UFO becomes FO!

Stymied by the title of this blog post?  I'll bet most people never realized that there is a whole world of knitting terminology and acronyms.  We covered "frogging" in an earlier post, but I've discovered even more!

Tink - When you make a mistake and have to un-knit a section of a project.  Here's the cool part - "tink" is "knit" backwards.  Love it!

UFO - The dreaded "unfinished object" that sits around gathering dust and taking up needles that could otherwise be used to start another sock project that could also languish.

FO - Hallelujah!  A "finished object!"  It's done, all set, cast off, finito!  The project can now be worn, shared, given as a gift, or otherwise moved into the happy world of DONE.

Check it out, I have a FO!  Last night I finished my Ribbed Ribbon socks!  My wonderful husband, who is just getting over a cold, even stayed up an extra hour to keep my company while I furiously knitted to reach my goal of finishing the socks over the weekend.  I used a sewn bind-off to keep the top edge of the socks stretchy and make sure they'd go over my heel easily.  It was the first time I used it, and I kinda liked it!

Are you ready to see my socks?  The lighting wasn't very good because it was 11:00 PM, but the pics will give you a decent idea of how they turned out.  Drum roll, please!

"Ribbed Ribbon" socks - - pattern by Wendy Johnson

Cast on: 3/1/11

Cast off: 3/20/11

First thing this morning, I posted cast-off posts and pictures on the three March KALs for which these socks are eligible. Ta-da!  Cross your fingers for me that mine get picked in the random drawing to win some free sock yarn.

For the remainder of the month, I'll be continuing to work on my Cookie A. "Thelonious" socks, as well as the pink "I Heart Toe-Up Socks" (another Wendy Johnson pattern) that has been one of those stunted UFOs for a month now.

Come April, I'll be casting on Wendy Johnson's "Bavarian Cable Socks" for the "Socks from the Toe Up" KAL plus Cookie A's "Mona" socks for the Knit Sock Love KAL.  I'm thinking a bright teal-y color for the Bavarian Cable, and I'm not sure for the Mona socks.  The yarn will have to be solid or semi-solid/heathered for the pattern to show up.  I do have a nice Gloss fingering yarn from Knit Picks in the Masala colorway.  Here's the swatch from their web site, but the color is actually prettier in person.

Masala Gloss color swatch from Knit Picks swatch

Oh, I just realized that I have pictures of the yarn wound into two "cakes" using my new ball winder!  (An early Mother's Day present from Chris.)  And that brings us to another fun knitting term.

Cake - The cylindrical "ball" of yarn created by a ball winder.  It sits flat, the yarn pulls from the center, and it looks like a little yarn cake.

One of two Masala Gloss yarn cakes

It's so cute, I could just eat it up!  And doesn't the color look so much better in the photo of my actual yarn than the swatch from the Knit Picks site??? 

Okay, I'm hungry so I need to go have breakfast and then fold laundry and knit.  Thelonious, here I come!