Kninja

It has been ages since I posted about knitting, in large part because it's been ages since I was excited about knitting. I told you at Easter that I would be right back with a post about a salvation history shawl...and then no such post appeared. I was knitting a kid's dragon mitten that made me grumpy, and a pair of grownup mitts that also made me grumpy, and a quilt that will probably take me up to retirement, and a couple of misguided gray things that really just need frogging. Did you want to hear about any of that nonsense? No, you did not.

This summer I cast on something I've been thinking about for ages. A couple of years ago I bought yarn during a KnitPIcks alpaca sale to make a Tortuga. (Click that link [she said bossily] -- you have to see how pretty it is.) But a laceweight sweater is A Commitment, and that pattern is not for sissies. It took me an awful lot of face-scrunching and head-scratching to determine that you start by knitting a sort of suspender, and then knitting the underarm and grafting the two sides together so that you can knit the sleeve in the round. I have never grafted in pattern before, but I'm going to be doing a lot of it to make this sweater. I'm almost done with the first sleeve, except for grafting the cuff edges together. I could just wear one sleeve around town, don't you think? If I wait until I have a whole sweater to wear I'm going to be waiting for a while.

I'm also working on a Fox Paws. 

If you're at all into knitting you've probably seen this pattern somewhere -- it's been wildly popular. It is super, super fiddly. I had to rip my first couple of attempts at a swatch because the stitches just wouldn't line up for me. Something weird is happening at the end of row 8 and I don't know why. But it is fun to see those nutso increases and decreases form themselves into wee paw shapes, and I love using up yarn leftovers from other projects that made me happy. The pale green was last used to make space invader socks for my firstborn; the blues are both from fun summer MKALs, and the darker green was a fun surprise package from my mom -- a skein of Madelinetosh from the upscale yarn shop in her neck of the woods.

This morning we had no coffee in the house (the horror!) and tonight we have no dishwasher detergent. First-world problems, I know, but I am off to lay in provisions. Because I might spend 30 hours knitting myself a funky scarf stitch by painstaking stitch, but I'm not about to pull those dishes out of the dishwasher and wash them by hand.