Have Train Travel Will Knit?

SO, there I was, thinking that with all the travel I was going to have to do for the rehearsals and concerts in Holland, I'd have tonnes of knitted things to share on my blog.  FAIL.  But seriously.  There were SO many hours just sitting on my behind of which I could have made use:  Tours to Paris - 1 hour;  Paris to The Hague - 3 ½ hours; then all the rehearsals - 1 ½ hours each way; The Hague to Zutphen - 2 ¾ hours each way; DH to Rotterdam was only 20 mins, (so that doesn't count as it's barely enough time to take all my winter outerwear off and put it back on again before arriving at the station) and lastly The Hague to Maastricht - 3 hours.  In all that time, I think I knitted all of 4 repeats on one sock.  I *may* have slept for the rest of the time...

BUT, there is a silver lining as after the concerts were over and before I came back to France, I used some down-time to finish these dorky babies:

noro stripy-feathery-fanny fugly socks™

No, I don't know what the hell I was thinking about, either.

The premise was promising, or so I led myself to believe...  Noro Kureyon Sock yarn in, erm, can't remember the colourway offhand.  (I got it 'cheap' from the LYS owner as she had used a teeny bit of it for display purposes and I was much too Scottish to pass up such a bargain, even if it was Noro!)  A basic stripe sock pattern that uses both ends of the ball for contrast, and a feather and fan stitch.  I could almost taste the potential.  I cast on with very high hopes and the first few inches of sock no. 1 (on the right) just flew off the needles:

undulating f&f prettiness

Of course, I was keeping an eye on the colour changing too, wondering what combination would come next, when I realised that the olive green was fast approaching on both sides.  Bugger.  Well, I have to come clean and tell you that I'd already cut out swathes of orange from the yarn, so I didn't feel I could be justified in chopping out some olive green, too, so I bit the bullet, carried on and eventually found stripes emerging once more.  To say I was apprehensive would be a gross overstatement but I was pleased to get past the glitch.  Until sock no. 2, where exactly the same thing happened at exactly the same place, just with lime green instead of the olive.  D'oh!

The Noro Gods were trifling with my highly-tuned sense of colour striping.  Either that, or they were too busy laughing at my efforts to lend a 'helping' hand.  Either way, I hope they were amused, as I can't say I was.  Particularly.

Still, I do have to admit I am fond of these two litter runts.  I can barely call them fraternal, though, seeing as they hardly look like a proper pair of socks, but maybe I can claim they share a turquoise great-grandmother somewhere down the line...

cousins, 4 times removed