Over the next five days, I will be flooding the airwaves with information about the Olympics. NBC seems to be all-Olympics all the time. I will try not to be that bad, but we’ve reached the critical mass point where it is necessary to focus obsessively on the end goal.

Remember the four little mousie socks I was competing to finish? Well, progress has been slow.

One little bootie is now sitting done, sans ears, eyes, and whiskers, and in need of sewing up. One little bootie has the ankle done and needs to move on to the foot. The next little bootie was accidentally knit in the round before I realized they should be knit flat and is waiting for me to figure out how to adjust the pattern or to frog it in desperation. And the final little bootie exists right now only in my imagination (where, by the way, it’s adorable).

Once the Olympics are over, I promise not to give you knitting updates multiple times a week. I promise to devise other topics of conversation. Ummm… Spring training? Books? Next Tuesday’s jury duty? Next Friday’s KT Tunstall concert? All will be fair game next week. I promise.

But in the meantime, we now return you to the Burrow, the site of our current Knitting Olympics event…

Three of us decided to turn down a party invitation to stay in last night and work on our knitting projects. Suzanne and I are both behind our desired schedule for our Knitting Olympics projects, and Chickona is working on her first sweater.

Much to our surprise, at 8:30, our friends called. Please come to the party, they said. There’s food — and you’ll love the location. You’ll be disappointed if you miss the City Museum, they claimed.

We grumbled. We groaned. But eventually we gave in and agreed to come join them.

And thank goodness we did.

The St. Louis City Museum is awesome. It’s like a children’s museum, but aimed at everyone. So there are quirky things like an architectural hallway with pieces of St. Louis buildings (including a surprising number of doorknobs). And there’s an arts and crafts corner. But there are also slides all over the place. And areas where you can climb through and up and across the building. There’s an aquarium with petting tanks. (Turtles are surprisingly cold to the touch, even when one remembers they are cold-blooded.) There’s a section of caves. There’s a whole outside component (which we did not take advantage of in the balmy teens).

So after a trip where the biggest (nay, only) crowd we saw was when the SuperCross was letting out and where abandoned buildings outnumbered those in-use, it was a huge relief to discover that there was life in St. Louis after all and that people were putting old buildings (in this case, an old shoe factory) to new and creative uses.

St. Louis had been disappointing; the City Museum salvaged my impression of it. And in the process, it vaulted to the head of the line in terms of my best museum experiences.

I managed to knit 24 rows of my first bootie last week before discovering that I shouldn’t be knitting in the round according to the directions.

I put that yarn aside in order to try to work the pattern flat, but only picked it up again last night after getting back from a late night. And, I’m sad to say, that my poor, tired brain couldn’t wrap itself around knit 2, purl 2 on straight needles. I know the knowledge is there. But either the yarn or my brain refuses to cooperate, so we’ll see how this goes…

Maybe I’ll take my President’s Day holiday on Friday in order to stay home and knit all day. Is that cheating? Is that a waste of my carefully accrued vacation time? Am I still upright? Where am I?

The first stage of any Olympics is to make the team. The second is to qualify for your event.

I’d made the Knitting Olympics team. My name was on the roster. But I’d yet to make sure I’d have a chance to fly down the hill to victory.

You see, I didn’t have a pattern or yarn.

Thursday night, I plowed through piles of patterns in books I owned, books borrowed from willing friends, and web sites galore.

Friday, I took off from my event in order to march with the team and enjoy the festivities.

Saturday, I took inventory of my stock of yarns and needles and wrote out what the patterns I was considering would need.

Yesterday, I laced up my boots and hiked out, slipping, sliding, and slogging through slushy snow en route to the local yarn store, which was having a sale (and Cakelove cupcakes).

How many people can say that they’ve hiked through the snow for a mile for the love of their craft? Well, probably tons. But probably not as many when you narrow down the craft to knitting.

Fifteen minutes after the store opened, it was not yet crowded. But as I wandered around, looking for some of the things I needed, the crowds began to grow. Shoppers began to outnumber store employees. The room began to grow warm.

The first item on my list was yarn for a sock yarn exchange I joined. That was easily grabbed, two shelves in from the door — some nice handpainted sock yarn in yellows, oranges, and reds. Yarn for a hat for a friend was a little harder. Here I was looking for yarn that would be soft enough to wear, masculine enough for a boy, and, preferably, colored in red and black. I found a red angora blend first and then found some black alpaca/merino wool.

And then it was back to my main event: the booties. My local yarn shop has two locations. The other location has a baby yarn section; this one does not. So I wandered around, increasingly feeling desperate. Not finding angora, I jettisoned the first pattern idea. Plus, I reasoned to myself, the twins are going to be summer babies. Who wants to wear angora in a swamp in the middle of the summer? Even rabbits object.

Eventually, I turned to a store employee. I’d decided on one of my patterns and needed some help figuring out what was fingering weight and what was DK weight. I still have no idea. But she pointed me to some baby-weight wool and then to some pretty cotton-wool blends.

Rudi arrived at that point, and together we chose a pretty deep teal and a dark lavender Rowan wool cotton, named Ship Shape and August, respectively, to make these booties from.

We finished the trip with a few more skeins of sock yarn (enough to make Rudi a pair in black, white, and grey and a pair for me in pinks), some extra needles, and some black alpaca/silk yarn Rudi asked me to make him a scarf from.

I cast on the friend’s hat tonight (I see him on Saturday and thought I ought to get started on it) and am loving feel of the Blue Sky yarn and the bamboo needles. It’s the equivalent of spa knitting.

Tomorrow, I’ll cast on the booties and start working toward my main race.

I’m about to embark upon a massive journey. No, it won’t compare physically to Di‘s marathon training or mentally to Shelley’s science-class-loading or emotionally to Sam‘s wedding.

But it will challenge my skills and my sanity (and maybe Rudi’s).

I’m going to take part in the Olympics, starting this weekend.

Why, sprite, you say with surprise, you’ve never given any indication that you partake in a winter sport. What do you do — ice skate? luge? curling?

Nope. Nope. And nope.

I’m entering in the knitting category.

Huh?

You read it right. I’m going to be a knitting Olympian.

Yarn Harlot decided to launch a knitalong to take place during the Olympics. I’m not sure how many people she thought she’d get to take part, but it’s obvious from her recent entries that it was not the 3,000+ who’ve signed up to knit their way through the real Winter Olympics.

I’ve debated joining for the last several weeks, and finally decided for certain tonight that I’m in. My project will be two pairs of baby booties (for D.C. friends who are expecting twins this summer). The rules dictate that I not cast on before the Olympic flame is lit on Friday (not possible, since I won’t be buying the yarn until Sunday anyway) and that I finish before the cauldron’s flame is extinguished on the 26th.

I don’t yet have yarn or a pattern, so if you’re a knitter and have suggestions, I’m open to them. I haven’t swatched. I’ve never knit one bootie, let alone four.

But I have faith that I can finish the task I’ve chosen for myself. It won’t be easy. It may not be fun. But I bet I will learn a lot. I will grow as a knitter. I will take pride in my accomplishment when it’s all over. And I will relish being part of a community that crosses international boundaries and languages and abilities.

And, in the meantime, I’m limbering up by finishing the socks that I started last year. It’s good to go into the Olympics with a final win, you know.

Wish me luck. Wish me speedy fingers. Wish me sleep. (And think nice thoughts for Rudi, too, who will have to be my one-man support team/cheering squad.) And, when it’s all over, wish me two finished pairs of baby booties.

I made a sock!

Last night, I finally managed to finish the sock I started more than a year ago when I was last in Boston. Our knitting group had decided we would make socks using a pattern one member had found.

The project got put on hold last February to work on squares for a coworker’s quilt. It stayed on hold through Sam and Alexis’ wedding quilt and then through the Christmas knitting season.

But I swore to myself that the first thing I finished after Christmas would be the project sitting half-done in my knitting basket.

And I did.

Admittedly, there are some mistakes. As you can see in the second picture, the most major mistake is that somewhere as I was working the heel I screwed up the ribbing on the top of the sock. But I decided I could live with that. And since it occurs at the turn of the sock, I don’t think it will be obvious unless I point it out to everyone.

I’m surprised by how proud I am of my little sock. It was easily half an hour that I stared giddily at my own foot last night. I mean, it’s nothing fancy and it’s hardly perfect. And it’s not the first project — or the largest — that I’ve finished. But it is the first thing I’ve intentionally knit for me — from picking out the yarn to weaving in that last end — and the ability to hold onto it after finishing it is a terrific feeling.

(Hear that, everyone? You might not get any more knit presents from me. I might just knit for myself from now on… Okay, probably not. But I may try to strike a more even balance.)

The next challenge will be to finish Sock #2 by the end of February so I have all of March to wear the socks before it gets too warm for wool. But with the extensive notes I’ve taken and the 2×2 ribbing pattern ingrained into my fingers’ memory, I don’t think that will be a problem. And if I need any motivation, I’ll just take out Sock #1 and wear it while I’m knitting. That should be the only incentive I need.