CMS knitting, finished socks, & dinner

Here are my new colloquium socks. They really are a nice color pink - the picture is kind of orange. I started them on Sunday night, and since I've been knitting my way through Tuesday teaching seminar as well as CMS/Colloquium the past few weeks (and I had knitting time during my TA session this week, when all the students left after the first hour) they've been growing quickly! It helps that k3p3 rib is easy, but still - I'm already started the heel flap, and we didn't even have colloquium today.

We don't have colloquium next week, either (or CMS for that matter) since the university has "midterm recess" next Thursday and Friday. But Robert and I are going to visit my family, so I'm expecting to get in plenty of knitting on the plane.
Here are the finished "church auction socks." Even though I didn't love every second of knitting them, I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out. I hope they keep the recipient's toes warm and cosy for a good long time!

In other news, I tried out a new recipe tonight: mock cheese sauce from the Vegan Delights cookbook. I also roasted some cauliflower to within an inch of its life (possibly my favorite way to prepare cauliflower), added some asparagus to the roasting pan when I started making the sauce, and heated some chicken-less nuggets from the freezer. I liked the sauce, although I really have no way no know if it tastes like dairy cheese. It was more "sharp" (I think? this is more dairy vocabulary I don't really know the meaning of) than the sauce I usually make with store-bought vegan cheese - kind of more like I imagine cheddar would taste. It was also quite a bright yellow color. Next time I might make it with veggie broth instead of water, to make the flavor a little more complex and try to make the color a little less neon.

Here is where the second sock was at the beginning of CMS on Thursday - very nearly done! I just had a few more rows. I unfortunately discovered that either the second skein of yarn was a yard or two shorter than the first, or my knitting tension wasn't quite the same as it was on the first sock, so before I could graft the cuffs, I had to "tink" a few rows of the first sock so they would match. Then I grafted the tops, and I managed to weave in the ends on one of them before the end of colloquium. Now I just have to weave in the ends on the other one, and then tonight I'll get to start a new project!! Here's where they were at the end of colloquium:
I was at Target last night, and they've started to put Easter stuff on sale. They had a bunch of really adorable Easter baskets, but these adorable buckets were less expensive. I got one large one and one small, and I'm planning to use them to store projects around the apartment.

Birthday Craft Day

Last Saturday was my birthday, and I had a craft day party to celebrate. We had a great time, and I worked on a bunch of projects. My friend Carolyn and I started with felted soaps (which I forgot to photograph). It's a very easy, super fun project - and you get to play with soap suds!

My friend Qiongling wanted to learn to knit. She picked it up really quickly. Here she is with the first of TWO potholders she made:
I did some spinning. I finished spinning the blue roving into singles, and then I plied it together with the spindle-spun stuff I made before I got the wheel. The quantity of wheel-spun singles was significantly larger than the quantity of spindle-spun singles - you can see the rest on the bobbin in the lower right in this picture. Another issue was that the spindle-spun singles were more over-twisted than the wheel-spun singles. So mixing them was maybe not the best idea in the world. I'm still figuring out how I'm going to make the rest of the wheel-spun singles into two-ply yarn. I think I might run it through the machine again, put a bit more twist into it, and end up with two bobbins with a roughly equal amount of singles, and ply those together. I feel like I've learned a lot from this experiment. We'll see how the yarns turn out (and I'm looking forward to more fiber I've ordered arriving so I can put my new knowledge to use).
I also knitted a bit on my "colloquium socks." I was informed that this was cheating, and I needed to disclose that on the blog.
For some extra disclosure, Robert and I went backpacking over Spring break last week, and I did a good amount of knitting on our long drive there and back. I'm pretty close to being done (Hallelujah!)

CMS/Colloquium knitting

I gave one of the CMS talks today, so I didn't get in quite as much knitting as I usually do on Thursday afternoons. I still managed to finish the gusset and get halfway through turning the heel, though! It's so exciting when a sock (or any handmade item, really) starts to be recognizable as what it is going to be.

Spinning Wheel!!!!!!!!!!!

My spinning wheel has arrived! I was expecting it yesterday, and I was heartbroken when it didn't get here. But today when I got home it was sitting outside my door! (I really wish the UPS deliveryperson had put it in the apartment office, but that's not what this post is about.)

The wheel arrived in a large box:

It's a Ladybug!

I took it out of the box. There was some assembly required...
Putting it together didn't take very long.

Here's a closeup.
My wheel is a Schacht Ladybug. One of the special things about it is that the people at Schacht put a little ladybug somewhere on each individual wheel. Not unlike the Snuggle Piggy book! It took me a few minutes to find mine:
Here's a larger view: it's behind the flywheel:
I started spinning a bit of some blue roving I've been spindle-spinning. It's so much easier spinning on the wheel than with a spindle! I love it!

Thank you Mom and Daddy!

First brown skirt

Here is the first brown skirt I made a few weeks ago. I bought the fabric and pattern during the JoAnn labor day sale last September, but I didn't get around to cutting out the pieces until January. A few weeks ago, my friend Evelyn kindly helped me put in the zipper (something I'd never done before). I really like the fabric, and I think it fits me well. I'm already thinking of adaptations of the pattern for future skirts - including a reproduction of my favorite skirt, which is unfortunately dying. My two favorite things about this pattern are the pockets and the pleats - both of which I had difficulty photographing well. The directions for putting together the pockets were somewhat confusing, but I'm really pleased with how they turned out.
You can kind of see the back pleats in this picture of the zipper. There are similar pleats in the front, too.

CMS/Colloquium knitting

I made some good progress on the socks yesterday. Here they were before CMS yesterday:
This is where I was at the end of colloquium. It's hard to see in this picture, but I started the gusset!
Yesterday's colloquium was the best one I've been to so far! The talk was about which groups can and can't be knot groups for knots of various dimensions, which is in some cases an unsolvable problem. I can't say I understood the whole thing, but I was following the entire time (which is REALLY unusual). The speaker was funny, he told entertaining historical anecdotes, and he gave the talk using adorable handwritten PowerPoint slides. It was a winner!

I have been joined in my CMS (but not colloquium) knitting by my friend Aru. Maybe we'll spread the trend further! Aru is making a lovely scarf for her boyfriend. Here she is knitting in our office in after colloquium: