All this and a box of cookies, too.

Hey, my aunt Dorie just sent me a box of Spontaneous Happy Cookies!

They’re from a place called Dancing Deer Bakery. I’m always happy to receive unannounced yum food at my house, but you should have seen Travis. The boy had a look of joy on his face you couldn’t believe.

Speaking of good food, here’s some of the eggy breakfast goodness we had for dinner last night:

Oh my god, was this good. We’ve been eating like crap lately – no motivation to actually make food, so we’ve been getting a lot of meals out, but none of those are particularly good either (besides the salad bar and strawberries from Ruby Tuesday’s. That was pretty good). Sometimes it takes just making one good meal to get us back into eating well.

We’ve got a little bit more cleaning to do this evening to get ready for my mom’s arrival tomorrow. After we’re done tidying up, I think we’re going to get out some of the new chainmail stuff and play with it. I can’t wait to do something with the awesome green rings.

I was having fun with photography yesterday, and managed to pull off taking a long shutter exposure shot of the glow in the dark chainmail rings. We’ve got a little bendy tripod thing, but the lens of the Nikon is so heavy, it wants to tip over. I weighted down the back bendy legs of the tripod and put the little bowl of rings in the bathroom sink (this is the one time I’ve really liked having a bathroom with no windows – it’s like a tiny darkroom) and got this picture:

I was all proud. 🙂 I have pretty shaky hands most of the time (I would be the world’s worst surgeon), and I need to get used to using the tripod more.

Also have been knitting more from the new Cat Bordhi book. I made a tiny Coriolis sock, but I really didn’t like the way it turned out. I think the problem with the Coriolis architecture is that it doesn’t translate well into a small sock – the sock just looks twisty and weird. Nevertheless, yesterday I cast on and today I completed my first person sized sock from the book, again using the Coriolis architecture. It’s the Tibetan Sock:

I was really skeptical that this was going to fit. I was knitting on size 4 needles, and at one point, I think I had like 70+ stitches, which is nutty. But I have to hand it to Cat – the fit is pretty much perfect. I think I prefer a slightly more snug sock, but if I had knit in any sort of pattern except for stockinette, that would have tightened up the sock. I love the fat swirl across the foot, and am already thinking of customizing the pattern and creating my own.

There’s definitely a lot of genius contained in New Pathways – all of the formulas for figuring out sock measurements and everything completely blows my mind. My biggest beef with the book is getting to the point where you have to turn the heel – there’s a lot of rearranging of stitches, adding markers, doing math – it gets really confusing. And it doesn’t seem to help that, although there are a lot of diagrams in the book showing how many stitches you’re supposed to have and what goes where, the stitches on my sock always seem to wind up to be a mirror image of what is in the book. I don’t know if I’m just knitting weird, or what’s going on, but no matter how I look at the sock on my DPNs, it doesn’t seem to match up with what the book shows.

That’s all right, though. Now that I’ve realized that I’m just going to be backwards, I can live with it. The important thing is knowing how many stitches go where, and I can use the numbers in the diagrams to figure out what needs to happen. I just really have to concentrate to do it. Right now, the New Pathways socks are not looking like they’re going to be car knitting, at least, not until one gets past the heel. Oh yeah, did I mention that the Coriolis socks are knit toe up? That’s right, I’m a toe-up sock virgin no more! Woo hoo! High five, Sulafaye! 🙂

I knit the Tibetan sock out of yarn I dyed last June, but never really liked. The colors were a lot more dull than what I was wanting. I figured that made it a good candidate for knitting a sock that I didn’t think was going to fit. But except for the pooling in the instep (I kind of hate pooling), I think the sock looks pretty decent. I love the weird cuff on it. Travis thinks it’s odd, but I’m thinking of maybe making a hat using blocks of knit rounds, purl rounds, and seedy-stitch rounds. Now that would be good car knitting.

Before I start cleaning, here’s a pic I took yesterday of one of the two caterpillars we’ve found in our yard:

They’re going to grow up to be monarch butterflies. How cool is that?

eta – For a look at some more socks knit from the different Cat Bordhi techniques, check out Lizzie’s latest post.