I take it back!

Aargh. Remember how I was all like "Oh, I am the queen of gauge and don't need to go down a needle size"? Well. My gauge was whacked. I knit about a foot of the ol' chevron scarf, and it had three distinctly differently-gauged sections, only the last of which was not strangely lumpy and unattractive. So. Bought size 4 needles and frogged. Again. This scarf sucks to frog; avoid that if you can.

Oh, and it took every ounce of my willpower and every iota of distraction my job has to offer, but I am not the sheepish new owner of 15 skeins (I'm not kidding) of Lorna's Laces. I came very close upon seeing this Chevron Scarf in Ravenswood and Gold Hill. Because despite having jumped on the Chevron Scarf bandwagon awhile ago, I hadn't yet seen a color combo that I really loved. So, considering the one I'm working on, the inevitable copy I make of Spacecase's, and the one my mom has requested, I had better start making some forward progress and fast.

Of course a lot of the pleasure I get out of knitting comes from the actual knitting part of it. But to be completely honest, probably more comes from thinking about what I'm going to knit in a few hours or after I finish my current projects. And looking at that page of LL's got me wondering what a combination of Bittersweet and Sorbet or Child's Play and Happy Valley would look like. And that's where the massive restraint needs to come in.

I'm knitting a sock from some Sunnyside Ellen (colorway Sherbet) I got from Etsy recently and to much rationalization. I also bought some Ashabee's handdyed merino/tencel, which is awesome and probably destined to become Monkey socks, once the Hederas are done. I'm to the instep there, and doing at least a pattern repeat a day.

Pictures next time.

effed oh: Meilenweit Mega Boot Stretch Socks

Yarn: Meilenweit Mega Boot Stretch
Color: 703
Pattern: my own basic sock
Needles: Crystal Palace Bamboo 1 1/2





And in another five months, I can wear them!

...chevron scarf?

I finished them.



I finally finally finally finished them. With a whole 26 minutes to spare.



There will be no ends weaving in the plane*.



Or in the car on the way to the event.



*But oh, was there some ends-weaving-in. 25 blocks per blanket, 2 blankets, 2 ends per block. It took freaking forever. I finished knitting WAY ahead of schedule and then the ends weaving took every last bit of my time.

All log cabin baby blanket and no log cabin baby blanket make log cabin a baby blanket.

Log cabin baby, blanket log cabin baby blanket log. Cabin, baby blanket log cabin baby. Blanket, log cabin? Baby blanket, log cabin baby blanket log cabin baby blanket. Log cabin baby blanket, log cabin. Baby blanket, log cabin baby blanket log cabin baby blanket log. Cabin baby blanket.

l.o.: g cabin baby blanket.

One down

I have finished the knitting part on the first Log Cabin blanket.



I have not finished the weaving-in-ends part of the first Log Cabin blanket. I will show you that part later. I've left very long ends, and my plan is to weave, weave, weave, then secure each end with a very small length of dual duty sewing thread tied in a serious knot. The yarn is whispy enough, I think, to get away with that.

Here are the projects that I'm officially not working on, kind of like how Alberto Gonzales officially can't really remember anything about anything.

Meilenweit Mega Boots Stretch Sox:



LMKG Chevron Scarf:



Not pictured are the Hederas, which will probably not see any more action until the Baby Blanket X-travaganza of 2007 is over. Those will be going to Mom, because her Cinderella feet worked for the size I made the first one. I'm almost to the end of the heel flap on Sock 2, and might have fallen down a wee little bit on the whole sockyarn thing... more about that when normal knitting resumes. But for now:

Progress Shot of Log Cabin #1

WIP: Log Cabin #1

Blanket 1 is rolling along nicely. The blocks are taking significantly longer, so I feel good doing about one a night. Next weekend we'll have about 16 hours in the car, too, so that should be a boon for the whole project as well.



I've been feeling like a particularly slow knitter recently, maybe just because I haven't finished anything for a while. I don't have a whole lot of time to knit in, and it's mostly taken up with garter baby blanket. So, the inevitable happened: I learned that I can walk and knit.

I got about 54 minutes of sock-knitting time into my hour lunch break. Unprecedented! And so far, I haven't walked into a tree, gotten hit by a car, fallen off a foot bridge (and oh, there are foot bridges), or dropped any stitches. This is a whole new frontier.

Chevron Scarf

A first attempt:



I was doing the decrease/increase rows with what I wanted to be the secondary color, the lighter Spring Fling, but that ended up kind of making it the primary color -- which you might be able to see in the awful, awful picture above.

So I switched it up:



and I like this much better. The Spring Fling is traveling from side to side nicely, but the Fairgrounds is not, which is resulting in lengthwise pools of orange-ish, dark green, and raspberry-ish. I'm trying to tighten up my gauge a bit and force it to move, but if this goes on much further, there might be some frogging.

Wow. Just while the pictures were loading, I started knitting a little tighter, and voila. They just can't drive 55. They're rolling rawhide.

I will NOT go down a needle size (like hell I'm knitting these on 4s, 5s are bad enough for a 77" scarf), and while manually changing your gauge doesn't seem to be an all-that-popular way of dealing with pooling here in blogland, it really works for me. And, now that I think about it, I realize that I have kind of been knitting the two colors differently anyway - when I do the straight across rows, I brace the end of the needle I knit onto against my leg and move the other needle and the yarn over top of it (if that makes any sense at all). This generally leads to a tighter gauge. I knit looser when I move both needles as I work, so this is really just bringing everything in line.

A word about the colors: this is not turning out how I'd expected. The Fairgrounds looks pretty different than what I pictured from my monitor(s) - it's a bit darker. I'd originally been planning to use Fairgrounds with Rocktober, and my discipline in yarn-buying rewarded me with Rocktober being discontinued before I got any of it. So I went with these two colorways because they appeared to be similar colors, just with different values. But not so much.

I'm withholding judgment for now. The colors do remind me of the sorts of colors that are used together in vintage quilts - something about the combinations, perhaps. Pastels with yellow-y darker colors. The dusk-time picture above shows the relationships of the colors accurately, but they are more vibrant than they appear there.