So, more things on the move

 I've been able to do more knitting having to take public transit for travels to doctor visits. So about 2 and a half hours of travel time twice a week for one more week. That means socks are progressing and...regressing on one project.

Remember the Sheepicorn socks? After turning the heel and working a few rounds I decided to try one of the socks on (being still on the needles). Fit was good for circumference and then pulled it all the way up... something didn't line up. I realized that the gusset line was not in the right spot so pulled it down and adjusted the position. My hand is gripping just at the tip of my big toe and there is a good inch of sock beyond my toe. No bueno at all.

So I measured and sure enough, little over an inch too long from toe to beginning of gusset. This meant I had already been too long when I had to stop knitting due to technical failure from needles. You can see how far beyond the 9 inch mark I had had knitted....so.....frogging happened.

Since I  had already rewound one ball that was falling apart I got the brilliant idea to use the ball winder to more efficiently frog. Marked where 8 inches was visually and with a stitch marker because trying to pick up a straight row of stitches with a pattern was not working with my eyesight. 

Ball winder trick worked to a certain degree but didn't go exactly as planned as kinked yarn will tend to twist on itself. Took about an hour or two per sock to rewind and frog then checked to see where I was. Due to the slanted rib pattern on the front of the sock I could match both socks to be at the same repeat sequence. Day and a half, put the one sock back on the original needles and all done. 

While those languished I wanted to really dig in with the Sheepbacca socks and finally got those started, same pattern on front as the Sheepicorn but using the padded/ribbed sole.

I'm working on those while traveling and am mentally working out if I should change the stitch pattern on the leg part to be more long and wavy. Will figure that out when I come to it.

So on one of my bus rides, I get on sitting in one of the side facing seats and pull out my knitting as it's a 35 to 40 minute ride and I hear an exclamation to my right. I look over and a wonderful abuelita is holding up her crocheting. We chat for a little, showing our projects to each other and she asks if I'm going on the shop hop this month. I told her no, I don't have the money and she agreed but also she has more than enough yarn. She had a yarn shop in town before the pandemic and when that happened, she had to close her shop and then completely shut it down. So she has all her stock from having the shop and as she says, 'best yarn is wool'. Never got her name and she told me the name of her shop but it was hard to hear it with the bus noise due to it being a Spanish name, likely hers. So that was a bright spot on the commute which helped my remember yarn enthusiasts are everywhere.

Another side project which I will likely restart is a wave and fan stitch scarf. I got this skein in the bag of random yarn that was given to me by another resident in our complex. Just one skein. I thought the wavy stitch would be perfect for showing off the stripes as it's a 'Jacquard' style and the sample project for a sweater on the label in a different colorway was not flattering. Knowing a little about planned pooling I took a guess at a good width for a scarf and the stitch count worked really well. Not perfect but close enough. My guess on the sequence from what I see coming up is after the green fleck will be a white space then the grey fleck will start again for the color pattern.

All the scarves I've seen done in this stitch ends up with the mirror of the wave. My plan... is to guess where the halfway point is and change to sailors rib or regular rib for one color then reverse the stitch. Right now it's kfb x3 then k2tog x 6, then kfb x 3. To reverse this on the other side it would have to be k2tog x 3, kfb x 6, k2tog x 3. In 'theory' it should make the other side of the scarf look like that, will see what happens. I will not be stopping and grafting at the middle that I've seen other patterns do. If this turns out  I'll have to show it off to the knitting world. Test swatch is definitely called for.