Craft ADD

I have another finished object! And it is not one of the projects I have been working so steadily on! Why would it be?

I present: Coney Island Fireworks Scarf (yeah, that's obviously not my project, but with no pictures it's the only way to show you what it looks like). Even though I've owned Stitch 'N Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook for years, I never really liked this scarf and never thought I would knit it. Recently, a good friend of mine requested a scarf, and while I hate when people tell me I should make them things but this guy is such a sweetheart, everyone loves him. I was thinking over the yarns in my stash, and I suddenly remembered I had a skien of Patons Divine that had been in there for years. It's a lovely denim blue color and very very soft, and it occurred to me that it would look good knit up with some fuzzy black fun fur that was also lying unloved in the stash. This particular friend likes his scarfs look and skinny, so again I set off on miles of narrow garter stitch knitting.

Sounds like torture after 36 inches of a garter stitch belt, right? NOOOOO!!!! The yarn is sooooo soft and the texture of the scarf is quite literally divine! And I'd been craving something easy and meditative because my other knitting was giving me some fits (as I will share in a moment). A scarf on big needles made with super soft yarn was actually exactly what I needed. And it was done fast too, aproximately 24 hours after casting on, I was weaving in ends and presenting it to my friend. He literally danced with joy in the parking lot when I gave it to him. Such a knit-worthy friend!

I was actually kind of tempted to keep the scarf. I was feeling really unsure about the color for my friend (he'd hinted that he'd really love a striped scarf) and once I'd run out of yarn and bound off, it wasn't as long as I was hoping but it was still a very cozy length. I had gone so far as to tell Bruce I was keeping the scarf and I had another one in mind to make for my friend. But then when were hanging out yesterday afternoon, my friend showed up and the scarf practically leaped from the backseat of the car into his hands. I've found lately that if I'm receptive and just keep knitting on something, my yarns eventually let me know what they're supposed to be and who their new owners will be. And after seeing him dance for joy (the texture I ended up with really does scream his personality) I knew I was right about giving him this scarf and not some other one.

As for my other knitting, it's questionable if I'll be as far on the sock poi as I wanted to be by my party deadline. I've gotten to the point of needing the hardware for the handles, and I think I'm going to have to put the project on hold until I get what I need. That, and I also might need more yarn to finish both poi, but I'm not sure. I'm going to keep chipping away at them, but this hardware thing is a nice big road block I'm going to have to get around sooner or later.

The wings are on hold until I finish the little top since I'm using the same yarn in both projects. The little top is going great, now that I finally finished the left half today. It was a real pain there for a while. I realized that in making the center of the triangles in a different yarn that I was essentially creating a big intarsia triangle, and I haven't done real intarsia since my first (and only) sweater which was at least 2 years ago. Not a problem after I remembered to twist the yarns any time I switched. And realizing that I'd need to use the second ball of the fuzzy yarn on the other side of the intarsia triangle (and good thing I had a second ball and didn't have to unwind the first to find it's end hidden inside, because whoever wound it had obviously never heard of a center-pull ball).

Then there was the little issue of being almost done with that section and looking down and seeing a mistake that totally screwed up my stitch count. Well, since I'm improvising a little from the written pattern and I needed to be able to perfectly repeat what I'm doing for the other side, I decided it would be best to just bite my tongue and rip back. I actually got all the stitches back onto the needle fairly painlessly; I was surprised because that never happens when I have to rip back work. Until I looked down and saw the SAME mistake on the opposite side another 7 or 8 rows down. So I pulled the needle out and ripped back even more. There went pretty much all of the previous day's progress. Fortunately by the end of that day I had fixed everything I'd ripped back and even finished the strap and bound off that side. Now that I know what I'm doing, the right half should go super quick, and then there's just a little sewing to finish it up.

I moved several projects on my Ravelry page from WIP to Hibernating. Like my peace sign granny square blanket; turns out my H hook is missing so I don't know when I'll get to work on that project! It's kind of liberating to put things on a shelf for a while. Normally I'm the kind of person who hates to leave things undone because it begins creating a list in my head. If you've ever played Magic the Gathering and had one of those really epic plays where you and your opponent keep countering each other's spells until you've got like six different actions to each carry out and you now have to remember the order to do them in (the whole first in, last out rule or whatever, but then damn those interrupts!) - that's kind of how my mental to-do list goes. So like I said, it's kind of liberating to put a few projects to sleep.

Of course all I really want to do is finish my wings and be able to put them on and run around like a crazy. So back to work it is.