Small milestones...

After several hours of intermittent hacking about, I have approximately half of my next homework assignment working. I'm hoping to make that 2/3 before bed, at least.

Here we have a photo of My Own Starry Night, reclining in the winter sunshine, as complete as it seems to want to be, for now:



I still think it needs more quilting, but I haven't got the skills to go with my ideas yet, so we're going to call it "done for now" and claim to have finished a quilt. I have to, because it's been stalling some other as-yet-unfinished ones.

Here we have the 2nd flip-top mittens:



Which have been done for a while but not photographed. This was a "kit" for which I threw out the pattern part and used the yummy yarn. The yarn is a handpainted silk from Sweaterkits, and almost matches the handpainted silk in the sweaterkits toque for which I did follow the pattern. I decided to partly re-engineer and partly improvise the flip-top pattern based on the one from "Not Just MORE Socks" that I used for Adam's Jitterbug flip-tops. It's not great - the base of my pinky is occasionally exposed - but it's close enough that I don't so much feel like pulling it out as doing something better next time.

And, the current two socks in progress:



I suppose you can argue that socks in progress do not count as milestones, but I put the qualifer SMALL in the title - getting the first sock of a pair done is a small milestone, as is getting the heel of a new sock turned via a new method I just tried for the first time (well, second, but first time successfully). I've decided the red sock is just the Red Alligator sock, because I didn't want Angry socks - my feet would probably not be happy if their socks were angry. The other one is a Straight Up Sock, something I started because the stitch pattern on the Red Alligator needs more concentration than I have when knitting while doing other things, but a Straight Up Sock can fill in as I can ALMOST do plain stockinette stitch without looking. Or when I'm tired. This will be Adam's next one and he doesn't mind at all that the sock seems to have a bit more pink in it than the ball of yarn appeared to at first.

I think I will stick to this method of having at least one challenging project and one more basic one on the go - it suits my can't-sit-still fidgetiness but also suits those times when I sometimes can't coordinate anything slightly complex while fidgeting.

Mom, I'll start you one as soon as the Alligators are done.