1.11.2010

+.3 Doing the Trick with .3 Left to Go (I hope!)

Love: The Yarn and Pattern (Although the light today is just not allowing me to capture the great depth of colour with which this nubby beauty seems to abosolutely glow!)
I was able to work quite a bit on the Darling Daughter scarf over the weekend and so made good progress, polishing off two skeins, yielding 5' of length. Its lovely yarn to work with and the pattern is turning out nicely both with the yarn and in absolute terms.
The pattern is from Drops Design* but 'calls for "super bulky" while I'm working with "chunky". To maintain the effect of the pattern's bulkiness and style without achieving its overall size because of the finer yarn I used a 30% larger needle than called for on the ball band (8mm rather than 6mm), swatched, calculated and then cast on 1/3 more stitches and made each cable 1/3 wider (8 stitches instead of 6). This is working to nicely maintain the relative scale between cable and borders and minimize the effect of the yarn...did I mention the yarn is lovely?...
The Needle, is not so lovely...
I'm using a lousy 8mm circular with a cable that's too long for the task. It also has these weird bumps in the cable close to the join. Despite having warmed and straightened the cable as best I could before starting it seems to be intent on reverting to more of a corkscrew arrangement with every row I knit. I can get a better needle tomorrow but I was kind of hoping to be almost done by then.

And I'm at the 2/3's finished point where, with scarves I tend to...
  • Wonder why I think they're fast and easy when they're often easy but rarely fast.
  • Loose enthusiasm as the frequent turning gets tougher with each added inch of length.
  • Just feel it should be done long before it is.
This scarf is to be big and looooooong and Darling Daughter, at close to 5'11", wants and can carry very long and very big so I'm starting to suspect that what I believe to be the "2/3's point" is actually going to become "just past half way"

Bottom line, being a mother I just really want my "baby"(nearing 6' tall or otherwise) to be warm so I want to get the thing thing done already so she can wear it in this bitter cold weather ASAP!

Oh speaking of "cold" and "ASAP" - I've gotta head out into it and walk!

Thanks for dropping by!

*Be careful if you follow that link - there are 2800 Free Patterns at that site, with all of them save the baby knits being modelled by 6' tall Scandinavians and so looking very compelling as a result!

3 comments:

Acorn to Oak said...

Great pictures! The yarn and scarf look wonderful! The subtle colors are nice and the cables make it look so warm and squishy! I bet your daughter's going to love it!

Lupie said...

Why is it that tweetie cottonie yarns make heart skip a beat!
The scarf and hat are both on my list!
Look foreward to seeing the scarf finished.

Brendaknits said...

OOoh. Aren't you the clever knitter doing all that math. what sacrifices for out kids, eh?