bright socks done!

Should I start every entry with: the Summer of Socks continues? Because it does!

The sock I started as a sort of emergency "trip" sock continues to travel, more locally. It has gone to two minor league baseball games. In face, I turned the heel in the 7th inning in the first one (on July 3) and then decided to rip out the heel and knit more foot length at the game last night. I did get the heel all finished, even though I had to stop knitting in the 9th inning because I was making a lot of mistakes and it was getting late. The game went 15 innings with the hometown heroes losing and with us getting in at midnight. At any rate, here is a pre heel rip out picture.

I also decided to try some swiss darning (or duplicate stitch) on this week's sock. I ended up having to go back to my tried and true weaving a patch for the heel because the stitches were so stretched out. One heel is done. I'll do the other soon and try duplicate stitch on the foot area. Might be next week though as I seem to be running out of week! I knit these in July of 2012 after taking them on vacation. They actually have worn pretty well for having an obviously too narrow heel.

I also finished the leftover socks, finally! All I really had to do was a few more rows and bindoff. I'm not sure why I need to look at instructions for the bindoff--Jenny's surprisingly Stretchy bindoff is incredibly easy once you have the process in your head. It has been a little hot to wear them but the things I do for this blog.

And last, but certainly not least, we adopted a few more pets this week. I do a lot of volunteering and it puts me in touch with a wide variety of people. One person that I especially like is an entomologist for a public garden. She is very cool and always is doing something fun and buggy. This summer she managed to breed a few wild moths and ended up with an abundance of caterpillars. Now some knitters might actually be horrified with this but this summer I am helping her raise moths. Many people think of moths as eating sweaters, but really it is larva both of moths and carpet beetles. These moths however are Cecropia and while they do eat a lot, they don't eat wool. In fact my nine eat birch, while my daughters each have 3 eating lilac. They are native to my area, and so releasing them in the spring wouldn't be an issue. In fact, I doubt these would survive if they were outside. Heck, they may not survive being raised by us. they are cute though:

They like to hang out together which is fun. And I love watching them. I don't actually have a birch tree though so I am roaming the neighborhood and knocking on doors. Well and hitting playgrounds--a surprising number of playgrounds have birch trees.