on the needles {beach edition}

It was such a beautiful day today that I decided on the spur of the moment to walk to the beach and knit the afternoon away. Care to join me?

Gorgeous sunny blue skies plus a little chill in the air made for perfect sweater weather.

Stopover in action

In the knitting bag:

More socks! No sock yarn WIP/UFO is safe from my current sock obsession. This is the same SpunRightRound yarn as pictured on my blog header. I ended up frogging the slip stitch shawl in order to knit this pattern instead. Working on the second sock of the pair.

Also knitting another pair of vanilla socks, this time using West Yorkshire Spinners - Country Birds range in the peacock colorway. I recently saw this yarn on the attic24 blog and instantly fell in love with the fresh bright blue & green stripes.

And lastly, there's my Doodler revisited. Excited to be knitting on this again. The yarn that I am using for clue 3 is by Duck Duck Wool. I so enjoyed watching the jewel toned colors sparkling in the afternoon sunlight.

I hope that your Wednesday was just as lovely! Have a wonderful rest of the week!

reverse dipped hermione's everyday socks

I tried really really hard to knit something besides socks with this beautiful ombré yarn. But as I was searching through shawl & cowl patterns on Ravelry, I couldn't get the idea of simple gradient socks out of my head. So I started to knit a test swatch in order to get a feel for the yarn. Ok, so the swatch happened to be 64 stitches divided evenly onto 3 dpn's. After one inch of ribbing, I decided to switch to a simple stitch pattern in order to see how the yarn behaved. Hmmm, but stockinette was too boring. There had to be just enough texture to keep things interesting. Then I remembered seeing a gorgeous pair of Hermione's Everyday Socks knitted by the beautiful & talented Nikki on IG. The stitch pattern was exactly what I had in mind! And that's how I ended up with a pair of quirky mismatched but fun gradient socks. The yarn is Tibetan Dream by Bijou Basin Ranch in the gorgeous Pink Ombré Flow colorway. It is a fingering weight yarn consisting of 85% pure yak with 15% nylon added in for strength and durability. This was my first experience knitting with yak fiber and I honestly didn't know what to expect. First impressions: luxuriously soft, non-irritating, beautiful drape, strong. It would be a wonderful yarn option for those with wool allergies. I can attest that my feet are feeling well and truly pampered right about now!