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Day two of my vacation and it finally stopped raining. Around three o’clock it was nice enough outside to open up the apartment and let some air in. Rain again tomorrow. It doesn’t look like I’ll be biking this week, as we’re driving up to Boston on Wednesday and then out to Ptown on Friday and coming back on Sunday.

I’ve Kitchenered the second toe and woven in the ends and I have these:

Notice that they don’t actually match. At least the swirl is in the same direction. The cause is the use of two different hanks of Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock, in Camouflage. At first I thought it might be my gauge, but the pattern is consistently different and one sock doesn’t feel looser than the other. One foot is bigger than the other, but that’s another issue.

What to Do Next Time

1. Try to get two socks out of the same skein.
2. Try a different rib. K2p2 is not my favorite.
3. Stop the rib at least an inch and a half from the heel flap. Ribbed ankles look puffy.
4. Knit the heel flap in a denser stitch.
5. Use 2mm-2.5mm dpn’s (#0 or #1 US). I used 2.75mm and the fabric is looser than I would like.
6. Use shorter dpn’s that do not have the manufacturer’s name stamped on them. The yarn occasionally snags on “Takumi”, and a seven-inch needle is a bit much for 14 stitches. One of the idle needles would occasionally get caught in the sock as it got longer.

Next up, something lace. Something done on one or two needles, not five.

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I’ve been cleaning up the posts that I imported from the old Blogger blog, consolidating all the images on to this server, turning off the comments—all I ever get is spam on the old stuff—and standardizing the HTML. It’s a geeky thing to do, but what do you expect.

Tonight’s dinner was inspired by an old post, Tamale Pie. The picture looks really good and it’s been over a year since I made it, so that’s what I made for dinner. Not quite the same recipe, though. Rather than use cornbread mix, which was too sweet, I made my own cornbread batter, halving the sugar. The flavor was wonderful, but the result was a bit more rustic. To make the dish, you spread half of a double batch of batter on the bottom of a baking dish, spoon the cooked and still hot meat filling on top of the batter and then cover with the remaning batter. The homemade batter was significantly more responsive to the heat of the filling than the the packaged mix. Before I could get the dish in the oven the bottom layer had risen to double its volume and threatened to spill the meat and top layer over the rim. I pushed it all back toward the center, but lost some of the asthetic appeal in the process.

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Yesterday I dealt with the offensive Silk Garden. I wound up all the excised lengths and laid them out so:

I found the ends that most closely matched, felted the ends together and wound it into a useful ball. It weighed in at 26g on the kitchen scale, which is half the weight of a full skein. The scarf could have been another 16 inches or so longer.

Bedtime. I have to take the car in early for inspection and service.