I may not have been blogging...

but I have been busy.

Here's my first offering from the yarn I got from the Great Stash Redistribution project. This is Tivoli Santos, 100% cotton yarn:


Doesn't Kit look warm and cozy? She's been sleeping with the blanket for the last couple of weeks. Sassy is very happy. It's a simple stockinette stitch body with a garter stitch border. Thank goodness it's so small - having all those ends hanging off the back of the piece while knitting is definitely not my favorite part of intarsia.

I started a pair of gloves from the orange and purple alpaca yarn I bought when Jillian and I took our yarn trip last spring. Discovered that 7" double pointed needles cannot be used for fingers and took a trip to the yarn shop to buy short ones. As it turned out, they didn't have short US 1s, but they did have this lovely yarn


It's Interlacements Toasty Toes. This stuff isn't cheap ($32/skein), but Knitter's Review says there's enough for 2 adult-sized pairs of socks. As you can see, I'm making gloves - my first. The colors are so gorgeous, I didn't want to hide them in socks - I wanted to show them off on my hands. Have I mentioned that I love the Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns? That's where I got the pattern for the glove and it's so easy to follow. The orange and purple gloves have been abandoned temporarily. I couldn't deal with 2 intarsia projects at the same time! They'll be done before winter starts again.

So, I mentioned that I worked up an alternate ending to Karen Baumer's diagonal scarf. Here are the ends of my scarf:


The way the pattern is written, the last triangle continues being knit in the same direction as the previous triangle - I'm anal, it bugged me. (Please note, the left side is the last triangle.) Here's what I did: start the last triangle the same way every other triangle was started. Continue in pattern to the middle of the triangle (I had 80 stitches, so I did the pattern until I had 40 stitches on my working needle).

Remember, you're making a stitch and then doing a decrease right afterward for the pattern. Once you get to the mid-point (on the triangle, the mid-point is the right side), you don't want to continue making a big triangle, you want a right angle. So what you need is a double decrease. I made the stitch, did a k2tog and then did a psso (slip a stitch, knit a stich, pass the slipped stitch over the knit stitch). I think it worked out pretty well. There was some confusion when there were about 5 stitches left - I don't know if you can see it, but there's a sort of bulb on the left side of that last triangle. I was so pleased with myself that I got this far, I fudged it and I'm extremely happy with it.

Let me know if this doesn't make any sense. It's a lot easier to do it than to try and write it down.