(I wrote some of this yesterday, but Firefox crashed before I could post it, and I was too frustrated to write it all again.)
This is where I’m up to with the clapotis. Well, actually, I’mfurther along than that, because I’ve done another pattern repeat or sosince I took the photo. I’m more than halfway through now (which isgood because I’m nearly halfway through my yarn!), and I still reallylike this. I’m starting to get bored with knitting it, though, which iswhy this post will go on to talk about plans and schemes that areforming in my mind

Still, the clapotis is good mindless TVknitting, so I don’t think I’ll abandon it, even while thinking aboutother things I could knit!
There’s a slight problem with a couple ofthe stocking-stitch-stripes, where my fingers got confused with”kfb” and “ktbl”, and increased some stitches when they were supposedto be only twisting them, so a couple of the stripes are ratherbulbous, which you can see in the picture to the right – counting downfrom the top-right, the second and third stocking-stitch-stripes areswollen near the top. Probably no one but me (and now you!) will evernotice, though.
The plots and schemes I mentioned earlier are to do with the sock yarnthat arrived with the clapotis yarn – blue and green Cascade SassyStripes, and Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock in “Valentine” (still muchpinker and tamer in real life, but in my head it’s still the colour ofblood oozing from a heart. Which probably makes me really gross, butnever mind). I swatched the Cascade last night; I don’t have the needlesize the Jaywalker pattern calls for, just the one below and the oneabove, but even with the smaller one, my gauge is way off, and thenumber of cast-on stitches would produce an enormous tube, so I thinkI’ll have to rejig the pattern. Fortunately, it comes in nice simplerepeats, and the length of each zig-zag is also adjustable, so itshould be really straightforward once I’ve re-swatched properly. WhichI will probably put off, because I hate swatching in the round – eitheryou have to cast on millions of stitches to make a tube wide enough tomeasure properly, or you leave loose yarn around the back, but then thethree-or-four stitches on the edges are too loose to be any good atall, and it’s really fiddly to manage. Sadly, my purl tension isdifferent from my knit tension, so I do have to do circular swatches.
The Lorna’s Laces is more troublesome. I knewwhen I bought the Cascade that it would be for Jaywalkers; all I knewabout the Lorna’s Laces is that it would be socks for me. I hadn’treally got any idea what kind of socks. Now I have a plan to test out -more swatching! – to see if it works with the variegated yarn. Thecolours are fairly similar, so I think it might well work. The plan is(surprise, surprise!) cables. Frax suggested using my triskell cable onsocks, and since the jumper of doom is destined for frogging, I stillwant something knitted with the thing, having designed it. So I’m goingto swatch that, and see how it works. And because a whole sock will betwo cable repeats around (give or take a few ribs), I might as wellguess a number of stitches and actually cast on for a toe-up sock andsee if it works. (Has to be toe-up because the pattern is chartedbottom-up, and I’m too lazy to rechart it.) I’m going to use the toe-upheel-flap method from Baudelaire, because I like it, and because itgives me a good number of stitches to be able to start the back cablepanel on the heel flap itself, which I think would be rather cool.