A totally fun scarf pattern

I am loving working on the dream scarf, so much that my other work has somewhat fallen by the wayside. After posting last time, I got out my knitting at Get Knitted Knatterers to find that I was missing 2 stitches. Ripping back a few rows stitch by stitch only made the work look worse, so I ended up taking it back to the beginning. This time, I decided lifelines were invented for this pattern, and invested in them. Since the pattern repeats every 9 rows, I put in a lifeline for each repeat and am glad I have. I've ripped back to them twice, since taking back mistakes is problematic at best with the reverse YOs. Still, it's looking amazing! This is the section of the scarf where I have taken the lifelines out to use on sections higher up. Saves on yarn that way, and I figure I don't need a network of lifelines all the way down when I'm happy with how it looks and won't need to rip back that far. This is how it looked with the lifelines in place - the change in colour is due to the lighting. I just used some white yarn I had lying around that I plan to use to make little animals with.

I'm just really excited with this project. I've learned the techniques well now, and it's pretty easy, but interesting enough to keep me going and not get bored - rather like the description the designer put in her pattern. I'm still not through the entire skein, despite knitting on it (nearly) every day, so I'm not sure how long it'll be with one skien. I may use another if I decide I want it longer, but that's the genius of scarves.

Dream Scarf

I remember when I was visiting my family last November, I had a knitting session with my Grandma. I had a few questions about some techniques I wanted to ask her, and it's nice to be able to talk knitting with someone, especially when that someone has vast experience and taught you (nearly) all you know. She got out some books to show me, and one of them was an old Mon Tricot book of patterns. I remember looking through there and thinking what a wealth of stuff it held. It's actually sitting on my wish list on Amazon now - I found one for a fiver, and should have snapped it up, as now the only ones available are over £50. Oh well. But that's beside the point.

The point I was leading up to is that the latest project to go on my needles is derived from the pages of that venerable collection, and I couldn't be more chuffed with the progress I'm making. Called Evie's Dream Scarf, it's an intricate piece of knitwork that has proved to be somewhat of a challenge for me, with new techniques to be learned and all the experience I posess needed to see where the next stitch is coming from.

The first challenge, which springs to the forefront immediately when you start on the pattern proper (after doing the garter edging) is the fact that you have to do yarn overs in purl. This is something I'd never encountered before, and was a little put off the first time I saw it in print. After thinking about it though, it makes perfect sense: you just reverse where the yarn is coming from, same as doing a YO in knit. Doing a YO when purling two together was the next challenge, especially since the yarn is a cotton silk blend and doesn't seem to have much give. There were some very tight stitches to be worked there! The third tricky bit was what is called on the pattern a Cross 2 - where you knit the second stitch down, and then the top stitch on the needle (which you would normally work first.) It feels, with my teeny tiny limited experience (of looking at how to cable), exactly like a mini-cable. I've even used my cable needle to help me access the lower stitch easily, again because of the lack of give in the yarn.

One last word about the yarn itself: it's a bit splitty. There are three strands wound together to make the yarn, and they all kind of act as their own individual bit, instead of working together to be one. There are a few places in the work where one or two strands have wandered off on their own, leaving their mate to do all the work of holding things together. Also, the bigger holes you see in the work closer to the needle is because the yarn is being difficult. I'm hoping blocking will sort that out.

Still, I'm loving working on this. I have three skeins of the yarn, but doubt I will use them all - I'll simply knit until I'm happy with the length.

As for updates on my other projects, I've started work on Sidonia again, and have found it as pleasant to work on now as I remember from when I put it down in January. I can't believe I hibernated it for over a month! The cowl, I finished a few days ago, only to find that it doesn't fit at all! It turns out I used the wrong needles: I have several projects in mind for the yarn, and one of them requires 2.75mm needles. My mind translated that into "all the projects for this yarn require 2.75mm needles" and everything went downhill from there. I think the cowl will fit a small child, since they have smaller heads (it won't go over my head) so I'm going to explore that possibility. And the squares blanket? Well, I do a row here and a row there. I may even get a picture of it at some point.

Crisis!

I've had a circular needle break on me. This in itself is very annoying, given that it's gone and dumped a good 40 stitches into nowhere, and I've had to go in with one of my large stitch holders and pick them up. Not easy with the splitting sockweight yarn I'm using! Worse is the fact that I don't have a replacement needle, and it's my Ravelympic project. The Ravelympics end today, so I'm not going to finish by the time it ends - which is really annyoing as I've been on track since I started. And of course, a picture of the troubled project:

I'm sure at some point I'll order another needle and finish this, but in the meantime I'm going to work on my squares blanket and cast on another small project. I've got a lacy headband that just fits the bill to get some instant gratification "project finished" feelings.

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.

WIPdancing and blocking

The nice thing about working with wool is that it dries quickly. I blocked Concerto yesterday, and by nighttime it was dry - a good thing too as I ended up spreading it out on the bed! It's a total of 68 inches, which isn't quite six feet, but I'm not too bothered. Here it is in all it's glory!

Last night I unpicked the eyelet scarf I made before Christmas in an effort to get it longer. I have almost a whole skein left, so I should get a few more feet on it I think. I have it back on the needles and did a row, but got distracted by the Olympics after that and didn't do any more. This may be a problem! I feel confident I'll finish though.

This song is over

Concerto is finished! I bound it off last night, just before going out for the evening. So it's done before the Olympics start, which means I can concentrate on my Ravelympics entry (or entries, depending on how this goes.)

Three months in the making, it has been a source of constant emotions for me. Excitement over mastering a new pattern, exasperation when I made a mistake, sometimes despair. I put it aside for a month because I just couldn't take it anymore, only to find it was my dislike for metal needles which was the problem. I have mourned the mistakes, made desisions on whether to rip, and have ended up creating something unique. Not perfect, but a testament to the designer and a beautiful creation.

You can see in this picture, which is part 6, that I've added a whole bunch of stitch markers. This is to remind me when I need to start the next mini-repeat for each row. It's a concession to my CFS and the fact that I remember little, get distracted easily, and make mistakes because of it. The plan worked well, and I'll be using it in other things where the pattern repeats itself several times over the course of a row.

Next comes the Ravelympics. I've umhed and ahed about what to do, first deciding to finish the scarf I started with Pima Silk. Then I saw some socks made by a blogger I follow, and thought I would do those, as my first socks being a nice challlenge for the occasion. But I don't have the right size needles for the yarn I want to use. I've gone back to the scarf for the time being, but I'm not sure it's going to be a huge challenge, so I might finding myself casting on before the event is over. But hey, we're allowed more than one project, so it'll be interesting to see what comes of it. Watch this spot!

The one with too many repeats

I finished part 5 of Concerto! If part 1 was pretty, and part 2 took too long (I really blame the needles on this one) and parts 3 and 4 were just fun, then part 5 was definitely The One With Too Many Repeats. I saw someone say on Ravelry that you don't get better at knitting, you just get better at picking things out. Well, I'm getting very good at picking things out after this section. 2 major ripping sessions (taking the work right off the needles) and the typical few times I have to go back several stitches or even to the beginning of the row to fix something. Still, the finished product looks great!

I feel like I'm knitting a lot faster now than I was when I started. I suppose that's not surprising, when I've knitted 140 rows (times 65 stitches in a row) of Concerto, plus the other stuff I've done on the side - gloves, armwarmers, a hat, part of a lace shawl, and a snood. Wow! I've done a lot more knitting than I thought. Looking at my finished projects on Ravelry, there are a lot of them, even if a good portion of them are small. This speed helps a lot when I'm trying to redo parts, since it doesn't make it seem too tedious.