Right...I promised photos

Because I totally suck, I have been delinquent in putting up these photos. But as I promised in my last post, here are the photos I took of the peacock feathers shawl. The pics were taken while I was blocking the sucker, and let me tell you, it's not easy blocking something like that when you've got two curious kitties around. The computer room wasn't big enough for me to do the best job with the blocking, but I still think it turned out okay. I was running out of room to stand in if you believe it!



Here's a closer look at the lace pattern taken from a slightly different angle.

OMG, Karen actually IS still knitting!

So, I actually managed to finish that Peacock Feather's shawl for my dance teacher (photos to come). It definitely was a learning experience. I learned that while I love my Denise interchangeables, they can be a pain for large projects where you need to chain a whole bunch of those connector pieces together. My loops would get caught on the joints, and it kinda drove me nuts sometimes. Also, I learned that you can't always trust what they say on the pattern for the amount of yarn that you'll need. I got two skeins of the Jaeggerspun (which is REALLY nice to work with, and I highly recommend it), but it turned out not to be enough. I had to end the shawl early and thankfully was able to finish the crochet chain binding (another new thing that I learned!). And even still, the shawl turned out HUGE! It was just kinda weird though, cuz that made me feel like I wasn't knitting tightly enough, but they even say in the instructions to knit more loosely. Oh well.

I think I'm going to move back to smaller, more recreational projects soon. Blocking that sucker was pretty hard. And back to stash busting!! I really need to make a serious dent in it.

The lazy knitter

I just finished a sock. A toe-up sock. And I started the second sock. Then I discovered that the first sock is actually too big. More specifically, the toe on the first sock is knit too loosely and that resulted in the rest of the sock being too big (I always knit a certain # of rows for the foot, that is how boring I am when it comes to knitting socks, it appears that I always do the same damned thing because I like the mindlessness of it all). Now the second toe is done, and it is much tighter and smaller. So what to do with the first toe? Rip out the whole sock? Cut the yarn and reknit the toe, and graft the stitches back together? Both of those things will really awaken the anxiety-ridden perfectionist monster in me and make me cry and cause way more stress than I need right now. So it looks like maybe I will just have to learn to live with yet another pair of mismatched socks.

It's a funny thing, I pretty much lose interest in my socks once I'm done knitting them. I fret incessantly about minor imperfections when I'm actually working on the socks, but then I completely forget about them afterwards. I do wear them sometimes, but I don't really knit socks for the pleasure of wearing handknitted socks, but more for the joy of working with pretty yarn. Process knitter indeed.