Back from Hibernation

The majority of my fibery time in the evenings is still being taken up by spinning (I'm getting about an ounce done every evening, so the end is in sight), so these days the only real knitting time I get on a daily basis is during my lunch break at work. That particular project is a surprise, so I can't show it to you just yet. I will say that it involves cotton and cables, so it's a good thing I'm only working on it 30-40 minutes at a time. Aside from that, however, any knitting chez Knit/Wit has been on a project that has been resurrected from hibernation.

Last week, when thinking about what to take with me to knit night, it suddenly occurred to me that I had a long-dormant WIP stored away in the closet of my fiber room. I had started my Lady Eleanor Stole before Rainbow was born (a check of my Ravelry project page when the topic came up at knit night revealed that I cast on for it on November 3, 2009), and I had worked enough on it to realize that I'd need more yarn than the 10 skeins I already had. Of course I had the bad luck to have picked a colorway that was discontinued, but I was able to find three more skeins of it in an online shop and placed the order. I remember distinctly that those three skeins were waiting for me when we brought Rainbow home from the hospital.

I think I managed to make a little progress on the stole last winter, but this project has been largely ignored for many months. Now I really want to finish it, and I want to finish it in time to use it this winter. Here is my progress thus far, four or five skeins in:

I've really forgotten just how addictive entrelac can be. It's one of those knitting techniques that looks really complicated but isn't, and it's definitely a good technique when you need something you can pick up and put down easily. There's no chart to mark or rows to count, and in my case I'm really just knitting until I'm out of yarn, so I don't even have to measure. I definitely need to reteach myself how to knit backwards, though, because it's getting big enough that it's a real pain to flip it back and forth.