I haven't managed to post anything this week, but I do have a very good excuse. Apparently I have an ulcer on my eye. Because of my heavy duty pain killers I didn't notice anything wrong until Wednesday morning when my right eye started streaming. I gave my optician a call and they told me to come in. The optician took one look at it and sent me to Eye Casualty. My what a fun experience that was, sitting around for three hours on uncomfortable seats in between being poked in the eye! The outcome of this visit to casualty was eye drops in the eye, every hour, on the hour for two days. After missing my first night of sleep I was starting to hallucinate and my eye started to get less manky. The second night I allowed myself to put the drops in every two hours. I felt much more rested on Friday, in time for my follow up appointment.
I went back to Eye Casualty and they had another poke and a prod and gave me two other medicines. I was given more drops and an ointment. I am allowed to sleep now whoopeeeeee! However, during the day, I have to put drops in every two hours, the ointment in before bed and another set of drops three times a day. I am very, very tired of the alarm on my mobile phone. I have had to change it once, it may have to be changed again before insanity sets in, because apparently I have to do this for another WEEK!!! I go back to casualty on Tuesday for another follow up.
Between hanging around hospitals and sticking stuff in my eye, I have had very little time to actually produce much creatively. However before all the eye palaver, I did attend a blackwork class at Mary Clare on Sunday. The project we worked on was a Tudor Rose. I have barely started it, but I am sure that I will carry on with it, and it may get me stitching again. There are many other classes being run at Mary Clare on Sundays throughout the year, and I can testify that the lunch is rather nice. If you are interested, I posted a list of the classes on this blog a while ago, here. I will try and finish the project, so you can see how nice it is, but I am not posting pictures until it looks like something!
I am also pleased to report my Happy Socks are now finished. I like this yarn, which is bamboo dominant, and the colours are fab, however, I have made a slight mistake on the striping.
As you can see, the toes are different colours. I couldn't work out what had gone wrong, because I had started the second sock at the right place in the yarn. Then I figured out what had happened.
I got the sock turned around after doing the toe! Because there was a rib on the top of the sock, and I started it in the wrong place, the toes look wrong. So in future, I will remember to check where the top of the sock SHOULD be starting.
There are two other problems with these lovely socks; 1) There are slight holes where the wrap and turn heel joins the main body of the sock, and 2) I started to increase the size of the leg two quickly and too early.
As you can see, I have weird folds at the ankle. This is because instead of graduating the increases, I did them all in one place. I did this on the other socks I made, but it didn't show as much, possibly because of the yarn. Next time I do increases in the diameter of the socks I will start a bit higher up the leg and spread the increases over several rows, to prevent the weird bagging.
Apart from these flaws, I still like these socks and I will use the yarn again. I will use part of the toe up formula again, but I am still searching for the perfect heel. One day I will find my perfect combination of sock patterns and then I will be ecstatic. after reading my previous sock posting I realise that I had intended to try the Jaywalker's with this yarn, maybe I should try again with my next socks.
In other news, I have started my bag for my friend's birthday present. I started knitting from the skein, without winding it into a ball, how dumb was that. When I got myself in a tangled mess I have to rip it back and start again, after winding the yarn into nice fat cakes. I'm so pleased I bought my ball winder. I am going to go and watch the nice BBC iPlayer while I knit up this bag. I only have a couple of weeks to get it finished. I'm glad she only wants a small bag