Stealth pas de deux woes

No gardening progress to report. The heavy rainfall we received this week turned my newly tilled garden into a morass of mud. I'm marking time until it drys out enough to get back in there and finish it. The bad news is that rain is fore casted for today, as well as Tuesday and Wednesday next week. Yikes! Vegetables may not get planted at all this year, if the weather doesn't cooperate.


Here is another flower photo by Hockeyboy. These irises are courtesy of my Mom. A few years ago, she needed to clean out her perennial beds because her physical health wouldn't allow her to do extensive weeding and maintenance the beds required. So I went down to visit her in Iowa and pulled out all the flowers in her garden and moved them back up to Minnesota. I replaced the flowers in her beds with some low maintenance shrubs. I have blessed my Mom every spring since then because her flowers have really beautified my garden beds.

The plant in the background is coreopsis and it blooms with a lovely star-like yellow blossom later in the season. When I planted them together, I had hoped that they would bloom at the same time but, alas, they are on different schedules entirely. Fortunately, I like the contrast of the foliage between them, so they still look great as companion plants.

Now for my Stealth woes . . . I purchased two skeins of Socks that Rock yarn for this project. Because I was in a hurry, I just wound each skein into one ball, instead of weighing and dividing each skein into two balls, as is my normal practice. I assumed I could knit two socks from two different skeins without any problems, since I ordered the same color at the same time - hence, they would be the same dye lot.

Well, 3 inches into the toe up pattern, it was obvious that the two skeins were not the same dye lot. While I would probably wear the socks that were slightly different shades, my DH is a perfectionist and would not wear socks that didn't match. So, after much debating and thought, I put the two socks onto dpns, weighed and wound each ball into two equal balls and have cast on for two more socks, one from each skein. When the two new socks are the same size as the original two socks, I will put them on dpns and transfer matching socks back onto my Knit Picks Option needle and finish them. Then I'll do the same with the other pair. Thus DH is going to get two pairs of socks, instead of one pair. I'm knitting like a fiend to finish them, since the project has now doubled in size. On the plus side, I'm loving the hand of this yarn so much, it is a joy to extend the pleasure of knitting with it.

STR rocks!