I really like this pattern. Doing the color changes at the last DD of the round makes it practically impossible to see any jog. This pattern is pretty easy to memorise and knitting is a pretty smooth process. The only thing I’m worried about is that I have to get my tension right at the color changes; I’ve been leaving too much slack and then having to go back and fiddle with the stitches near the DD to make things look good again. That also might just be a side effect of not having knit much over the last year and a half.

A lot of time passed between home losses, and my brain hurt trying to figure out how much tension I should leave in the white yarn that I was carrying up the side, so I just cut it and reattached it when needed. Same with the away losses (which made sense at the time, but now kind of baffles me – midnight knitting, folks), so I hope the Mets only win on this road trip, or that would have been kind of pointless.

The Mets’ recent record (2 wins, 2 losses) makes for a visually interesting piece of work, but I’d like to knit monochromatic blocks of wins if it’s all the same to them.

I realized today that I hate my bow scarf. The picture looked cute in the book, but there’s so little possibility that I would actually wear it that there’s no point in continuing to knit it. I’m glad I learned intarsia, though, because it came in handy tonight at my monthly knitting meeting. A new member asked me how to prevent holes in colorwork, and I was actually able to tell her. Go me!

I finished Satanski’s mittens, and am really pleased with how they came out. Mittens are great! Here’s the final product:

I finished blocking Satanski’s scarf, so all I need to do now is take a few minutes and weave in the ends. It came out really really well, and although it’s not terribly hard to impress a three-year-old, I’m happy that he likes it so much. I also started on what will be the matching mittens. This is my first pair of mittens, and I’m kind of cobbling together several patterns, so we’ll see how those turn out. Here are pictures of the finished scarf (undone ends and all) and the beginning of the mittens.

 
Today, the knitting Meetup group that I belong to had a trial yarn swap. I didn’t prepare well for it at all; I brought 300 yards of a brown striped sock wool, 300 yards of a sunny yellow sock wool, and 600 yards of blue alpaca. I probably shouldn’t have been so obvious about bringing things that interested me not at all! Anyway, I ended up trading the alpaca for some gorgeous light blue bamboo (cannot believe I got that), and the brown wool for some really cool blue cotton. I was also given about 200 yards of a cool white wool with flecks of yellow and orange (it’s cute; definitely for babies/kids). I couldn’t find any takers for the yellow wool, and although I may regret it later, since I still have several balls here and I have no idea what I’m going to do with those, I gave it away for a yarn drop. I hope that somebody can put it to good use!

I finished Satanski’s scarf, and it came out great! I love this yarn (Malabrigo Worsted, in Oceanus), and Satanski loves his scarf. That picture to the left shows what the scarf looked like last night, when I was about 60% of the way finished. I’m going to get started on matching mittens tomorrow, with a hat to follow soon thereafter. I need to block the scarf, as right now all it wants to do is roll itself back into a ball, but that means that I might as well block all the other stuff I’ve been ignoring for a while. Block party tomorrow!

Sorry, I’m groaning over here, too. 

This is what the OpArt blanket is looking like these days. That kid is due nigh on two months from now and I still don’t know when we’ll be having his dad’s baby shower at work, so I should definitely get the lead out and start doing a lot of work on this again. Even after I’m done knitting, I’m going to be weaving in ends forever, so I should just do it already.

I had high hopes for the scarf that I was going to make Satanski. I sat down, thought of a pattern, and charted it. All was well, until I realized that my chart was not taking into account the two decreases I need to work on each row to even out the two yarn overs I was including. I think I tried to get too fancy, too fast, and the whole thing just annoyed me. So I decided to modify a baby blanket pattern from Debbie Stoller’s Stitch and Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook and make it into a scarf instead. I’ve made the Big, Bad Baby Blanket a couple of times already (and I’m pretty sure I have a third one somewhere on a set of circulars), so by now the pattern is pretty much dead easy for me. I’m hoping that I will have enough yarn left over afterward to make the kid a pair of mittens, or even a hat. I can’t remember what the name of the yarn is, because I bought and had it wound in Vermont, and cannot find the label at all. I just started it yesterday, but it’s kid-sized and knitting up quickly, so I will upload photos once I get home from work.

My OpArt is coming along well. I’m up to 132 stitches in each section. I need to pay more attention though, because a couple of rounds ago I dropped a stitch about six rows down, and that was super annoying to fix in pattern.