I'm knitting a summer sweater called Laar for Ellie. I'm using the pattern yarn, a Zephyr silk-wool blend.
My swatch was, miraculously, dead on gauge.
Then I started casting on: a knitted on cast on, cast on 5 and cast off 2, for some 200 plus stitches. Yes, this will make a beautiful picot edging at the bottom of the sweater, but I'm afraid it may also leave me blind. And, the yarn likes to split. Casting on alone may be a long term project. I wonder if Laar will be worth it?
Little Copernicus is finished. Down to the sweet little Mother of Pearl buttons. Very cute. All it needs now is a baby!
I have knitting work to do. I'm about three skeins away from finishing the endless black hole afghan. And, I should be knitting it over the weekend as it's so big it can only be worked on at home.
But no. Write it off to knitter's ADHD or spring fever, but I put the afghan down for the weekend. I also bypassed two charming projects I've purchased pattern and yarn for, Norie and Laar by Gudrun Johnston, but not yet started. And I even let the hat I'm knitting for my snowbound eldest child in some incredibly soft Eco Alpaca from Cascade Yarns sit swatched, but not started.
Instead I picked up the shrug I've been meaning to knit for my Mom for quite some time. I have four luscious skeins of Jade Sapphire 6-ply Cashmere in the Blackberry Fudge colorway and I had selected the Dream in Color Shrug Pattern. I selected that pattern after seeing this Shrug knit up last fall — one of the dancers at my daughter's ballet school was wearing it, and it was beyond-words-amazing. I always have lace anxiety (really, you keep count with kids chirping about homework, the Judge whining about "where's my dinner," and a Blackberry that goes off incessantly with work) but decided to tackle it and see what happened.
Things are always much more manageable after you start, right? The 30 rows of ribbing zipped by in the dentist's chair (the pattern is knit from cuff to cuff). The yarn is just fabulous. It's soft, the knitted fabric is squishy, it's everything I like best in Cashmere. And the lace is a simple 11 stitch 20 row repeat. With only five sets of 11 stitches and a few extra on each end to the row, this pattern is very do-able, even for someone tackling their first lace project. So much for the anxiety!
I'm midway through the second lace repeat and finding this to be lots of fun to knit. But, I'm going to set it aside to pick up the afghan for the next few evenings. It now has the benefit of being large enough to snuggle under while knitting. And it's so soft and inviting that the time has come for me to finish it off and make it available to the whole family.