Weekend knitting

I hate blogger. I was just about ready to publish a post, and it ate my post. Sounds like the dog ate my homework excuse, but really, it did!

Anyway, here's what I think I wrote...

DF and I road tripped again this weekend, so this was the perfect opportunity to finish off CW completely under the guise of keeping DF company. On the drive up of course, DF wondered, what does DF stand for? I told him, Dear Fiancee of course! What did you think it meant? Well, Dumb F*** was what came to mind. Well, let's see if this works. On one hand, it can mean, Oh isn't my DF fabulous! He paints my toes, feeds me ice cream in bed, and is just absolutely dreamy! On the other hand, it can totally mean, I can't believe DF left 20 piles of last week's mail on every horizontal surface in the house, AGAIN! What an absolutely perfect acronym. Different meanings, but absolutley clear in context!

Oh, back to the knitting story. I did finish CW finally. If you've been watching the progress bars, you'll see that I made it 100%, but why not just take the progress bar off entirely? Well, neither BO or CW have been blocked, and I refuse to take a FO picture and write up a summary unless they're blocked. So the progress bars remain until I get around to blocking. Hopefully, that will be soon. Anyway, here it is in its full UNBLOCKED glory!


I did wrestle with binding off CW last night. I ran out of yarn before I could finish the last 3 rows of the last lace repeat. So I actually bound off early. Here's the closeup of the bound off edge. Hopefully it'll still look okay with blocking... Anyway, lesson to be learned here is that if you know that the pattern takes 600 yards of yarn and you have 300 yards of one color and many yards more of another, it's probably wise to use the color that you have more of for the sections that you expect will take more yarn. You know, apply common sense for once, right?

So you know how I argued about the logic of starting Spirit of Blaze (Thanks Chris for the apt name!) Well, that was before I started making mods again to the design. I decided that the all-over rib and cable pattern would be difficult to work into the raglan decreases neatly without the cables coming "undone" or rather unworked. I thought it looked okay, but not great. So I'm thinking about some other desgin.

But what that DOES mean is that I needed to start something that I already had the pattern and the yarn for. Since my Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool ($45 on ebay for a whole pack!) came in late last week, I could start on Hopeful! I did manage to cast on, but that was about it. Wow, 160 sts of DK weight yarn in labelled gauge looks tiny! I did get to knit a few rounds at the doctor's office this morning. What fun! Specula and stirrups! Why can't I start every week this way?

Anyway, you can see that I've already included a modification to this pattern. Marnie MacLean on the Hopeful Knitalong (which I swear I'm joining soon!) posted her finished Hopeful a few days ago. She even posted a how-to on the picot hem modification on her blog. Since hers was so beautiful and I didn't really like the ribbed hem on the original, I decided to give the easy mod a go. That eyelet round in the picture above is the turning row for the hem, and below is the closeup of what the picot edge will look like when it's turned.


Oh and back to the original road trip story. DF and I took the 4 hour car ride up to Bishop despite gas prices topping $3 the entire way for our inaugural bouldering trip together for this season . Yet again, I didn't manage to send anything, but I do have hopes of making progress on Action Figure (V6) and finishing Serengeti (V5), both problems at the Happy Boulders, this year. If we ever remember to take pictures while we're on these trips, I'll post some here. But this picture on Serengeti from last year will have to suffice until we get more!