Done!

I finished knitting sockapalooza sock B last night, and cast it off this morning. I had alot of leftover beads - about 40% of the beads that were used for the socks, and I still had the wee little beads that were too small to thread on the yarn. So yesterday I stopped by The Sassy Bead Company and picked up some larger beads and beading elastic so that I could knit my swap pal a Bauble bracelet. It was a rainy afternoon, so while Somerset and Greedo napped, I strung the beads. The pattern calls for 4mm dpns; I tried knitting it up on 5mm dpns. Here's the result of my initial attempt to knit it up: I'm not sure if I like it right now. I fly back to BC tomorrow, and will re-knit it on 4 mm needles once I get there to see if it looks any less dog's-breakfast-like. It probably didn't help that I didn't actually use crimping beads to anchor the beads on the cord , so in some spots gaps opened up, which made the loops "catch" instead of slide through each other like a good yarn should. Back to last night - one of the great things about moving to Toronto is that there is a huge knitting community. There are several SnB's that meet on a weekly basis, and on Wednesday nights, there is a large group that meets at a Second Cup. It's large enough that if you get there late you risk missing out on finding a seat! There's a great mix of people who attend, and new people join in quite often. Last night Allie joined us. She is just teaching herself to knit, and we were all quite impressed by how even her stitches were for her very first project. She was knitting "a square" out of some dollar store yarn, and we helped her to cast it off. Check it out: The yarn she was using was a bit on the bulky side for her needles, so when she was casting on for square #2, I showed her how to do a long tail cast on. Which was when I learned that my long tail cast on technique is very different from that which other people use. Looking at the knitting help video, it appears that I use a modification of the "thumb method". I'm not entirely sure where I picked it up; I think that was my interpretation of the diagrams given in a Debbie Bliss knitting book. It's amazing how many ways people come up with to wrap sting around a stick, isn't it?