Rent Socks

Some of you know that I have a very long commute to work - 84 km (~50 miles) each way. In addition to this, my role at work has been changing lately and now I'm doing training in a classroom setting. The result of this is that now I have a hard and fast start time in the mornings and when you have to cross a city of a million people to get to work, traffic is unpredictable at best. So on the days when I teach, I spend the night before at a friend's place much closer to work. We have experimented with how to compensate her for this. She's not really comfortable taking my money. I've brought a roast a few times, wine others but I think we've settled on something that will work: socks. She doesn't knit, but loves hand-knit socks.

So here is what is likely going to be the first of many:  Rent Socks.  The yarn is Trail Socks by Fleece Artist in "cedar" colourway. After she's tried it on and I know it's the right length, I'll graft the toe.

In other news, the calendar says it's spring now, but it seems mother nature didn't get the memo. It's still very cold outside (-10C) with lots of snow. But one of the oddities of Eastern Ontario is how fast the seasons change, especially from Winter to Spring.  When the change happens it will be very fast, a matter of days.  I've lived here long enough to know this so I've got some seeds started.

I know this is very early but I really only have a few things here.  I have some herbs (basil, cilantro, dill) which were decimated by some unknown critter last year, I have some pumpkins which I'll transplant when I can, some celery because home grown is really the only kind I like, and some tomatoes.  See, I've been looking at the tomato plants in May with the fruit already on them and think I'd really like to have one, but I won't pay the $20 the nursery is asking for them.  I figure I can grow it myself with a little bit of planning.

I'm also working on a new tank top for summer.  This is called Fifty-Fifty and you can find the pattern on Knitty.  I spent last night and a few hours this morning working on this and this is what I have so far.  As is normal for me, I'm not using the recommended yarn so I'm not getting the recommended gauge so I've had to recalculate all the numbers.  It turns out, that with my recalculated numbers I was 4 stitches off the numbers for a different size so I decided to try that. Here is the pattern. I think this will be really cute when it's all knit up.

I quite like the pattern, but one of my pet peeves with patterns like this is when the pattern doesn't quite fit around the number of stitches so you end up with a really awkward join on the sides.  In this case, there is a huge gap (ok, not so huge, only 4 stitches) on the sides where the pattern doesn't meet up.  Still, this makes me crazy.  

Not all the sizes have this problem, so I'm going to rip this all out and recalculate, maybe change the ease a little bit to see if I can use the numbers for a size that doesn't have this problem.