Lace, Lace, Lace

Once again it has been a good long time since I last posted here. I've still been doing plenty of knitting in the mean time. Nothing that involved whipping up my own patterns, just playing with some made by others.

I took a break from more complicated patterns and made a drop stitch scarf with the new Simply Soft Paints. I absolutely love the Oceana colorway. I have another skein of it and I'm not sure what I'm going to make with it yet. The scarf still needs blocked, but I love it already. There are so many colors, it will go with everything.

I've gone back to the Old Shale scarf I started a while back. It took a while to get into the rhythm of the pattern, but I think I have it down now. I'm going a lot longer between putting in lifelines. At my own risk. I hope to have the scarf done here in the next week.

Then it will be on to some of my "pay it forward" projects. I'm going to be making two shawls which will use the feather and fan pattern as well. It is going to be quite an undertaking. Good thing I have all year, even if I'd like to get them done before June. I still haven't decided whether I want to make them both with horizontal stripes or make one with vertical stripes.

I am definitely going to make the one using Simply Soft first. It will go faster and give me a break from using tiny, splitty yarn. The Addi Lace Turbos cut down on the splitting a lot, but it still happens on occasion.

Projects, Patterns, and Sales

Whew, the holidays have finally settled themselves down and I have a few minutes to blog here.

I did a ton (for me) of knitting for Christmas; four scarfs and two ear bands. Plus an ear band for me after some particularly cold nights at work, with a scarf in progress. They can all be seen in my projects on http://www.ravelry.com/, username RenaissanceKnits. Everyone really liked their stuff, and I'm glad. I also really wish I would have known about the curling of stockinette stitch so that I could have put some proper borders on the scarves, but I suppose it gives me an excuse to make more!

In making the ear bands--the pattern is called Calorimetry--I had my first foray into short rows. I was a bit intimidated at the thought at first but they weren't really a problem at all! I'm really pleased with how they came out with my modifications to incorporate the cable patterns from the scarves.

I'm also making my first forays into lace with a feather and fan scarf I started and a feather and fan shawl that is in the queue. It's a really simple pattern and I love the way it looks. I just need to pay a little bit more attention so I can stop ripping it out back to the lifelines I put in. I might not ever get it done at this rate!

So much yarn is on sale right now that it's really hard not to keep buying more. I had planned on doing the feather and fan shawl with some Simply Soft that I already had in my stash. Then, while I was out today, NaturallyCaron.com Country was on sale for half off today at Michaels. So, of course, I had to buy it and I'm going to use it for the shawl now.

There are so many patterns and techniques I want to try and not enough people to pawn the projects off on!