If anyone would like to know what I have been doing the last few days the acceptable answers would be a)marking or b)not sleeping. From Saturday afternoon to this morning I managed to mark about 100 assignments/tests. I would feel comforted in the fact that it's all done if it wasn't for the fact that I will get about that many again this upcoming weekend :P But I will survive. I may not sleep as much as I like but I will mark. And with any luck squeeze in some knitting.
Yesterday when I was at near gouging my eyes out with the knitting needles stress levels I had a lovely gift arrive in the mail to help take the edge off. It's the October mail out of the Sweet Sheep Self Striping Sock Yarn Club. Hooray! The yarn this month is by my current favourite indie dyer "Lovesticks" and is in the funnest colourway: "Frankensocks" and came with an adorable Frankenstein rubber ducky key chain. I kept it in front of the computer and petted it whenever I felt the need for a bit of stress relief. This is the super cool yarn I got to look at:

I'm sure you can see why it's so suitably named :)
Sunday afternoon my mother and I took a trip to visit my cousin, meet the baby for the first time and gift her with the baby blanket I had made. The little one is so adorable and such a good baby. She slept through mostly the entire visit but I held her while she slept for most of the time so I got some good baby cuddling in (which is also a big help in the stress department, I highly recomment it! Though I don't recommend picking up stranger babies, mothers don't tend to like that... I'm just saying). But what really warmed my heart is that apparently she had no idea I was making the blanket. I had told my aunt and grandma but they never passed that info on. My cousin mentioned that not too long before I arrived she had commented to her husband that her other two kids all had people knit for them and the new little one didn't have any handknits of her own and had to use her siblings knits. She was absolutely thrilled that I had taken the time to knit for her baby. So I promised that there would be more handknits in the future, there is no way that any little babies in my life are going to grow up with out wooly goodness to comfort them!
In the knitting department I have finished the first Hula Punch Jaywalker and have not yet cast on for the second. Hopefully that will be remedied by the end of the week. My real knitting progress has been on the Wavy Lace Socks as I'm determined to have them finished this month and there's less than two weeks left to do that in. I've just passed the heel on the first one and I'm loving the pattern. However I have hit a major concern. It's beginning to look less and less likely that I will indeed have enough yarn to finish it. For now I will keep blindly trucking ahead hoping the knitting gods don't feel any urge to smack me at the moment and pray for a miracle. If the miracle doesn't pull through I'll have to decide whether I want to rip back and remove repeats from the leg or if I want to engage in a hunt for more of this yarn in the same dyelot. It's Claudia Handpainted so it's atleast a very common and accessible yarn but it totally smacks of the kind that could have big variation between dyelots and that's not something I think I want to risk. What's a girl to do? Please think some good thoughts for the sock :) Oh, and the sock also seems to have something against being photographed. The colour just will not register with the camera. After many attempts I will leave you with the least crappiest of all the pictures, happy knitting this week!