I'm not making much progress on these socks at the moment because I have so many projects on the go but I just picked them up to take these photos and they are quite soft I anticipate them being quite cushion-y. I finished the first leg and I've done a few inches on the second leg.

My first attempt at amigurumi which is a Japanese craze of crocheting cute little animals. It doesn't really look exactly like the picture but given the non-standard notation and the lack of instruction I'm happy that it came out looking like a duck at all.

I saw this a few weeks ago when I was visiting my parents and I was pleasantly surprised. I have not seen all that much of the original Star Trek but I though they made a pretty good effort at picking younger versions of the characters. I was hoping McCoy would have more of those "I'm a doctor not a ___" but he only had one. I will say it was more of an action movie than proper sci fi since they seemed to have put more effort finding a woman who would look good painted green and wearing only underwear than in filling in some of the plot details. For example why do these Romulans look nothing like any of the other Romulans?? But there were quite a few funny bits and over-the-top action scenes abound. I liked how the guy whose only combat training was fencing was able to do back flips while fighting bad guys on a tiny platform way above the planet's surface. I've seen real fencing and I'm pretty sure I would remember back flips. Anyway I recommend it as lighthearted viewing for an evening out.

I recently read I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith on the recommendation of a friend. I really like the movie and having now read the book I would say it's a pretty good interpretation of the book (although I've seen the movie so many times it was hard to imagine the characters without seeing the actors from the movie). As with all movie/book combos there was more detail in the book and I thought Neal was a much more likable character in the book than he was in the movie. He had a great line about how the English way of eating with a knife in one had and a fork in the other felt a bit barbaric - I totally agree :). I think I may have liked the movie ending better - it's not that the ending is really all that different but the main character is writing in her journal and I felt that what she wrote in the movie was a bit more of an ending than what she wrote in the book. I highly recommend this book especially as a vacation book as it is a fairly quick read and it's not nearly as confusing as many modern novels with tons of extraneous characters and scene switches every chapter.

I've done a few repeats on my Cold Mountain Stole from knitty.com. I'm using two strands of lace weight yarn that I bought a while ago. Unfortunately I seem to have lost the tags so I can't record exactly what kind of yarn it is. So far it's coming out well but I'm not too happy with the corners or the edges, hopefully I'll be happier after I block it. It was an easy pattern to memorize and it's fairly easy to tell what row I'm on and if I've made a mistake in the previous RS row, important qualities for lace.

I dyed this yarn in a crazy knitting adventure with Carolyn. We used two packets of koolaid in about 1 cup of water and we striped the sock blanks the long way to avoid having actual stripes in our socks. We did run out of dye mixture about 2/3 of the way through but fortunately my mom was able to run to the store for us to get more. Although we really poured the dye on there are still bits of the yarn that are not dyed, I'm not sure how to avoid that in the future using this dying method (as opposed to the soak the yarn in a pot method). The yarn still smells quite fruity despite having been dry for several days now. I'm knitting the socks two at a time but on dpn's rather than with the magic loop method so expect a post later on about how they somehow came out different lengths. I'm also knitting toe up for the first time and so far I'm quite happy with how its coming out.

I'm designing this sweater myself. I started a different drop sleeve sweater from a pattern I already have but I discovered about 12 inches in that it was coming out the wrong size and I didn't want to do the same pattern over so I am making one up as I go along. I decided to add some extra cabling towards the top to make the sweater a bit narrower. I may add a few extra stitches of stockinette to the bottom of the back to make the sweater a smidge larger in the backside area. My goal is a comfortable, slightly oversized sweater that I can wear with jeans and relax in. There is no shaping in the sweater so far, it just looks like it has a bit of a waist because it's curled under as stockinette is prone to do.