What am I...a snail????

Ha! While I *feel* like I'm getting somewhere, I'm hard-pressed to show any progress. Sheesh! I'm a tad lost with what to do between spinning and knitting and I've made progress with both but...when I went to update my list, it sure as bloody heck didn't take long! Anyway... the scarf at left is the Ripples in My Stash design that I'm meant to be writing up for the website as a free stash-buster idea/pattern. It's bits of left over handspun alpaca and angora that I russian-joined and knit up in the Feather and Fan pattern. Really yummy and it's done but for the writing up (never a favorite thing to do but tomorrow's another day!)

My best friend's earflap hat is done BUT ~ heavy sigh ~ it's a tad big. I used the pattern from Knit Scene Fall 06 and it's meant to be a "tallish" sort of

hat, which is cute but I think it's a bit too tall since she's a pinhead like me. On the positive side, tall is kind of good in the I'm Gonna Felt It A Bit fixer upper process. It's not tight either so I think a tad bit of felting will be fine with this.

Then there are the mittens...oh MY. Now, I adore Norah Gaughn and the mitten pattern is from Knitting Nature, a book I slobber over regularly. The mittens were in Interweave Knits as an excerpt from the book so I went about knitting them up to match the hat. I've never knit mittens before but I know the Target Mittens are an odd type of pattern...knit on straights and then you pick up around the weird opening and knit the "thumb target" as it's called in the pattern. The thumb is wonky and it's either me and my eternal gauge issues or the pattern. I didn't even do as many rounds as the pattern called for and the thumb is like super long. Hmmmm....

I felt really good about these mittens at the phase pictured above with the magazine...they were fitting well, looking cute, fun to knit...YAY ME! Then...I finished them... I mean, lookit that thing below...is that not weird looking???

I could blame it on the fact that they aren't washed and blocked yet but I don't think that's gonna help much. It looks better on my hand but that thumb is still oddly long and bizarre. Oh well...I could have ripped it out but I decided to weave in the ends and make another one and if I hate them still I'll keep them for me (I don't hate them enough to not wear them...c'mon, they're mittens and they won't make me look fat and they're wool, right????) I may have enough of the yarn left to make her a better pair but she's very cool and will probably be OK with them. I may felt them up some, I dunno.

So, my FO's of shame are here for you to see and comment on. It's tough to make that second mitten but I MUST FINISH THEM and move on!




On a lighter note (ahem!) I did six rows on my Sheep Shawl yesterday. Whew...I'm smokin on THAT one...ha! But, if I have a tinking session on that baby, I'm shot for the day. I usually fix what I screwed up and try to end it on a postive plain knit row and tuck it away.

Then, last night I finished up a fleece combing UFO and actually spun, plied and washed the stuff! It's a very wacky hand-dyed Nasty-Part-Of-The-Fleece experiment, which I hope to blog about tomorrow morning. Pretty fun and one small skein of very weird yarn that makes me happy!