Almost there

Almost there - the title of this blog post comes from the fact that two projects that I'm working on are 'almost there' but not quite - and then something comes up.

Do you want to see what a pile of 21 squares looks like?

Voila (I added a coffee cup to help see the size of it).



Too bad it's not a pile of 24 squares, which is the number I needed to make the blanket. The blanket is the April project from the Knitter's Almanac by Elizabeth Zimmermann.

Since last month was April, I decided to focus on this blanket and I ended up making the majority of the squares. I had originally planned to do this blanket a little by little but the temptation of doing the April blanket in April thwarted my plans. Last weekend I went to the yarn shop (Spinning Turtle) to get the remaining 2 skeins of each color that I needed to finish (there is one solid yellow and one variegated yellow-brown). This is the popular Brown Sheep's Lamb's pride Bulky, but she only had one of each. Apparently the yarn was back-ordered. However, the yarn didn´t come last week. When I talked to the shop owner the yarn wasn´t shipped because they were out of some of the colors!!!! Out!!! How can a big yarn company like Brown Sheep run out of yarn!!!!

Well, I could have finished all the squares in the month of April. I get 3 squares out of each skein of the variegated (and 7 out of the solid color). Let's hope it comes this week because next weekend is a big knitting retreat with the fabulous gals at the Athens County Knitters Group (AKA The Rowdy Knitters). Can't wait. I had plans to work on the blanket there, hopefully start crafting the squares together. I guess I can start on that whether or not the yarn comes.



The project I worked on after the blanket was the sideways cardigan from Vogue knitting a year ago (Summer 2008). I started the back last summer, then had to change what I had a little so it just lingered. Now I took it back up and did a lot of laborious lace. Imagine K3tog in cotton and knitting 4 sts into a single yo stitch. Not easy at all. The pattern has a lot of errors in it and the directions in the magazine are hard to follow for the lace, but they published a chart as well (which does have a small error, but who's counting, right?) and that chart saved my knitting. That is until I discovered that for some unknown reasons I had a lot more repeats than I was supposed to. Oh no! It might come from a seemingly innocent mistake I made in the very beginning, that I didn't think mattered, but probably did. So what do I do? Start the lace over? Let me sleep on it. I'll probably to the front pieces first and then reconsider.


Or maybe I'll just work on my own medallion sweater, which is the front page project from this year's Summer issue of Vogue Knitting. I could write a whole blog post about that piece. How I love it and hate at the same time. I probably will write that post someday because I already have the yarn for this project and I can see some swatching in my future.



In the meantime, I'm working on my Blaka, which is a small shawl with a bat motive from the Einband book. There is a KAL going on on Ravelry for it (Lopi group I think) so I'm motivated to work on it. Last time I photographed it, I had completed one bat, as you can see above.