I have fallen out with my sock

I have fallen out with knitting the lacy socks. I have been beset with problems. The pattern has driven me nuts and stye on my eye hasn't helped my patience. Last night I managed to drop a stitch and on a ladder lace pattern that isn't a good thing. It laddered down about 10 rows before I could catch it so there was a lot of &*$" going on in my house. I have managed to latch it up but it's less than perfect. The one saving grace is that it is under the foot otherwise I would have had to unrip it stitch by stitch and row by row. There is going to be an awful lot of cosmetic darning done on this sock before it reaches my niece. I have got the second sock syndrome and I haven't even finished the first!

The photos today are of my charity shop stash that I bought the other day. I have 600 grams in each of the lilac/purple shades although the lilac has quite a few half balls in the bag. Where are the other halves? I wonder what projects were started and then discarded before it reached Cancer Research? The white fleck wool was another mystery. There appeared to be 5 x 100 gram balls but on closer inspection one of the balls changed colour a quarter way through the ball. I rewound it to check and now have about 80 grams of wool flecked with orange, green and blue and 420 grams with just green and blue. Strange. There was no knot to designate where the colours changed from one colour to another. Weird happenings in the balling dept? Perhaps the lady throwing the orange bits in had gone on a tea break?

The wool appears to be either acrylic or acrylic mix but I got 1,700 grams for £10 so I am well pleased. I don't know what I will turn it into as yet but the fleck will come in handy for making something for baby Charlie. I have found 500 grams of 4ply pale blue in my stash and was searching through my vast collection of patterns but there were hardly any 4ply ones and the ones that were 4ply were either crocheted or for girls. I can see a bit of Internet searching going on today although most of the patterns are US and they tend to use thicker wool for their babies. I like to see a brand new baby in finer things. If anyone has any links to any nice boy's fine garments especially a beanie please let me know.

I have a Debbie Bliss book but when I came to look closely most of the patterns are in Aran thickness. For a new baby hat? Erika Knight has one 4ply cardigan in her book but it is plain but then the book is called Simple Knits. I looked in the Itty Bitty Hat book and the smallest hat in there is too large and in worsted (double knit). I suppose I could pop it on smaller needles and use 4ply and see what happens.

I am trying not to put these socks down as they will get pushed to the back of the drawer if I do. The lure of Charlie knitting is beckoning as that would be far more exciting. I have found a crochet pattern that could be boyish ( well for a very young baby) so I will start on that. You can't keep me away from my crochet for long or I get fidgety!