twisted!

Mountain Man recently told me, in a not-really-joking and not-very-complimentary way, that I was a "knitting fanatic." It's true that in the face of academic misery and the semi-isolation of moving back to Vermont, I've increasingly focused on my knitting, relying on it for solace and release. So I can't say that he's wrong. But it does mean that I should yammer about it to the blog instead of to him!

In the spirit of blogging more about my incremental progress, here's the project that I'm currently focused on:
It's a Clapotis-style scarf, knit out of a wool yarn that I'd dyed with cochineal insects. The base yarn is Licorice Twist, so called because one of its three plies is absorbs dye more readily. The shocking pink color and the curl of the scarf make me think of this project as Peppermint Twist.

The Clapotis pattern is easy to modify for size, but it turns out that the 'size' is a moving target. This scarf is 5.25" wide before dropping stitches, broadening into 6.5" with dropped stitches, but then eventually twisting into a 2" diameter tube. The good thing about a scarf, though, is that all of these sizes would work. And while my full-size Clapotis (the only picture is on my very first blog entry) took me a-g-e-s, this is flying by.