What A Difference A Year Makes

MCM has been gone a year. The first 10 1/2 months were so incredibly hard, but the last six or seven weeks have been a complete 180* change. I still miss him, I will always miss him. But I don't cry anymore (well hardly, anyway).
So the VIP came to visit. It was wonderful. Now if you'll notice my ticker, I've got a month to go before I see him again. He brought me some wonderful fibery presents, some of which have already been sampled. I got four 50g balls of Soxx Appeal yarn, in three different colourways. One colour there is two balls of, because it is green, and he wants socks out of it. I've already completed one pair of short socks for me. This pair took me a whole week, instead of just three days. The Soxx Appeal yarn only has 3% nylon and 1% elastic, but it is a highly-twisted yarn, so it has a long of sproing. It took me twice as long to knit with, because I was worried about keeping my tension loose. But I really like the resulting socks. Row gauge is off a bit, so keep that in mind if you decide you'd like to try some.

He also got me two balls of Opal Tiger. Two balls will make three pairs of socks! I am going to have to be a bit creative here. And he also brought me eight ounces of Romney/Columbia roving, dyed bright pink. I wound one hank of it into a bump yesterday, and began spinning with it. It is so nice and greasy, it feels wonderful.

And so here is the FO gallery:

Obviously the first pair is Trekking 100. I love this yarn. I think I am going to try to collect as many dyelots of this as I can. Who wants to help me? The second pair is Cat Bordhi's Coriolis Sock from Knitty Gritty. I totally FUBAR'd it up, but it's not too bad for a first attempt. They fit fine, and they are very warm. Instead of using the Austermann Step like she did, I bought two skeins of Brown Sheep sock yarn in two different colours. I really like how they turned out, plus I still have yarn left over for some short socks. The third pair is my Soxx Appeal short socks. You can see that they are quite short. I ended up with two feet of yarn left over. That's a bit too close for comfort, in my opinion. But I will definitely knit with it again, although I will probably go up to a size 3mm needle. The last pair is Fortissima Disco. Although this is very pretty yarn, I didn't like knitting with it. The metallic strand made it not as stretchy as wool yarn usually is. These socks actually went into time-out twice: once while I did the Trekking 100, and again when I did the Soxx Appeal.

So hopefully all these photos will appease you. Now if you'll excuse me, I have about a hundred errands to run today. I need to drop a bag of stuff off to the DI, fetch my meds, print some photos, go to the LYS . . . . . stuff like that.