New WIPs: the small projects

M’s scarf is blocked and awaits time and better weather for a photo shoot. The Minimalist Cardi is blocked but perhaps not correctly. I’m confused a bit by some of the measurements in the schematic compared to the measurements in the pattern, but I think I did it OK. If the sleeves don’t fit, I’ll be reblocking. In any event, I’m awaiting the arrival of Janet Szabo’s The “I Hate to Finish Sweaters” Guide to Finishing Sweaters. I don’t “hate” to finish sweaters per se, but I do hate not really knowing what I am doing. I’ve decided to put myself in the hands of a master before all that knitting goes to waste or looks lousy due to finishing ignorance. In the meantime, I’ve cast on some new projects: socks, a scarf and a sweater.

The socks are a simple 5×2 rib that I’m knitting up in Great Adirondacks Silky Sock in the Chili Peppers colorway. The yarn was a gift from my only knitting friend I can see in person, LC (previously Elsie on this blog), who gave it to me for my birthday last November along with some stitch markers. LC knows I love red, and she loves the Silky Sock yarn, so she thought this would be perfect, and it is.

The leg is 63 stitches and the colors shift so nicely. After the heel and gussets I got some pooling, but the pooling on the sole of the foot is cool. M called it a “Harry Potter lightning bolt.” I wonder if I’ll have magic powers when I wear these socks?

I’ve cast on for the second sock, and ideally would like to finish it by the end of January. I want to design a sock I’ve had swimming about in my head for a February-March Project Spectrum project.

So I have some lace to knit (Kiri in Christmas red suri alpaca is on hold for a bit), I started the Dainty Bess scarf for myself. The yarn is Malabrigo laceweight in Curazo, and I love the colors and the softness of it.

This is my third start to this scarf. The first attempt met with disaster, including screwing up one garter edge so weirdly that I couldn’t fix it. The second attempt–well, we need not go into it. I started wondering why this was SO HARD. Then I figured out that I didn’t like the chart. The knit stitches were squares, which I think distorted how the pattern actually looks knitted, and the wrong side rows were all charted, even though they were all garter edges and purling across. That was distracting. I used my own knitting graph paper I made in Adobe Illustrator and recharted the scarf. I knew all would be well when I could draw the second half of each repeat after only looking at the first half. And the knitting has been perfectly fine since I made my own chart.

Well, I’ve been prattling away. But do stop by Cocktails with M to see M’s post about the Oriental cocktail. It is a superb cocktail, although in our inebriated state we took a goofy picture of it centered in front of the table lamp. If I weren’t having a beer with our cider-braised pork shoulder for dinner, I might have another tonight. Oh, well, tomorrow is another day…