Something Other Than Socks...

But first, let's talk about socks :-).  I finally finished my Down the Rabbit-Hole socks last Friday night!

I think I'd become spoiled with all the available knitting time I had during my break from working on shows, and I'd grown accustomed to being able to finish a pair of socks in a week.  So, it felt like these socks took forever...even though, realistically, they took a little over three weeks (and both socks involved false starts and had to be ripped back).

I like them a lot....but I'm not in love with them, I have to say.  They're a wee bit tight (not so tight as to be unwearable), and the toes are slightly different (one of them has an extra set of traveling stitches right at the tip of the toe and some of the dark teal color).  Despite these little foibles, I'm still charmed by the design of these and the self-striping yarn.  I can't say I'll make more striped socks for myself (not really my style), but I have requests from both friends and family so it looks like self-striping yarn and I will be meeting again!

And now for the not socks part of this post that the title promised.  Since the socks were finally done, I allowed myself to cast on for my Sandshore Cardigan Saturday morning!  Yipee!  Obviously that whole being a polygamous knitter thing didn't pan out....anyone else out there like me?  Or am I just some weird breed of knitter that finds it impossible to have multiple projects on the needles and actually work on them all?

I actually had a lot of free time this weekend, for a change, so I was knitting like a fiend.  That, combined with the fact that this an extremely fast knit anyways, means that by the end of Sunday night, I was already past the horizontal mesh stripe on the back.  Looking at where the mesh stripe was going to land on my cardigan, I was worried I'd missed a whole chunk of knitting.  Other Ravelers' pictures made it appear that the stripe was much farther down the back than mine seemed like it was going to be.  I re-read the pattern at least 10 times to find what I missed, but as far as I could tell, I'd done everything right.  So, I decided to try the sucker on, and it looked just fine (I think...), so I'm forging ahead. 

I'm super excited about this cardigan!  I love the way that it's turning out, especially the mesh panel down the back, which, like many other Ravelers, I am centering.  My OCD can't deal with the asymmetrical version (not that it isn't lovely, it's just not for me).  I'm optimistic that I'll be done with it in two weeks or so (provided I get my knitting time on the weekends).  

Not a whole lot crazy or new in my theatre world in the past week or so.  We finished staging the entire show, and the director has started working on where his sound design and where he wants the lighting designer to put light cues (he is a bit controlling when it comes to design work).  So far, there are 105 sound cues and 250 light cues -- I'm going to be a busy little SM calling this show, which I love!  

I'm getting very nervous about the prop tracking for this show.  The Monkey King (yep, Monkey King) has a staff that is normally 3 inches long that he keeps behind his ear, but he is able to magically change it into a full length staff...onstage.  Now, if you're a big Regional Theater or Broadway Theater, maybe that's not so bad.  You may have access to IATSE crew members to staff the show and cool things like traps and fly systems.  And while I think the community theatre scene here in my city is top-notch, we don't have access to any of those things.  I suppose we could have built some traps in the platforms, but we're having enough trouble just getting board ops, I don't know who we would have put in them to man them.  Anyhow, it's going to be an interesting problem to solve and once the actors get their scripts out of their hands and start carrying props....well, we'll start identifying and solving some of these problems.

But, we're only three weeks into rehearsal so I'm not too stressed yet.  I just keep reminding myself that it's not brain surgery, and we'll figure it all out like we always do -- one of the many magical things about theatre.  I'm going to try and start taking more pictures of rehearsal so the theatre part of my posts will be more than just ramblings.

As always, if you're reading this, I hope you are having and continue to have a wonderful week!