Let the Games Begin!

The oregano socks are complete at last! I love them and really want to keep them for myself, but I don't wear much green, so they will be handed off to my friend at church in the morning. I know she will just adore them! Everyone who sees them tells me they are beautiful, so it must be true...

Brenda's pattern worked very well with the colorway--you can still see the twists in each cable and the detail in every lacy inset. The lace insets even inspired me to try designing my first pair of socks. I have some of Scout's sock yarn in a colorway called Storm Surge that contains lovely shades of the blue and grey of my alma mater, Georgetown. My new pattern idea includes some pointy lace insets reminiscent of Healy Hall, so I think the pattern will be named "Hoya Socksa" in honor of the school.

Let's pause for an educational moment:

The following is borrowed from the Georgetown University New Student Guide.

“What Rocks” at Georgetown University

No one seems to know exactly when or how the term Hoya Saxa was first used at Georgetown. Many years ago there was a team at Georgetown called the “Stonewalls,” and it is suggested that a student applied the Greek and Latin terms and dubbed them “hoya saxa”—what rocks! Hoya has since become the nickname for Georgetown’s athletic teams and students.

Hoia is from the Greek word hoios, meaning “such a” or “what a.” The neuter plural of this word is hoia, which agrees with the neuter plural of the Latin word saxa, meaning rocks; thus we have hoya—substituting the letter “y” for “i.” Before 1900 every Georgetown student studied both Greek and Latin, so there was no need to explain in print what the expression meant.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blog entry...

My Black Bunny Fibers indigo laceweight arrived this week. I intended it for Icarus, but the pictures in Interweave show it in very fine gauge suri alpaca. Instead, I may return to my original Print O'The Waves plan to showcase Carol's beautiful blue dyework. The waves just seem more fitting for the stormy blues and greys in my yarn (more of those GU colors!). I am looking for more suggestions though, so if you know of a great pattern for 880 yards of yummy laceweight, please let me know!

The Trekking XXL socks have been frogged yet again, and this time they have been reborn as a pair of plain vanilla top-down socks. The dark Trekking colorway wasn't letting any pattern I tried to show up, so the latest incarnation is just stockinette stitch. They will be my movie and t.v. socks for a while so I can concentrate on the show. Through all this, I learned I am just not a toe-up girl, because the style wasn't working for me. I know there are toe-up devotees out there who claim it is the best method imaginable because you can use up all your yarn, but I am like Wendy. I am just more satisfied by starting from the cuff, turning into the homestretch at the heel, and anticipating the decreases at the toe which signal the completion of a sock.

I was a very responsible middle school math and science teacher this week. I used my time wisely yesterday (both of my Science classes had tests and my homeroom had P.E.), and I wrote lesson plans for my next two units in Science and my assignment sheets for next week. I also graded all of this week's assignments last night before I finished off the oregano socks. This is very important, because I now have the rest of the weekend to do nothing but knit, knit, knit! I don't think I have ever managed to do that since I started full-time teaching. I guess I just needed the proper motivation provided by my fiber and pointy sticks!

I'm off to play with my yarn!

And, oh yeah: Go Hoyas! Go Gators! Go Sooners!