wip: lace ribbon scarf

As I previously predicted, this scarf has become my constant travel project. I’ve knit it through all my recent travelling, and on my new commute. For example, here I am knitting it in Tulsa, OK:

(The sun really blasts out the corner there, sorry.)

The fun thing about knitting this scarf (Lace Ribbon by Veronik Avery if you don’t recognize it) as a traveling/KIP project is that people are really drawn to the color saturation of this yarn (Koigu KPM). GFF bought me this yarn for my birthday at the end of March, and the color choice is totally her doing, btw. I brought this scarf with me to work on during our coop work shift last weekend, and everyone who passed through the check out line commented on it. The shift consensus was that this colorway should be named either “Saffron” or “Chrysanthemum.”

The color of the yarn is actually pretty accurate there. It’s luminous, for real. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough of it to make the scarf as long as I want it. With two skeins, it’s not long enough to wrap around my neck. I think a third skein would make it wearable, but I’m going to have to put off buying the final skein for a while until I’ve got some more cash flow. And I came to the end of the yarn I have for it yesterday! So I have to find a new travel project for a while.

Look at that lace pattern, will ya? I can’t get over it, myself. I also can’t tell you how truly enjoyable I’ve found it to be! I memorized the pattern pretty quickly, despite it having a 24 row repeat. It’s simple enough to keep track of as a traveling project, but interesting enough that I can knit it for an hour or so without getting bored, even if I’m not listening to my ipod or whatever. I’m anxious to wear this scarf, but I’m going to be sad when I’m through knitting it.

Speaking of sadness when finishing a project…I did manage to finish my Rusted Root this weekend! It came together very quickly at the end (no seaming, natch), and I’ve already worn it out of the house, although it’s really in need of a good blocking. Not sure when I’m going to get it blocked, but once I do I’ll have GFF take some pics of me wearing it and report back to y’all. It’s not perfect, but it IS my first finished garment and I’m danged proud of it!

wip: Rusted Root

(Not that I’ve been posting that much recently, but things are in danger of slowing down even more because I’m starting a new job and I will actually be in a real office all week long. I thought I’d spread out some posts about my current wips to give you some material for the next week or so. And hopefully at least one of these will become a FO by then! This one is dangerously close.)

So you know how there are some patterns that it seems like basically everyone has knit, and anyone who hasn’t knit it by now probably just doesn’t get their kicks from that pattern and so that’s that, no more of those FOs? It seems to me that Ravelry is changing that, because there are new rashes of Clapotis, Pomatomus, and – yep – Rusted Root all over the place. For myself, I never realized how cute this pattern was until I looked through pages and pages of cute knitters wearing their finished tops! All the different colors and styling really made me see the potential in this simple sweater. Ok, it also helped me to see that this sweater is really simple, and that people knit it really fast.

This is where the sweater was on April 16:

(Those are my Pomatomus socks!) This was three days after starting – but keep in mind that the “first day” was just swatching, and the second and third day (April 14 & 15) I was working for a tax preparer all day. At this point, I was almost through the raglan shaping, about to separate the arm stitches.

Five days later, April 21, I had this:

At this point, I was through with the waist decreases and starting a straight knitting portion before doing hip increases.  Since then, I’ve completed the hip increases and knit several inches…I just have a little bit more to knit lengthwise, then I’ll do the ribbing, the neck ribbing, and the sleeve finishing!  This is going to be my  first finished garment and it’s so close I can taste it.  (No pictures, sorry!)

Despite my new job and loss of daytime knitting time, I’m being extremely monogamous with my knitting right now (ok, I’m having a sort of on-the-road affair with my lace ribbon scarf, but this sweater could in no way be mistaken for travel knitting during rush hour on the subway in NYC) and making time for this sweater every morning before work and every evening while watching TV or waiting for GFF to come home for us to eat dinner or whatever.  I’m DETERMINED to wear this sweater a lot before it gets too hot for such a heavy (albeit cotton) top this summer.

Want an example of my extreme at-home project monogamy?  I’m seriously yearning to cast on for something new (in particular, I’m dreaming of slinky bamboo or silk tank tops – even though these don’t really make that much sense in my wardrobe – and new socks and lace shawls).   Yesterday, I spent over an hour pulling all my yarn out (I really don’t have that much)*, searching Ravelry for patterns to use with my most summer-appropriate choices, and basically just feeling all these different yarns.  I found a partial ball of Cascade Fixation and cast on 40 stitches in the round, knit 4 rounds (just to ease my yearnings) and immediately ripped out and rewound the yarn.  I mean, really, that could hardly be taken to count as cheating on my project!

So I hope to have this done soon, hopefully by next weekend, and I will post a FO report then.  In the meantime, I’ll try to post about my Lace Ribbon Scarf and the socks I’m working on (the second of which will be my traveling project when LRS is finished).  Happy Sunday knitting, y’all!

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*I can tell that GFF finds this extremely odd.  She can tell it makes me happy to look at my box of possibility, but she is a little confused when I also pull out my bag of scraps (you know, all the little leftover balls at the end of projects) and start to look at those, too.  But I’m not alone in this type of behavior, right?