Finished!

I've got my red lace gift scarf in my lap as I type this. I'm on the last row before binding off; I'm working on that row while waiting for stuff to load. Except for weaving in the tails, I'll be done by the time I get home from work. I'll post photos as soon as I have them available.

Still not sure what I'll do next though.

Progress!

I just measured that red lace scarf I'm knitting at 52 inches. That's four-foot-four. Yes, that said four-foot-four. I still have plenty of yarn left, though without access to my little yarn scale, I won't be able to tell you how much. Anyway, here's a photo from earlier in the week:



I'm looking into what else I can knit, possibly for other gifts. Even if I can't figure out who to give stuff to, I have plenty of other stuff to knit, now that I have all that new yarn. I made several "Yo! Drop It!" scarves from Stitch 'N Bitch Nation before I knew the "correct" way of making a yarnover (I went backwards), but I might do another of those. I've also been looking at some free patterns linked to in Ravelry: two from Knitty but some others from other blogs. On the theory of one good plug turn deserving another, I'll list a few of them here.

• I'm always short of hats, and that's where the Knitty patterns come in. I might make the "Urchin" hat in that fuzzy yarn I got on Wednesday.
• I also kinda like the "Foliage" hats, but I'm not sure I have a good yarn for either of them.
• I like the Pumpkin in-the-round pattern from the blog Mummble-Jummble2. While I think that fluffy orange yarn from earlier this week might work, I don't have a fluffy green. Maybe I'll find a pair of good feltable yarns somewhere or other.
• The first of two scarves I'm posting is the "Irish Hiking Scarf" from Hello Yarn. This is another project waiting for good yarn, but I have some ideas...
• The other scarf is the "Easy Lace Stashbuster Scarf" from the Hockey Mom Knits blog. Having read the pattern through, it looks highly adaptable with little effort -- which is a definite plus, since often enough I can't leave a pattern alone.

So what will I end up doing? If the gauge work for the "Urchin" hat in that fuzzy yarn, I might make a hat & scarf set using that pattern and the Stashbuster. I might do the Hiking Scarf in, say, that chenille. But on the other hand, there's a good chance I'll do something else entirely.

Lace trauma

It was bound to happen some time or other; when it did, I was surprised by how simple it was, and how easy to prevent.

I made a noticable mistake on my knitting and kept on going for a good three or four inches.

Sometime yesterday evening (or maybe this morning, but I doubt it), I either added or left out a row. In other words, I worked a pattern repeat of four rows as either three or five rows. This might not be too bad if the front and back weren't noticably different, but as it was I had to pull out a day's work to fix the problem.

Really, it's not so much the mistake that gets me. It's that 1) this happened before I spliced on that third ball of yarn, so I now have a huge tangle instead of a moderate one, and 2) it's a whole day's work. I suppose it could be worse, though: the yarn I'm using isn't one that's hard to unravel - it came out easily, in fact, unlike that mohair that spat a needle and didn't drop a stitch.

Here's to an ounce of prevention.

The Scarf Lengthens...

I measured my scarf last night at 39", and have done some more knitting since. I've just spit-spliced on the last of the three balls of yarn - a process that sounds a lot less disgusting than it really is.