Escaping a Sock Class Does a Body Good

I'm still floating from the nomination. Wow. I never thought such a thing would happen to me. I haven't been blogging all that long, so I'm especially pleased. I'm working on my nominations and will have them by this weekend.

Not much came in the mail today. YFIT was delivering, so it's not a huge surprise. I also have really cut down on my buying (vacation coming, you know), so there's not a lot left to arrive. I do have my yarn and sock clubs, but for obvious reasons, I can't post pictures of those.

These two things did come today, though.



The goddess was custom made. She's filled with all sorts of wonderful-smelling herbs, has real stones on her, and a medicine bag around her neck. The back side of her also has stones and beautiful embroidery. I'm extremely happy with her. The yarn is from See Jayne Knit and is called "Canadian Maple". It's gorgeous, soft, squishy, and did I say gorgeous? Incredible.

I decided to dive in my closet (after having to clear out a bunch of crap from in front of the doors) to find the yarn I want to sell. Just for fun, I took pictures of the bins that will be sold. I'll tell you what's in them after each picture. Please forgive the quality of the pictures - today is a strange day weather-wise, and the light wasn't the best for taking pictures.

This entire stack is what I'm selling. There's all kinds of yarny goodness in those bins. The bins aren't for sale - I may need to fill them back up. :)



The two bottom bins are all Opal. Not only are they filled, they're CRAMMED. The yarn is all neatly put in rows, but those rows are tight. There are single skeins, collections, and old/rare skeins in there.



This bin is all Lorna's Laces. There are mostly two skeins of each color. I also have some duplicates in there, but I need to make a list of them all. I have one person who is very interested in buying some, and she has some specific colors in mind. I haven't bought any Lorna's for a while, so these are the older colors. Some of them aren't available anymore.



The small bin to the left is Schaefer's Anne. I see one errant skein in there, but the rest is all Anne. There's one of each color in there. The small bin to the right contains things like OnLine, Regia, etc. I also have a large bin which is at the bottom of a lot of others that I'm selling off. That one contains Trekking and other skeins like it.



It's going to take me longer to inventory all this yarn than I thought. In fact, I didn't realize I had so much yarn. If I can sell even some/most of it, I can make Hubster a happy man. It's all brand new, never been exposed to my filthy ciggies (it's always been in these sealed bins in a closet far away from smoke - we never smoked in our house, and even though we smoke in here, they're not exposed to it), and it's also protected from the cat. If there's anything you are looking for in the lines I've mentioned, please let me know. Chances are that I have it.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, allow me to tell you about the hell that was class last night.

We got home around 10:00 p.m., had dinner, and I settled down to knit a little before I blogged. I needed to unwind. I unwound, all right. When I looked at the clock, it was 3:00 a.m. So I came over to the computer, wondering what to take pictures of. I had decided to take some pictures of the stash when I noticed that it was now 7:00 a.m. I also noticed that my hand was dead, as in so numb that I couldn't even move it. Not conducive to typing. So while I was waiting it out, I heard Hubster's alarm go off. At 10:00 a.m. Sigh. Those classes just wipe me out, and I have one more to go.

First of all, I'm now down to four people. Buffalo Woman is long gone, as are most of the other people who gave me totally blank looks when I said anything. Fine. The four women left had finished their homework and were justifiably proud of having done so. They all held up their socks with pride. Then I saw it.

One of the women had begun her slipstitch WAY too early, so that it began under the arch of her foot.

I took the sock from her just to make sure that I wasn't seeing things. Nope. She hadn't even knitted the foot long enough, because her gussets were started in the wrong place. To make matters worse, she hadn't listened when I explained where to put the slipstitch and counted every row of the gusset increases instead of just the increase rows, so she had twice as many rows left to do before she should have started the slips. I told her to pick up the stitches below the slips and rip it back, then reknit back to the point where the gussets should begin. She sighed heavily and set to the task - after a 15-minute explanation of how a knit stitch is formed and how to slide the needle under the leading leg. ARGH. And these are people with knitting experience. I think they might have seen a knitting needle at some point in their lives.

Then I turned to the lady next to me. She gave me her sock. Not bad. I didn't have the heart to tell her that it was poorly knitted, but I thought that since it was her first one, she would improve. It was for her daughter and was the same size I wear, so I tried it on. It was uh... slightly large. Just a bit. Kind of baggy. Okay... so the damn thing hung off my foot. I looked at her and told her that the only thing she could do was to start over. Besides, I've seen superwash felt, and if I tried to get her to shrink it down, she'd sure as shit felt it and then wind up with a Cabbage Patch doll slipper.

The third lady actually did well. The sock was nicely knitted, the stitches were even, and she had followed the directions. No problem. Whew.

The fourth lady had taken my last class but missed a couple of the meetings. She was taking it again to make up for what she didn't get the first time. She handed me a completed pair of socks. Nice, I thought, even though I told everyone to NOT go beyond where I told them to. There was a good reason for it. She had 1" long cuffs.

I kid you not.

I asked her why the cuffs were so short, and she told me that she was sick of knitting them and wanted to start another pair (?), so she just stopped knitting on the cuffs and began a new pair. Okey dokey.

Last night, I had hoped to get them to do the heel flap and then begin to meld the flap with the gussets to form the heel turn. I'm an overachiever in thought as well as action. I began to explain how to use the markers in conjunction with the decreases and what the markers meant when the lady who had done a decent job interrupted me. "Can you please repeat that?" she asked. So I repeated it. And again. And again. And then I told her to look at the fucking book with the pretty pictures and follow along with what I was saying. I was sorely wishing I had my pills.

After her 10th question, I finally told her, "PLEASE don't make this any harder than it has to be." She was taking copious notes, but I figured that if it helped her, so be it. They all finally understood what I was saying and demonstrating. At 8:45 p.m. They had 15 minutes left to knit the entire heel flap. I realized that teaching them the next step was out of the question (I tell you, sometimes I'm as sharp as a cow patty).

The lady who had to frog left early, claiming that she just couldn't deal with it all and promising to come back to their fifth and free session. I didn't see what the problem was, but I figured it was better to let her go. The others gathered up their stuff in preparation for leaving. So instead of leaving them with nothing to do for two weeks, I told them to do the other sock up to the point we had stopped at (you normally do the entire heel on one sock before you move to the other, but I had to give them something). They seemed cheerful and left.

I stumbled out to the car, lit a ciggie, and yelled, "FOOD!" So Hubster and I went to the coffee shop that serves such good burgers. They were closed. For vacation. For three more weeks. Then we tried another coffee shop. Closed. So guess what I had for dinner? Yep. English muffins and ham.

I don't know why these classes wipe me out so much. I think I'm so stressed out by the time they're over that I fall apart when I get home. I'm not teaching next month, so that will give me time to charge my batteries.

Next week, the Monkey Socks have to be set aside while I do my homework for the classes I'm taking at TKGA in two weeks. I'm hoping to find some really cool things in the market there for your viewing pleasure (and my yarny pleasure). I've never been to it, but I've heard differing opinions about how good it is. Stitches West comes in February, and I'm definitely going to that one. Not for the classes. For the market.

I'm afraid that if I push my class taking/teaching, I'll be a quivering mass.

Oh wait. I'm already a quivering mass.