The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and then some more Good

The Good: I finished the Cadence Socks and they're awesome!

First Christmas present done! My sister will love these!

The Bad: I have a math exam tomorrow and I am totally unprepared!

The Ugly: The short socks are done...

wah waaaaah....

Ew.

Yuck. Get them away. Ew. Ew.

I'm pretty sure my only mistake was making them too big. I'm going to try again on 6's and see how that goes. Also, the pattern is obviously totally wrong about sizing. On these I did 9 iterations of the cable pattern (including the decreasing part), but I'd say for a size 7 foot or so to do 6 or 7 cable patterns (but maybe less on 6's, I'll let you know when I figure it out) But another sizing issue: the ankle is way too loose! My other sister would be like, "you made your other sister those amazing Cadence socks and I get these? You must hate me." So I'm not going to give her these socks. Because I don't hate her.

Maybe if you made these on 7's with thicker fluffier yarn they'd make good slippers, but now they're sort of ugly floppy useless sock/slipper hybrids. Another (necessary) deviation I made from the pattern is that I kitchener'd the toe shut, instead of pulling the yarn through the remaining 10 stitches.

The also-Good:

Instead of going back to the short socks, which I'm completely sick of, I forged ahead and started the Java Socks for sister's room mate #1:

Now this is what I thought sock-knitting would be like before I started. The Cadence socks were really easy and went really quickly. These socks however, they're just inching along. This yarn is much finer and I'm actually sticking to the size 1's. But they are oh-so-soft! 

Here's my game plan: The pattern said the leg is 6.5 inches long. Each iteration of the pattern (4 rows) is about a half an inch long. If I do 4 iterations of the pattern (about 2 inches) per day, I'll be done with the leg in a few days. Not bad. My problem is that this weekend is Thanksgiving, and my whole family will be together. This by itself is not a bad thing, but that means I can't work on any family-related projects, because then they'd see their gift before it's done and that would ruin everything. So I have to strategically work on certain projects while certain people are not around. I can work on the short socks on the way to Thanksgiving, because sister #2 won't be in the car, and I can work on the Java Socks at the party while sister #2 is around, and maybe I'll work on the fuzzy hat if my dad isn't around at some point.

I also need to come up with a gift for my mom. I really want her gift to be like a grand finale to the Christmas 2011 gift collection, but I can't find anything spectacular (and yet doable) enough. It's hard to browse patterns on Ravelry when I have 3 projects going at once. It makes me feel guilty. There are just too many fun things to do and no time at all to do them!