours that most appealed to us and fill a canvas with that. My choice was an aqua green blue. And finally she gave us the subject matter "sun or sunlight" and asked us to create some representation of that within our chosen colour scheme. My painting is intended to suggest a view of the sun from under water. The entire painting was worked with a 2" wide brush so it's very loose stylistically. I am really pleased with it and really looking forward to seeing where things go next week. Our homework was to prepare 2-3 canvases, each with three or more layers of coloured grounds. In the vein of staying well outside my comfort zone, one will be yellow/putty/parchment (ending with a lightish shade), one will be red/pink/purple (ending with a medium shade) and one will be blue/green/navy (ending with a dark shade). And then I guess we'll have to wait and see...