Week 10 - Rosie and the Sock

We have another new addition to our 'household".  She is always a bit flushed and her face is always quite pale.  And she is missing her mama something fierce right now.  Folks, I give you Rosie, our white-faced red cow, often mistaken as a Hereford but she has no papers so she can't officially be called that.  She was born on July 3, 2015 so that makes her 8 months old.  And up till yesterday, she had been getting some of her sustenance from her mama....then she was loaded into a trailer and brought over to our property where she will live permanently...she's been bellerin' all night and all day today...but she's eating grass and drinking from the water trough so we know she can do it. It will probably take about a week for her to be totally weaned but we can wait her out!  Behind Rosie is Aggie, a neighbor's cow who is also living at our house for the time being.  

This was Rosie after she ran off the trailer yesterday.  She 'escaped' the trailer and ran around in the field, obviously looking for her mama...Garnet (who also belongs to our neighbor) was checking

her out.

On another note, Sock Madness 10 is upon us.  I have participated for the last 9 years. It always starts no sooner than the first of March each year.  So imagine my surprise, not to mention my anxiety, when I decided to check on Monday nite (Leap Day, February 29) and Shazbot, the pattern is out!  Turns out, the designer lives in Australia and the Powers That Be decided that was good enough reason to release the competition pattern a day early in the U.S, since it was already March 1st Down Under.  So I frantically sought out the two colors of yarn it called for, grabbed my needles, and cast on.  Now the rules of the game are that one MUST use exactly the cast on method in the pattern. And one MUST follow all the other directions and methods in order to continue in the competition.  I had never done the particular cast on called for so I logged on to YouTube to watch a video - I think I might use that cast on again...pretty slick.  Then it was on toward the heel of the sock.  I  am not fond of knitting socks from the toe up.  The heels on those kinds of socks just drive me nuts.  But this sock was a toe-up sock and it used a method of doing the heel that was new to me.  Again I went up to YouTube to watch a video on Japanese Short Row Heels.  Let's just say that I got thru it, (note all the orange stitch markers) and made the heel.

And finished that darned sock yesterday afternoon.  Now all I have to do is do it again for the second sock...and get that done no later than a week from tomorrow at midnight. 

It wouldn't be so hard if not for my knitting assistant who quite frankly has no regard for the hurried-ness of Sock Madness.  His attitude is, if it's not all about him, he just doesn't care.  

Very difficult to knit with both arms full of cat!

 I'm off to cast on the second sock....wish me luck getting that dratted heel done properly.

Thanks for stopping by.