Thanks for all your positive thoughts and messages.

So much has happened during the past week. Everything seemed so hopeless but my “little” guy has hung on. Earlier this week we had another vet visit and she suggested getting an ultrasound. We did that on Friday and got useful  information. The tumor is on his spleen which surprisingly, can be removed. Apparently cats can survive without it. The only other worry at this moment is the spots on his lungs. Chances are that these spots are also cancer but another type. Soon we’ll need to decide whether surgery on the spleen would help his chances. With all this being said, things aren’t quite as dire as before. He’s been responding to his medicine and should be OK a little while longer.

This week I had a few chances to continue working on my “Fair Isle” socks. These are the ones with the striped feet that I started a couple of weeks ago.

I’m trying to get the stripes to line up on the short row heels but this is proving to be a puzzle. In Simple Socks, PGR says to knit even numbered rows so that when you get to the heels you can evenly split a  stripe between the ascending and descending side. She uses a four row stripe as an example. She knits the first two rows of the stripe before starting the short row heel and then finish with the last two rows.

I can see how this would work with four rows but I’m having trouble with ones that have two rows. To think this out, I started sketching it on a graph. PGR says that the middle row of the hour glass needs to be an odd number of rows so that the stripes line up.  I tried to knit an even number of rows (two) at this point but she’s right; the stripes don’t exactly line up. I’ve also tried one row in the middle but that doesn’t quite work either. I end up with two many yellow rows on the ascending side.

I forgot to take picture before ripping out my attempts but you can get an idea of the problem from my first sock I knitted several years ago. These were made out of Regia self-striping sock yarn. I wasn’t trying to get the stripes to line up but they did on the right side. The left side didn’t line up quite as well but still not too bad. This is what I’m trying to do with my current sock, but with two row stripes. Notice the brown stripe in that cuts across the instep. It’s only one row wide. Part of the puzzle includes trying to get this stripe on the instep to be exactly two rows like the others.

By the way, my new computer is acting up so I’ve had trouble returning e-mails promptly. Hopefully I’ll be able to it  get fixed soon.