Long time, I know. Here's why...
Earlier this year, I joined the 4th round of the International Secret Scarf Exchange. I've had so much fun doing these exchanges.
I got my scarf exchange pal, and she lived in Texas, so she was hoping for something lacy, because really... anything else is not going to get much use down there at all. So, I searched through all of my scarf patterns and links and found something I really liked, and bought some yarn to use for it... not the yarn used in the original, because that was a discontinued yarn, and what I got:
(Knit One, Crochet Too's Douceur et Soie) had a vastly different gauge from the original, so I knew to get a scarf of a decent width I would have to tinker with the pattern.
Then I swatched with some less fuzzy yarn to see how much I'd need to add to make the scarf an appropriate width... but I bound off too tightly, and even the smoother yarn didn't want me to frog it back and fix that, so I got all worried and decided that was not going to work.
After a few days of fretting, I went to a local yarn store to see if there was ANY other pattern that appealed to me and found the Cocoon Lace Scarf from Fiber Trends, which... I already owned and loved and wanted to make, but I had just forgotten about it. Even better, the yarn suggested in the pattern was the exact same gauge and fiber content as the Douceur et Soie. Perfect. I was back in business.
I finally got cast on, and got moving along on the project:
I think at that point I was down to about a month before I was supposed to mail it off. Not nearly as much as I would've liked, so I tried to hurry, but unfortunately this yarn and this pattern just would not be hurried. The yarn was pretty slippery and very fine, so each stitch was slower than I would've liked, especially since I was needing to work fast. Compound that with the fact that on half the right side rows, the stitch markers fall in the middle of a double decrease, so I'd have to lift a stitch over each stitch marker before I could do the decrease.
The first half of the scarf took me about 3 weeks to knit, and I had maybe 2 weeks left before I sent it off... now I'm running behind and so I feel like I can't post anything about it, in case the intended recipient is perusing around the blogs of the people knitting and figures out that what I'm working on is so obviously for her, that it must be the one and the secret/surprise part is spoiled.
And my mom was coming to visit and my house was a MESS, so I spent a lot of time cleaning/straightening up. Then she was here for a week and a half, and I barely got to knit on the scarf while she was here.
By that time, I was officially late, and I still had half of the scarf left to do. I worked really hard on it, but try as I might, I could rarely do more than 2 repeats in a day (I think there was once, and I really did work on it a LOT that day), and many days I couldn't get that many. And to top it off, towards the end, my allergies really kicked in and even though I was at the point where the knitting was finished and all I had to do was graft the two ends together, I had to put that off because it's really impossible to graft (and new to me, I was grafting both knit and purl stitches) when your eyes are nearly swollen shut and you are violently sneezing every few SECONDS. In the end, I was a full 3 weeks late mailing it off. I was so embarrassed!
I do think, though, that it turned out beautifully:
It's a great knit, and the pattern is well written. My only thought is that this pattern in this yarn is a knit to savor, not one to do on a short deadline.
I also made my pal a small tote bag:
The fabric was drapier than the ones I'd made before, so I had to make a stiff insert to go with it, too.
After all that, I was so burned out I don't think I knit at all for a whole week...
And then I thought I'd better look at the schedule for Sockapalooza that I'd signed up for thinking there would be plenty of time after the scarf exchange to do a pair of socks. They're supposed to be mailed out August 2nd. Less than a month from then, and I hadn't picked out a pattern or bought yarn for it.
YIKES! Here we go again.
Next post, the start of the Sockapalooza socks.
