Remember when you were a kid, and your mom told you that you couldn’t do x, y, and z? It made you want to do x, y, and z all that much more, didn’t it? Fast-forward to adulthood, where you no longer have a mother who tells you what you can and cannot do. Instead, you have that mommy voice inside your head telling you what you ought and oughtn’t do. I love my Mommy, but right now, that mommy voice is killing me. Or rather, my natural instinct to rebel against it is.

You see, there are things I want to buy. I’m a very materialistic person. I love shopping. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not one of those people who rack up thousands of dollars of credit card debt on dozens of monthly shopping sprees, but I like things. I like looking at things, shopping for things, buying things, and having things. It’s hard for me to see a thing I want and not buy it. It’s made easier when said thing is expensive, because then I have to weigh the pros and cons of buying it. But in the current state of things, any thing that’s not food is an expense I can’t really justify right now. So when I see things I want - things I know I cannot have right now - it makes me want them that much more.

Two of the things I want are relatively inexpensive, but still not justified purchases. The first are these Dragonfly Sock Blockers. I almost exclusively knit socks, and having these lovely sock blockers would make me very happy. But… they’re $26 more than I can allow myself to spend right now. Then the other day, I was over visiting Loribird’s blog, From the Wool Room when I saw this nifty device. She explained in yesterday’s post that it was a wooden dpn-holder or “sock-saver” that keeps your dpns safe and secure when you’re not working on your sock. They come in a variety of sizes to accommodate all lengths of dpns, and they’re just fabulous. I guess they don’t have the things on their website, so I haven’t the foggiest of what they cost. But it doesn’t matter. However much they are, it’s too much for me to even think about spending right now. Oh well.

Anyway, I’ve been working on those Merino Lace Socks by Anne Woodbury from the new Favorite Socks book. The stupid Koigu is continuing to be a pain in the ass to work with, as it’s all super-twisty and kinky, but the colors are coming out lovely, and it feels so nice, so I guess I can forgive it this one time. (One time only, you hear me, Koigu?)

However, last night after I turned the heel, I ran into a problem: the chart for the pattern continuation on the foot didn’t match up with the chart for the leg. You see, in the leg, the series of lace panels are broken up by two purl stitches (see the pretty little black dots below?). However, those little black dots don’t exist on the chart for the foot pattern. Instead, they’re written as knit stitches.

leg pattern chart, with purl stitches	foot pattern chart, without purl stitches

Now, I know in my heart that that cannot be right, but when I googled for errata, I found nothing. Nada. Zilch. So I put it to the Sock Knitters Community over at LiveJournal anyway, for my own peace of mind, and as it turns out, the pattern as it was originally printed in the Summer 2003 edition of Interweave Knits has the chart written correctly. And apparently this pattern isn’t the only one with issues - Grumperina had some problems with a chart in another pattern, too. It seems strange that a book that’s merely a collective of previously-published patterns would have such glaring errors in it. Oh well.

(Incidentally, I’ll be saying “screw you” to the chart and continuing to break up those lace panels with purl stitches all the way down to the toe, thank you very much, pattern be damned.)