Finally FO

I finally finished my "Tour de France" socks. It took me a lot longer than during the Tour de France and I am the first person to admit it. However, I am very happy with the finished product even if it seemed like they would never end. I learned on this project that I like one cable needle type far better than the other. I much prefer and find much easier to work with the fisherman's hook like cable needles than the ones that are like a dpn but bent up in the middle. They just work better for me at the stitches not coming off the cable needle and for ease of knitting from them. The socks turned out to be quite long and I used up all but less than a yard of the yarn I believe. I didn't even do the ribbing at the top, using my scale to judge with great success how many repeats I could squeeze out of this yarn.
It took me a little bit (a couple of days) to start a new project, but I have. It's not the project down below. It's a baby blanket I am knitting using someone else's dishcloth patterns, all of them are Hawaii related, to put into a pattern with seed stitch in between the dishcloth patterns. It's in progress but I only have the seed stitch border going so far since I had to do a fair bit of counting and arranging and math to get the patterns sorted into how I want to use them and what will make a good baby blanket size.

This is not the new project but the start of another new one. It's a swatch. If you know what for, let me know, otherwise I will tell you next time.

In running related news I have started training for my 10k in October. I am using Hal Higdon's Novice plan for the 10k and it is going well so far, except for all this rain we have all of a sudden in the Boston area which is mostly keeping me from running outside.

Happy Knitting and Running!

P.S. Happy Birthday to my Dad and niece tomorrow!

Flowers and Train Knitting

Hi everyone,

I have been very busy as of late. I did not meet my Tour de France goal. It was an epic failure for me. However, these flowers from M did wonders to cheer me up about that. Aren't they beautiful? They lasted strong for about a week and now some of the blooms are still around, but most have gone away. They were the most fragrant and wonderful flowers.
Here was the socks before I did another 1.5 repeats to be left with only one more to go on this sock and then the border. However, I am still behind this on the other sock, having most of the leg left to go.
I didn't knit on it much this week because Michael ran in a 24 hour relay race this weekend starting at 7 PM Friday night and going to 7 PM Saturday night. Our running club, the Shamrock Runners Club, had the team. We spent the night there in my car, and only slept 5-6 hours that night. It wasn't the most comfortable. The relay was over a 5k course. I ran one lap for M at about 4 PM on Saturday. It wasn't very ideal conditions. It was hot at that point, and while it was not that humid, I couldn't race as hard as I would have liked. I did improve my 5k time to 36:08 by M's watch, since each individual lap was not timed, that is all I have to go on. I definitely didn't hydrate enough during the night and day due to some very questionable porta potties. It was mid day Saturday before we discovered the office park bathrooms were open with running water and real toilets and soap!!!! soap!!!! It seemed like such a luxury at that point. If he does this again next year, we will 1) have a tent or go home to sleep in our bed, as it is 20-25 minutes away, and we would have 5-6 hours in between laps at night as they do 2 laps during the night to let people get some sleep. Today we were both tired, so we went and did some fun things I wanted to do-we did mini golf and got ice cream at Richardson's, which is yummy.

I did a repeat today on the sock however. I'm looking forward to the finishing line with these so I can start and concentrate on the baby blanket.

Happy Knitting and Running!