Socks, and more socks

I finished the socks! JoAnne is wearing them right now, and they look like this! They also look mighty fine with her clogs. This is the first time I've tried the Twisted Sisters stretchy cast on, and it totally ROCKS. It is SO stretchy, and looks great too. I highly recommend it.

In other news today, I had some bold (to say the least) superwash roving lying around, and I decided to spin it up for socks, since I now have no socks on needles, and need a small project for when I need to avoid Mom's sweater.

This roving really looks like that; its orange, yellow, magenta, green, pink, coral. I was a little bit frightened and if anything I thought it might spin up to be even brighter, after navajo plying and whatnot.

Wow! Imagine my surprise. Probably this stuff doesn't happen to other dyers, right? Its not exactly EARTH tones, but...well. It calmed down considerably. As singles spinning around on the bobbin it was a terrifying olive/khaki kind of thing, and I decided to navajo ply it to try to preserve some separate colors; I plyed with short loops, maybe 4-6 inches long in the hopes of avoiding the seemingly unavoidable olive drab fate. Its like sunrise over a wheat field right after the first frost or something. I have to cast on soon! I'm dying (dyeing?) of curiosity...I wonder what the knitted fabric will look like.

And ok, since you asked, I did make progress on Mom's sweater. It just FELT like no progress at all; I spent a long long time swatching and obsessing over patterns, and the winner is:

From Knitter's Magazing Winter 2004. Picture it short; ending a few inches below the breast. And then believe me when I tell you that the fabric, when knit from the yarn I am spinning, is very very stretchy. Also a little drapey, super soft, and very light, but also stretchy like 2x2 rib, and that's true even though the stitches have room to breathe, which is important because this is a wool/alpaca/silk blend and it has a little fuzz and will likely bloom when I wash it a few times. I'm thinking of making the back a little smaller at the hem, letting it get bigger over about 4 inches, so it will not get stuck between Mom's butt and her chair as she pulls it around her.

Her only stipulations were: summer weight, and no warm collar. This just about killed me because I have to say the yarn is so fuzzy and soft. But I can make a cuddly shawl-collared thing in the fall if I want to. For now, I'm gonna knit this for her. I've looked at kazillions of patterns, obsessed till I'm cross-eyed, decided over and over to design something top-down and be done with it. No baggy loose old-lady thing would do, my mom has complicated gorgeous expensive sweaters she bought overseas on trips. She wears tailored jackets, exquisitely fashinonable sharp clothes. The pressure is just horrible. If she doesn't like it, for sure she's not gonna wear it. It can't be dowdy or slouchy, and she has to be able to put it on really easily without getting up or twisting around.

So..I'm kind of excited about how this pattern is actually already WRITTEN, because I don't have time to fuss around with this. Mom is ill, and I feel like I need a sure thing. I can't just frog it and start again if she's going to have time to wear it. So...I have a pattern, I have (almost) enough yarn, and I'm hoping to cast on my Mother's Day.
And let me just pause for a moment of silence regarding the big deal it is to design yarn for and spin a sweater.

Yep, that's the swatch. I'm thinking some sort of tealish color.