Friday, March 23, 2007

Korea or Bust!

Some of you may have heard me talking about going to Korea this summer. Hwa Gye Sa Temple in Seoul is offering their semi-annual retreat there for free this year! All you have to do is get there. The Zen temples in Korea do two three month long retreats every year called Kyol Che. It means something like ‘tight practice’. The rest of the time is called ‘loose practice’. This year, you can sit three days up to the whole three months for free. I’ve decided to go in July and sit for 3-4 weeks. I haven’t decided quite how long yet. I have to factor in shop coverage, how long it is going to take me to recover from jet lag and things like that.
Anyway, I’m doing a bit of a fundraiser for it, which is equivalent to a ‘rent party’. If you are interested and would like me to send you more info, please drop me an email. I’ll send you an invitation!
If not, don’t worry. This is for fun and I’m not asking anyone to this party that hasn’t specifically asked to be invited.
Meanwhile, in lieu of payment, the temple has asked people to make an offering. I have decided to offer six pairs of socks to the temple for the monks and nuns. The unfortunate part of this is that Kwan Um School monastics can only wear grey, boring, boring, grey.





Oh, well. It’s all part of the practice, I guess. Anyway, my big challenge here is to make six pairs of socks out of 10 skeins of Regia. I think I can do it and I have some extra if I have to use a bit. It means that there will be a join in almost every sock. This kind of rubs me the wrong way. I’m going to work very hard to sew the ends in so that it doesn’t make a lump. Any suggestions?


And now, I give you Wanda and the tail that just keeps getting away. Her relationship with her tail really is quite conflicted.



I love her expression of exasperation at the end!

6 comments:

17th stitch said...

Dear Lucy,

I'm a huge fan of your blog, and your store - and I'm so sad that I only found your store in the month before I moved away from Boston!

I just had to point out - and I'm sure you've thought of this by now - that if you have 10 skeins of Regia to make 12 socks, only 2 of those socks need to involve joins. Of course, those two will have lots of joins. But maybe there's a pattern out there which will help disguise them.

I can't wait to try out your entrelac scarf pattern! Looks smashing!

Lucy said...

Hi Allison,
Thank you for your kind comments about my shop!
I did think about having one sock with lots of joins and thought it would be better to have many socks with one join rather than one sock with many joins. I'm onto the second pair and using magic loop. It's good fun! Pictures to come.

Anonymous said...

Lucy:

First, it was wonderful to meet you today, and I'm so happy to have some of your gorgeous sock yarn to take back with me to New Mexico. I hope Annie's friend is able to get the evil out of her soysilk spinning :)

Second, the joins. I'd try a Russian Join with one of the socks. You may find that it works well enough that you don't mind having a sock with a whole big bunch of joins (though I think that it would drive me nuts, personally).

Love the store, love the yarn. Thanks so much for the chat!

--Ann

Anonymous said...

ahem... lucy's store works really well, even long distance, via etsy and calls to the shop (but what color regia do you have? is it blue-purple or purple-blue? can you overnight it?). and maybe knitting in all grey does make knitting the new yoga (blarf!!!!)... meditation involved with boring-colored sock knitting might make you more prepared for the trip.

omly said...

Hi Lucy,
I promised I would send pictures of my coral snake socks. You can see them here.

Anonymous said...

when is next sock club!?!?!?