pause button

I've been putting off my posting for the last several days because I keep thinking I'm just on the cusp of finishing something cool. A sleeve of forecast (not quite yet). A beret to match the peppermint twist scarf (gone awry). A tussah silk scarf (four inches left). And so forth.

I do have one finished object to show -- only I can't quite show the whole thing because it's going to be a baby shower gift. Here's a slice though:
It's a tinkered-with version of my sprouting tree of life baby blanket, this time in a soft, earthy color. The knitting was smooth as can be, but at four a.m. I learned a valuable lesson: when you're sewing in the ends of the Blue Sky Alpacas cotton, don't try anything fancy! Just take the whole, bulky strand of yarn and do some duplicate stitch. Unfortunately, I tried to make it more subtle by separating the plies and sewing them in separatedly, but once separated, they disintegrated beneath my fingers, leaving me -- to my horror -- with a scant two inches to try to sew in. And yes, I did say this was at four a.m.

And why the late night, you may ask? It's been a mad dash around here, as I'm leaving in an hour for several weeks of travelling with Mountain Man. We're traipsing around the Himalayas to rejuvinate our spirits (seems like sweet georgia and yarnmonster are starting a trend!). I'm bringing two lace projects with me, in an effort to economize on weight while providing hours of alpaca happiness. So please excuse an extended pause in this blog - I'll try to blog once or twice from the road, not to mention finally replying to your comments (much appreciated - sorry to be so delayed) and I'll be back and hopefully happier next month!

Forecast progress

This is a dash of a post with an update on Forecast. Here it is as of this morning (note: in real life, the sleeves are the right size. It's just the fact that they can spread out in this unfinished state that gives it a 'flying nun' kind of quality):

Figuring out the yoke was a pain in the neck, since it involved numerous iterations of knitting two rows, placing the 200+ stitches on scrap yarn, trying it on, thinking it's close but not ready, and moving it back to the needle. Blah. It sapped me of my knitting excitement, so that I had to drag myself to do it instead of happily grabbing every spare minute to knit. But once that was passed, the rest of the body has gone quickly.

I'm headed off to a conference for a couple days, but I think this is too ungainly a project for travel. So I'm taking a break from it and starting in on another organic cotton baby blanket -- seems like those babies are sprouting up everywhere these days!