I’ve been working hard this week updating our family photo site. I take a ridiculous amount of pictures in a day and an even more ridiculous amount when we’re road tripping or having an adventure of some kind. I took heaps and heaps of pictures and videos on our journey from Ontario to Los Angeles and though we’ve been here for 3 1/2 months, I just finished uploading them all this week.

Since this project was meant to be a ‘scrap yarn’ project I’m trying to work on it between projects with whatever is left from the sock I last made. The issue there of course is that I’m usually racing to finish a pair of socks for someone’s birthday (and therefore I am a week or so behind on knitting the next pair of socks). So when I finish a pair, I’m casting on for the next pair.

However. Since we’ve been in LA, I’ve been a lot more relaxed about everything. I’m sure it has a lot to do with not being ‘home’, even if we are living here for the foreseeable future. I posted a while ago that my mindset started to change just before we left Canada when I had to accept that I was going to have to start our trek down to California without having a new place picked out. That was pretty huge for me. I’m a planner. Like woah, I’m a planner. I almost want to say I was a planner. It hasn’t even been 4 months yet but I feel less of an urge to plan things now. The whole drive down here instead of stressing out about where the next hotel was going to be, we just drove on and stayed where we stayed. We got tired, Googled the closest hotel and checked in. And guess what? It was fine. It was better than fine. I was super fun and I actually felt really relaxed about the whole thing after the first night. So what does that have to do with socks? Um, everything!

In January I made a list of the 12 pairs of socks I wanted to make and who I wanted to make them for. I used to see it as a timeline (as in I have to finish Brigitte’s socks in April because that’s when her birthday is) but now I see it more like an ordered list (Brigitte got her socks at the end of May and was perfectly happy with them). I also took off a few names of people I have already knitted socks for and added a couple that I haven’t knitted for – and no projects are tied to birthdays. So I will keep knitting on my puffs until I feel like casting on for the next pair of socks in my list!

My favorite puff right now is the purple and green one in the second photo. I knew when I casted on that I didn’t have enough purple for a whole puff but in the spirit of a scrap project, I just added on the next ball of scrap yarn and kept knitting. It reminds me of our first apartment – it was green and purple. Haha. yes, really.

I am still working on that this week and today we’re meeting up with a homeschooling group in our area. I’m so excited!

Today I’m linking up with Freshly Pieced

I finished the Hedgerow socks and popped them in the mail yesterday! So in the next week or so my husband’s wonderful Nanny will get her extremely late handmade birthday gift! Photos of that after these little cuties.

At some point last fall, one of my besties Talea, my sister Nikki and I all started knitting our own versions of this amazing blanket. Since it’s a scrap yarn quit, or at least that’s the idea, it’s generally worked on in between projects with the leftover yarn. Very similar that way to the sock yarn blanket comes together (the one I linked to here is my sister’s). I’ve always wanted to make a sock yarn blanket since socks are like, 90% of what I knit, but the puffs are just too cute to resist so away I went. The problem was I’d find myself casting on for new socks as soon as I finished the last pair and my ‘must do things in order’ brain would not let me put down the socks to work on the puffs. However, as I mentioned before, I’m thankfully growing out of that and have been able to put down new socks (these are next) and crank out some puffs.

Each puff takes me between 20-30 minutes, but with three wee ones underfoot I’m lucky if I get the opportunity to have 20-30 uninterrupted minutes when I’m not supposed to be doing something else. Originally I figured this quilt would take me approximately eleventy billion years to finish but then I thought, I’m sure I waste 20-30 minutes at a time doing random things. I’m just going to channel my randonmess into puff knitting and I’ll have this thing done by next year! Do not snap me from this delusion, thankyouverymuch. Right now I have 43 and I’m keeping a tally going in the sidebar, I have to see what happens when they’re all laid out but I will likely need upwards of 400 puffs! It’s going to be a fun, colorful quilt! Some of the yarn scraps I’m using are in the bag in the back of the first image. I can’t wait to see it!!

Here are a few pictures of the finished Hedgerow socks! Socks #4 for the year!