The Rook-y vest on a day it was made for

So this morning it's gray and overcast and there's a light mist of rain coming down. Yesterday's temperatures were in the high 70s, nearly 80 degrees Fahrenheit (about 25 degrees C). Today's in the mid-40s (about 7 degrees C).

This is exactly the kind of weather I envisioned when I started the Rook-y vest, which I've shown in progress and then finished but flat.

Rook-y is a Socks That Rock yarn, used by most folks for making, as the name implies, socks. It's Merino, and well twisted and plied, which would make it work well for most people's footwear. However, I'm very hard on my socks and need to use wools that are soft enough for next-to-the-skin wear but more durable than Merino. So when two skeins of this Raven Clan colorway came into my life, I knew they were destined to be made into a frequent-wear item that was not socks. Thus the vest experiment.

When I arrived at the coffee house this morning for one of my three weekly sessions of "get out of the office and work on a project without interruption," my companions Kit and Judy declared the vest a success. I handed Judy my camera.

So here, at the request of Leslie over at Nake-id Knits, is a picture of the vest "on the hoof":

(I look like I need another post-travel nap. . . . )

Because the yarn is so tightly twisted (to maximize durability in the Merino), the legs of the stockinette stitches are slightly unbalanced and my two lace cable panels (mirrored) look slightly different. I don't find this a problem at all, and would happily use this yarn again for non-sock knitting projects. The yarn was very pleasant on the needles, and I loved the color variations within the dominant black field.

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I've got lots of photos from my two recent trips, first to New Mexico and then to western Massachusetts by way of a brief touchdown in upstate New York. My accounts of these travels will, of course, be idiosyncratic and far from comprehensive. But I saw some cool stuff.

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Speaking of cool stuff, I learned from this morning's issue of Shelf Awareness (an electronic publication about the book trade) about a New York Times article on Luis Soriano, who operates a bookmobile—called Biblioburro—out of his home in a conflict-beset part of Colombia with the help of two donkeys, the appropriately named Alfa and Beto.