Scofflaw Socks

One of my aunts is an avid royals watcher; me, not so much. Alas, neither of us received an invitation to this Friday's wedding of the century (a phrase that makes her sigh and me gag). I briefly thought about knitting her some corgi slippers to mark the day, but no. At least I have newly finished handspun socks in colorway Royal Platypus, modeled on my pasty spring legs with some pale spring flowers – the New Jersey state flower, wild violets.



I'm inordinately pleased with these socks, which are mine from spun fiber to FO (as much of the process I want to own, at least for now) and with the way the pix capture the richly saturated figgy colors of the Into the Whirled BFL.



The excellent sock pattern, Supporter's Socks by Linda Pankhurst, was the qualifying round in this year's Sock Madness. I was eliminated, but in some respects, losing was liberating. Sock Madness patterns tend to be a bit short in the leg, a bit long in the foot for my taste, and for competition one must knit the pattern as written or larger. My socks are taller than pattern in the leg, shorter than pattern in the foot. Then there's mystery variation between the legs – the stitch gauge is more or less the same, but the row gauge is 'way off. Can you see it?



Part of the leg variation is due to the vagaries of handspun, but most is because I finished one sock, contracted a pox, and tried to knit on while medicated. I thought about frogging the second sock and re-knitting, but decided a pox on that! The socks differ from pattern and from each other – if that bugs the knitting police, all I have to say to them is Pbbt.

Also today, I got the long-awaited Nook Color software update to Android 2.2, or Froyo. There be Flash and apps! I'm enjoying the toys, although demanding creature that I am, I liked the speed of the old non-Flash-y browser and I'm not sure why there needs to be a paid app for functions (such as a calculator) that seem like they oughta be native to a computing machine. But not to criticize – the app store is only a day old and I'm still exploring the update.