Green Socks

This is my first pair of lace socks. I'm quite pleased with them. :) I made these from Lanette sock yarn. It's tough to find a good, solid color sock yarn, but this stuff is great, very soft. Also I have been wanting to make a pair of green socks for a long time now but had been having trouble finding a yarn that I liked. I used a pattern from the book, Socks, Socks, Socks that I reviewed over at Universal Book Reviews.

Fair Isle Socks

These are one of the pairs of socks that I am working on currently. My first Fair Isle socks was a pair of slipper socks that I made for my mom for Christmas. They have hearts on the heels. These are a lot tougher though because the pattern is more complex. I'm enjoying making these socks, but they are definitely challenging.

Perking the Office

Yay! Craig gave me flowers. I brought them to work so that my cat, Doc, wouldn't eat them or knock them over. Plus, I wanted to look at them while I was at work. The plant in the foreground is a grafted cactus.

Knitting Bags

I was at my friend's place yesterday, and she saw that I was using a zippered bag that curtains come in to store my current sock project. She said that she uses the same thing! I like zippered bags such as those for curtains, pillowcases, and for bigger projects, comforters or blankets. Some other bags that work great are the inexpensive "green" bags that are being sold all over town as a replacement for paper or plastic bags at the grocery store. Of course, I find myself using tote bags as well to store knitting projects. At garage sales, you can find a ton of tote bags really cheap. People go to conferences where they are given these bags they will never use again. I don't personally care what the bags say or where they come from because they make great project bags.

Craig Peterson & Beyond Compare

Pictured to the left is my husband, Craig Peterson. He's the lead developer of a shareware utility called Beyond Compare. Recently, he was interviewed by Successful Software. A couple of months ago, he participated in the Podcast at Delphi.org where he also discussed the development of Beyond Compare version 3.

One of the things they were trying to ascertain in the Successful Software interview is why Beyond Compare succeeded despite the developers ignoring conventional wisdom and making some unusual decisions. I think it is precisely for these reasons that Beyond Compare is so successful. You cannot succeed if you just do what everybody else does. They buck the trends, and it works for them.

2009 knitting goals

I'm not a big one for making New Year's Resolutions. I am also not particularly goal-oriented. It seems to me that often life gets in the way of our goals. "The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry," adaptation of a saying by Robert Burns. However, when it comes to knitting, there are some things that I would like to learn, and maybe I'll even learn them this year. So here are three of my knitting goals:

1. Learn to knit socks on circular needles.
2. Learn to spin yarn from roving.
3. Learn to knit cables.

I hope, but I don't know if it's true or not, that knitting socks on circulars will be faster than knitting them on double points. I'm currently knitting a pair of socks from Sandy's Palette merino sock yarn. This is super-soft luxurious sock yarn, but it's taking me simply forever to finish these socks. I started them during our vacation in November.

I suspect that my sweater-knitting has cut into my sock-knitting though. Since November, I have knit two sweaters, and I'm currently working on a third that I just started last week. What I love about knitting is that it finally gives me a good reason to appreciate winter. I can fight back against the cold and knit sweaters! My current sweater is a Neckdown Pullover for Women by Knitting Pure & Simple. It's a raglan. I'm knitting it from Cestari Cranberry Tweed 100% wool.

Do tarantulas spin webs?

I took this picture of this cute little fella at the Desert Springs Preserve when we were in Las Vegas this November. I know most people don't think tarantulas are cute, but they are fuzzy which makes them cute in my opinion.

So I got to wondering if tarantulas spin webs like other spiders do. It turns out, they do, sort of but not for the same purpose as other spiders. They do make silk, but rather than using it to catch bugs, tarantulas use the silk to line their dens. It helps them to detect intruders.

Here is a site with good info on tarantulas.