I’m a bit grumpy this morning. It has a lot to do with a) the cat’s new habit of throwing up if I don’t get out of bed when he judges it’s feeding time (today he discovered such a ploy ends with him outside and unfed for an hour), b) knowing the next two days are going to be stupidly hot, c) wishing that the very overdue house extension was finished.

In knitting news, I’ve been doing a bit of everything. I have one side of the Vero Jumper mostly done, and the other more than half done. It knits up so fast, I’m tempted to rename it to the Verocity Jumper. I stopped where the neck shaping for the front starts on the first side, and started the second, because I’m waiting to see which side turns out to have the most appealing mixture of strip colours – and the least likely to give the impression of lopsided boobs (lighter colours enhance shapes, dark ones flatten them out) before I decide which will be the front.

Last night I may have discovered a mistake in the Kimono Top that means frogging several hours work, but figured I better have another look at another time to be sure.

The first Manly Mega Sock is past the heel. I decided that to keep the colour graduation uninterrupted, I should do an afterthought heel. I could knit from the centre of the ball… or wait until I’d knit both tubes and find two sections of the colourway that matched in the leftovers so I got matching heels.

But to avoid short row heel fitting problems, I tried my new method of increasing just before the heel, and decreasing after it. Where the heel was to go I knit in a row of waste yarn.

At that point I realised that having increases and decreases either side of the heel row meant I couldn’t move the heel position if I got it wrong. I’d have to rip it all out. I went looking in my sock yarn stash for leftover yarn to do a test heel. And I found some patonyle in a colour that matched the purple/red/orange ply of the Mega Boots Stretch very well.

Remembering that Michelle had successfully used contrasting heels and toes on her MBS socks recently, I added the heel, put the sock on the beau (pre grafting) and considered if the yarn matched well enough. It looked rather good, actually.

Then, because I couldn’t face the grafting, I frogged the MBS yarn back to the heel and reknit the decrease rows. I figured it would take pretty close to the same amount of time to reknit as graft.

Of course, I’m not going to frog back and reknit the toe in the contrast yarn. But I will knit the cuff in it, I think.