Vanilla Reversed. Neat.

If I had to put one word to yesterday, it would be sleep.  I'm trying to cut down my coffee intake during the week, to see if it would make a difference to my sleeping habits.  It isn't that I cannot get to sleep, it is that I wake through the night and have difficulty slowing my mind to get back to sleep.  I don't really feel an overwhelming urge for morning coffee so it isn't a really big deal, but what is striking is the daytime sleeping on no coffee days.  If I was not retired, this would be much harder.  When I say sleep, I don't mean napping either.  I mean full out sleeping.  I slept for three hours yesterday afternoon and it did not affect my sleep overnight either. 

It should also be stated that I'm not stopping coffee.  I love my coffee.  I am just trying to cut back to one cup a day.  But some days, I end up not having any.  

Still there was knitting.  And it was kind of fun knitting.

I was at the point on my Vanilla Reversed socks where it was time to sit down and face the pattern to figure out the heel.  Only to call it  heel that you have to figure out isn't really what is going on.  What you are actually doing is making the gusset. I had to work through it couple times before I got it.  It was a huge help to have all the projects and pictures on Ravelry.  When the written word didn't want to penetrate the thick walls of my skull, the photos eked their way in and finally it all made sense. sense. It wasn't like what was going on when I did my first heel turn.  Nothing so earth shattering.  It was more like what happens in lace.

In lace, the pattern writers write a repeat of lace at the point where the lace stitches actually do repeat.  They often will put markers there and all the counts will logically flow from that point to point B to point C.  I get that.  BUT  my brain needs to sort slightly differently. My brain sorts in a P Q F kind of way, a more ripples on the pond way of thinking but once my brain starts to see written directions  in a way that works for it, it flows along wonderfully well.  

That's kind of what happened here.  It took me three tries for the first set of rows and then suddenly it was all just right and it flew quite merrily along.

This sock is really quite clever without being difficult.  If you are a true pattern follower, you will like this, or if you are like me and have to sort  of come to understand where the designer is going, you will like this.  It is just a slightly different sort of  way of getting around the heel.  I will  use it again where I know that the socks are for me.  It won't replace my best afterthoughts and their flexibility, but it will have a place.  

So that was my whole day.  That and sleeping/napping/dozing.  Today is different.  Today is errands and spinning. I'm excited for this today.  It's mid project and I can't wait to show you!