Hanky Panky

Thursday morning, I met Hank.

Yes, he's just as cute as he looks in this picture. If not more so. I think Jeff and I woke him up from a nap when we got to the store. He was moving kind of slow and letting out some squeaky little yawns. But he was soon in full puppy form, chewing on shoe-laces, sniffing shoes and putting up with a lot of luvin'. Personality plus, we'd say. I'm really looking forward to watching him grow up in the store. Right before we left, Stephanie showed up to pick up where we left off. I imagine he's not going to be lacking attention for quite some time!

Oh, and since we were in the shop, I picked up some more Cascade 220 to make a pair of clogs for Jeff. I'm going to use the same navy color for the cuff and the sole as I used on my pair, but the top color is going to be a gray-ish blue.

And the Kohle Socks are moving right along. Most patterns I have call for doing the decreases for the gussets one stitch over from the end of the row. I think for aesthetic (and possibly structural) reasons, it's not a good idea to decrease on first or last stitch on the needle. However, following the instructions, I found that this gave me a 3-knit-stitch rib on the outer edges of the instep, instead of a 2-knit-stitch rib, like all the others. So the instep ended up looking like:

k3, p2, k2, p2.....p2, k2, p2, k3

Then, I had a revelation. Since I was doing this using magic loop, and not on dpns, I could move the decrease over one stitch. I was in the middle of a needle, so it didn't matter. And this would give me 2x2 ribbing all the way across the instep. Duh! So, at the point of almost having finished the gusset decreases, I decided to rip back. Mayhem ensued. Stitches were dropped. Curse words were muttered. I ended up having to rip back to the cuff and re-doing the heel flap, the turn AND the gusset. Sigh.

I like the big wide stripes. The heel and turn almost totally took up a brown and a black section, except for a half a round that came across the instep. You can see this in the picture. Rats. But the Eye-of-Partridge heel worked out pretty well. Kind of hard to see, but I know it's there.