Mindless/Brainless/Demented/On Hold.

I am stuck in the mindless zone - a granny rectangle blanket, a garter stitch triangular scarf (Noro), a V-stitch bath mat (a baaaath maaaaat?!!! what do I need a bath mat for?! from a dollar/skein plain vanilla white cotton from Michael's, but it is actually quite comfy) and now a seed stitch crochet scarf (another Noro) while some more complicated projects are languishing.

I did a few stitches (read: inches) of the Kidsilk Haze Veronique to finish the back, but have not had the wherewithall or the backbone to put it on a spare yarn and to block it, and I have tried a few starts on the second Tomatomus sock, but it keeps pooling, so I keep on frogging it and trying to start at different point of the color sequence - the first sock did not pool at all, so I do not know why the second is doing it. That's about it. The Veronique was supposed to be for opera-going with my dad - the orange should look nice with black.

I went back to work today - everybody was nice and kind, there wasnot much new stuff to deal with, but mounds of things from the past ten days.

I think I will go and block Veronique. I need to get out of this rut.

A Wonderful Day.

Yesterday morning the four balls of RY Cashsoft form Sheila in Illinois arrived in the mail. This lovely lady had the exact dye lot of the shade I needed to finish the Twenty-now-Twenty-One-Year Vest and she send it to me even before I was able to pay her! I will finally be able to finish it, although I have to redo the frogged back.

Then I went to the library to pick up some books (Glamour Knits, if you need to know; even though I had the pattern for the shrug from the CanadianLiving website I wanted to see the real thing again) and I got:

1. the IK issue I have been hunting for for the last two months, the one with the Oriel Blouse and the Ogee Skirt in it; finally somebody returned it;

2. CSI: The Seventh Season 5 CD set (I was waiting for it for over 6 months); and

3. another IK issue that turned out to be the newest, Spring 2009, brand spanking new issue that I have not even seen in the bookstores yet! I could not believe my luck! What a feast!

Then I went home and, after two failed attempts at casting off the collar for the Noro shrug, I realized that somehow, in the wee hours of the morning I set the collar off by about an inch and one sleeve is longer than the other. Darn!

But I love it. I am wearing it now even with the uneven sleeves (of course I will frog the whole day worth of knitting in the collar to reset it just right, why do you ask?). The colours are glorious, and with some creative splicing I got the sleeves to almost match. I used the newly acquired skill of K1P1 knit cast-on (it gives a great finished edge) and I cast the second ribbing from the end and then grafted it onto the end of the sleeve so that it would match just right. I did it! I grafted K1P1 ribbing to each other! So it is only the matter of that one inch. It would have been a perfect day...

Now I am off to the Twenty One Year Vest.

The Third Noro Scarf.

I just finished the Multidirectional Diagonal Scarf. It was going to be just diagonal, but I could not keep it straight and as I started to think "it will block itself out" I realized that it will not, frogged it and did the actual MDS.
It took forever. Almost five feet of 55 stitches across (diagonally) in garter stitch on 3mm needles - enough to make you suicidal. But: no thinking required, just pure brute force of perseverence, so I persevered. And I noticed something else entirely - I could not stop before I finished the whole skein. Just could not. Halfway through I decided that I will give it to my friend Jacek, so it could have been a lot shorter (guys prefer shorter scarves), but no!, the Noro effect would just not let me stop. I had to see what color will come up next, how the plys will mix and match, how the colors will bring each other out as different combinations come together on the diagonals. It was surreal, I was in its clutches and could not free myself. And now I cannot wait to start another project with a Noro yarn. [It will either be a Evelyn Clark's swallowtail lace shawl in Noro Silk Sock in rainbow or Erica Knight's ribbed shrug in Silk Garden Chunky in red-orange-limey green.] And I love coming across the thicker and the thinner sections, the fluffy parts almost not fitting in the previous row's stitches. Nothing boring about Noro.

I used the alternative ending for the scarf and in the end I had exactly 2 inches of yarn left. Because it is a bit scratchy, I soaked it in Eucalan (never used it before) and now it is blocking and drying. Photos will have to wait until tomorrow, because the colors just do not come out nice in fluorescent/flash light.

And I need to develop my colour imagination. Striped and self-striping yarns just look COMPLETELY different when knitted from how they look in the skein. This yarn did not show any of the boring drab olives, marroons and blahy browns that make up about half of the knitted scarf. All I saw when I bought it was the fire-engine red, emerald green and some purples. Selective vision, maybe?