Ravelympics

So far things haven't gone quite as I planned. Instead of adding a skein to the eyelet scarf, I started on it, realised why I hated it in the first place, looked closely at the directions again, realised I'd done the whole thing wrong, and took it off the needles in disgust. I entered it in the frogging event instead and now have a fair bit of black Pima Silk to use for something else. I also frogged the shrug I made ages ago which turned out horribly, and has been sitting around waiting to be unravelled. I had a time of it, since the ends didn't seem to want to be found. It was knitted in the round, and I did a horrible job if it, with a huge ladder all down the join. I fixed it up a lot, so I had smaller pieces of yarn to take out of that, and really just couldn't find the starting point. I ended up cutting a lot, and so I wasted a bit, but oh well. I still have a lot, which I plan to turn into little animals.

Speaking of animals, I decided my first project for the Ravelympics was going to be a cat toy I've been planning on making for awhile. The pattern is a bumble bee, and it uses four colours. However, I've never acutally done more than one colour at a time, and didn't have the colours on offer. I did have a blue acrylic that I knew would be perfect for this kind of project. I decided the cat wouldn't care if I made it just one colour, so I sat down one evening and just did it. I was ripping down the white shrug at the same time, and used a lot of the scrap yarn I'd cut to stuff the bee with - along with a fair bit of catnip. You stuff the body, and then proceed to knit the head. The cat was on that toy before I'd even taken it off the needles. He's been playing with it ever since, and I think I'm going to have to make another one before too long. The yarn will hold, I did a good knitting job, but it was easy and fun and the catnip goes after awhile, and it'll get looking very ragged. It doesn't look perfect in this picture because he had already played with it.

Doing the bee was kind of a stop gap until I got some needles through that I wanted to use to make a cowl. I found a great provider on ebay that does bamboo needles and ships them very quickly. I've always gotten mind the next day, provided I order in the daytime before the last post goes out. I got these the next day as expected, and got to work on the cowl. I had some lovely vareigated yarn I was using for a shawl, but the shawl pattern proved to be rather indecipherable, even after I asked for help, so I decided to take it off the needles and use it for some smaller projects. I have socks in the queue that are going to use this yarn, but the cowl has come first. It's essentially an eight row segment repeated about 10 times. This is the cowl with 2 repeats, and I'm on my fourth now - it's fairly easy, but could almost do with a smaller circular. Unfortunately, this is the smallest available, so I'm just doing a lot of pulling around. Still, I should easily finish it by the time the Olympics are over, and hopefully before. With the cold weather here, it would be a welcome addition to my winter wear.