We have finally killed our television! We'd had bundled internet, cable and digital phone with the diabolical Time Warner Cable for several years. A few weeks ago we realized that porting our home number to a cell phone for Mark (added to my plan), in conjunction with losing the cable (which is an enormous time-suck, of course), would save us about $100 a month, so we did it! The phone thing took a week or two to be finalized, and TWC actually makes you go down to their office and return your box to cancel your account--apparently assuming that many people are too lazy to make the effort--but Mark took it back Saturday morning. We couldn't live without the interwebs, clearly, and we plan to exploit Hulu for all it's worth and keep our NetFlix account quite active, but not having the cable means we'll both get a lot more done. I cannot tell you how much time I've spent vegging in front of HGTV...okay, I was probably knitting at the time, but still. So it's a brave new world here. Already I can tell we're going to get a lot more sleep, since I won't be forcing myself to go to bed after the first segment of Colbert. That, and I think the laundry will be folded in a more timely manner. Mark even volunteered to help tonight. :)

Dude, I owe you all some knitting content. I have two secret projects currently en route to their recipients, and I just finished two test-knits last week. Hmmm... I know what I can show you! Really ugly socks.



It's not the pattern, of course (the quick and fun Sprucey Lucy, by the ever-awesome Wendy)--it's this nasty yarn (JL Vinca--avoid!), which is made up of two plies that in this particular skein generally managed to clash with each other 75% of the time. Plus I am no fan of yellow, and there's a hell of a lot of it here. So I overdyed them with a pellet of red Easter egg dye and a mess of vinegar. Voila:



They're still pretty funky, but the yellow is now a pretty orange, and the red and purple bits are very vivid.

What else? Well, several cozies have been constructed. This one is for my DivaCup, which I should be receiving in the next few days:



Get it? Teehee. There are several more on Ravelry in this exact colorway of Peaches and Creme. And then there's this one (kind of NSFW, so I won't post it here), which I made for a knitting friend who had a birthday last week. Apparently she enjoys it. (Pattern here--probably also NSFW.) How could I resist making both of those in the same week?! There's also a pattern out there for a rather scandalous crocheted maxipad holder that uses fun fur to its best advantage...but I'm not even going to link to that. I think it's kind of gross, actually... But in G-rated cozy news, I decided to replace my leaking microwavable hot-cold pack with an old-school rubber hot water bottle--and since it needed a cover, I made one, also out of yarn I dyed myself:



I had 120 yards of vintage (and scratchy) off-white wool I picked up at a thrift store. I first dyed the whole thing with leftover store-brand rooibos tea, then drizzled cherry Kool-Aid randomly over the tan hanks. It looked pretty awful before it was knitted, but I'm pretty happy with how it looks now. I ran out of yarn a few yards from the top, so I finished with a few yards of Patons Classic Wool. It's much softer now that I've washed it with some conditioner (Flex, for more of that old-school flavor).

But wait! Before I go, here's something totally normal, so you don't think I've completely lost my mind:



My Berlin socks, out of some awesome Cherry Tree Hill yarn, hooray. At first I was planning to reknit the feet, since they got a little baggy the first time I wore them, but they fit better now that they've been washed. They should be fine with my clogs in the fall.

Next blog post: actual sewing! On the sewing machine!