tangled up

Scarf Season

Making scarves my office and travel project has been an innovation in my knitting life this fall. I'm more than halfway through a pretty Koigu number that uses the simple drop stitch pattern of the Alligator Wrap. And I've used up half of my Big Kureyon stash with these numbers:

At home, I'm still working on completing Perkins -- the end is definitely in sight -- and that just may become my weekend effort. I was supposed to leave Sunday for travel to three separate places and two of the three trips have been canceled, leaving me the weekend and the beginning of the week in DC. I've also completed the back of a sweater using Wool in the Woods mohair in Mystic Ridge -- I LOVE that yarn. The front band is complete, too, and I'm just starting the cable pattern -- big question for me is to I make it a crew neck as the pattern shows or go for the V neck that I originally had in mind. Looking forward to returning to Sheerly There too, but that is going to wait until after I've sewed up Lara. Lots of knitting to look forward too, lots more in my head, and I still need to plot out holiday presents. Takes the mind off politics, even fleetingly.

Desperately Seeking Blocking

I've had some chance to knit but little chance to post, so here's a quick catch up...

The first Perkins sleeve is starting to grow; with any luck, I can finish it this weekend. I needed a quick break from all the yarn switching so I went back to the edging. Back to the beginning -- I had frogged my first couple of attempts because it's very hard to correct mistakes. This time, I completed one of the sleeve edges. It really needs a good blocking but I pinned it to the sleeve anyway in order to get a quick picture:

Thanks to numerous conference calls, my "work" project, the Lucky Brand scarf is off the needles. No picture until after it has been blocked. Right now it looks like a twisted, eight foot snake, bearing no resemblance to what I hope will be the result. My worry for it is that it folds itself in half between the decreases in the center. As I sit here, it occurs to me for the first time that I might have avoided that by keeping one regular stitch in the actual center between them (did I not look at the store model closely enough?). Well, no reason for concern until after it takes a bath and stretches out.

Finally, Lara became my "debate project," and after last night, I've just completed the right side cast off/decreases so I'm down to the final sleeve. It looks like it's going to finish just beautifully and it's such a quick knit that it's a great addition to the repertoire for presents. I'm thinking it might be fun to do as a two tone with a contrasting color for the ribbing. I did get over to Knit Happens to have a look at the Alpaca Silk and while it's very soft and seems like it would feel terrific to knit with, it's a bit too shiny for me. I'm really happy with the Cash Iroha and hope my sister will be too.

The Rebecca #27 and #28 that I had ordered from the Knitting Garden arrived yesterday. Lots of intriguing designs, but the first will definitely be the Apricot Jacket. Can't even scope it out, though, until Perkins is complete, blocked, constructed and on display at Woolwinders. But that should happen pretty soon now.

Made a fun but very expensive visit to Knit + Stitch = Bliss on Sunday (very smart of them to start having Sunday hours) before going to see a film that I loved, I Heart Huckabees. I came away with lots of Rowan Kidsilk Haze. Some of it I will use held together with Koigu for a sweater, the rest I will attempt to use on its own for some kind of lace scarf or shawl, but a couple of quick swatches have convinced me that that will be a challenge.

The week at work has been totally crazed (why am I not there now??) but I did manage to get off a second package to my Secret Pal. I have seen many more creative packages than the one I sent, but I figure that by sending yarn, I can't go wrong.

Progress Report

I feel pretty pathetic. Last night I got home from work after 10:30, got in bed with my knitting to watch Jon Stuart, and woke up this morning wrapped in yarn, with my WIP (poor Perkins) entirely off the needles, and my glasses midway across the floor of the room. Luckily, minimal damage was done and Perkins' right front is close to being finished (maybe tonight if I can stay awake). Knitting before bedtime now has to compete with Bob Dylan's autobiography. Not too much, though, I'm enjoying it so much that I'll read it very slowly to make the experience last longer.

Thanks to a series of conference calls, I've gotten to the end of the first skein of Big Kureyon on the Lucky Brand scarf. I have to take it home to get a photo.

And last but not least, I've bound off the left front of Lara so I guess I'm officially half finished. I was going to put it aside until Perkins is complete, but I need something that's easy to knit during the debate tomorrow night, so that right front just might be it.

I'd Rather Be Knitting....

It's a stressful day and I need a moment's peace, so here I am. I had a very long day yesterday and this one promises to be the same, but that doesn't mean that knitting won't get done. Thanks to conference calls and a staff meeting, the Lucky Brand scarf has now grown to three feet. There's still a good bit of yarn on the first ball of Big Kureyon so I'm thinking that 2 skeins will more than do it (as opposed to the moss stitch one I did last year that was much more dense and took 3 or 4 -- if only I could remember, those were the days before blogging). It's going to need a serious blocking when it's finished, but I'm growing very fond of it and starting to think whom it would be suited for when it's finished. (photo tk)

Late last night I did a bit more on Lara and have about 12 rows to go before the left front is finished. When that's done, I set it down to work on Perkins. I'm eager to make progress on Perkins, no, I'm eager to finish her, (1) because of the interesting challenge it will be to piece it all together and (2) beause I could a glimpse of Sheerly There last night, languishing at the bottom of the basket, and I can't wait to get back to her sometime soon.

So much knitting, so little time. With two debates this week, though, that will be three hours of relatively uninterrupted time....

best laid plans...

Summer ended fast. September has gotten off to a roaring start and shows few signs of slowing down. The challenge is going to be how to keep knitting and blogging in the midst of work that's piling on and the height of the political season. I did politics full time for years and it left little time for knitting, no, it left little time for any hobby or outside interest. Other people manage it differently, but I poured my whole heart and soul into it and there wasn't much left for anything else. Which was a big reason why I started doing something different. And the fact that I have the time to knit enough to actually blog about it is an indication of how far I've come. But it's a really important election year and there's just a little more than 6 weeks left, so I need to crawl out of this cozy knitting coccoon that i've created.

Okay, what brought all this soul searching on? Nothing big, just a call to help Kerry/Edwards out in North Carolina for a few days. The few days has turned into just a weekend because I can't break off from work right now, but there is a knitting silver lining -- two hour-long flights that are suited for nothing but knitting. So then the question is, what project to take along? The one that I feel the most need to finish quickly is the Woolwinders Yorkshire Tweed DK sample sweater, Perkins by Sarah Dalllas. Here's a picture of the sweater, but I'm not going to do the vertical stripes, so look at the sleeves to get an idea of what it will look like. Problem is, starting at the sleeves as i did and with the striping that requires frequent yarn changes, it's hard to carry along. Tonight on my way back to the office from the airport, I realized how to solve the dilemma. Well, maybe it won't solve it, but it will move it from an at-home-only project to one that I can travel with. The answer: put the sleeves on hold, combine the back and sides into one piece and go from there. That will increase the amount of knitting between yarn changes and have the additional benefit of cutting down the number of loose ends that I'm going to have to weave in at the end. So, I'm going to try that, and I want to get started right now. If I'm going to do that, while I can still keep my eyes open (didn't get much sleep in Toronto), I want to do the transfer.

Just one more thing about the last two days. I had high hopes for the Lucky scarf but the Big Kureyon just didn't want to go down that road. The scarf I saw in the store had a soft quality that seemed attributable to something like an alpaca mix and the BK has a very "dry" hand. So it was frogged (yet again) and now is nicely working up as a multidirectional triangle scarf. Photos of that later, right now I'm losing the battle with my eyelids.

Lucky Brand knockoff

This will have to be a short, quick post b/c I've still got work to do tonight and I'm leaving for Toronto in the morning, but I've become a bit addicted to blogging and I need my fix. Had an opportunity for some daytime knitting today as I waited at the passport office to get a new passport since I seem to have misplaced mine in the move last year. I hope to find it sometime, just so I can save the Cuba stamp, but I needed one in a hurry since this trip was only set up last night. So I started a new takealong project, a knockoff of a scarf that I saw in the window of Lucky Brand Jeans. It's a simple pattern that I sussed out after noticing that the Chevron Tank on the Interweave Knits website had a similar construction (see Julia's blog to see the actual tank as a WIP). I'm using some of the Big Kureyon that I got on sale at Stitch DC, working it on US13s. The large needles (I'd ordinarily work it on US10s) are creating a really loose fabric, which is just fine because the yarn is so warm to begin with. Even with frogging it several times to get the width and pattern that I wanted, I still got a decent amount done while I waited for my number to be called.

So I'm off to Toronto, just an overnight and a day at the Film Festival, somewhere I've always wanted to go (but more than overnight and not for work). The flights should be a chance to make some progress on the scarf, which I'll report on when I return on Thursday. Unfortunately, with all the striping, my Rowan sample project for Woolwinders would be awkward to travel with.

Here's the scarf as shown on Lucky Brand's website (their photographer is even worse than me) and my WIP.