Paranthetical Socks

Thank you to everyone who expressed sympathy regarding my neck yesterday.  I am still pretty sore today, but I have regained a lot of mobility and am actually sitting fairly comfortably, which is always nice.  I also only work a few hours this afternoon at my second job, so I have not had to stand all day, which seems to have helped.  Instead I have been doing something truly terrifying, reading my thesis straight through.  I got through the first 50 pages this morning before I felt like throwing it out the window.  I'll try to brave the last few chapters tonight.  The thesis isn't scary because it is bad, I am actually tentatively proud of it, but the thought that everything I have done academically for the past two and a half years (really since high school when I decided that this is what I wanted to do with my life) boils down to a little under 100 pages of text is rather unnerving at times.

Aside from the ability to laugh without dying from pain, my morning was also brightened by the arrival of a lovely package.

This is a skein of Unwind Yarn Company's Luxe Sock in the colorway Lake Lure.  Dana, who is the owner of this fine Etsy shop, is one of the hosts of the Just One More Row podcast (I met her and Brittany at SAFF.  Lovely women) and offered up a coupon code to the listeners for the month of October.  Because of SAFF I decided to put off purchasing until the end of the month so that I could have full use of my yarn budget for the event.  And I am so glad I waited.  I originally had my eye on her Faded Graffiti colorway, but someone else bought it.  But!  I got an awesome skein.  Not only does it have 10% cashmere and 10% nylon (I've never tried any cashmere blends and I am afraid to use blends without nylon for socks), but it is also named after one of my hometown's local landmarks (at least I think it is)!  Lake Lure is in the same county as the town in which I grew up, and I have spent a lot of time out there.  Tourists love to go hang out on the man-made lake, and it was the filming location for Dirty Dancing and Last of the Mohicans.

Chris and I on his first visit

I am fantasizing about knitting this up as the Darjeeling socks from Knitter's Book of Socks (birthday present from an amazing friend).  I'm in fact so psyched about this project that I am pretty sure I shall be frogging another sock project to make room for it on the needles.

Now, before I frog, I want to say that I love the Hummingbird socks.  Pretty much all of the patterns in Knitter's Book of Socks are projects I want to make.  The Hummingbird socks are billed as the perfect project for verigated yarn because the patterning moves the color vertically as well as horizontally.  I'm just not so sure that it works for this skein of Miss Babs.  It is striping too perfectly, which is somewhat annoying in such a pretty lace pattern.  Plus I don't have the mental capacity right now for a pattern that requires full attention to the chart, so I'm gonna rip them out and put the yarn to good use as something else.  Maybe as Trillian?