Vacation Knitting Is Good Knitting

So. I'm on vacation. That means I keep forgetting what day it is (not entirely a bad thing, I'll grant you, but it's helpful when you're trying to remember to blog on certain days). We arrived Saturday afternoon, spent the first couple of days doing a lot of shopping for groceries and toiletry items, and today we finally got a chance to just relax all day. The weather has been pretty good -- upper 70s to low 80s, mostly sunny, and generally with a nice breeze. It's been a touch on the humid side (which I realized when I went out for a run yesterday morning), but the plus side of that is that my winter skin is no longer painfully dry. So it's been a great few days, and I'm looking forward to the week and a half we have left that I'm sure will fly by.

Despite all the running around, I've been managing to get in a lot of extra time to knit and get a jump on next year's designing. On Sunday afternoon, I started a hat. Yesterday, I finished it. If it looks familiar, it's because it's the same pattern as the handspun hat I knit last month but worked in commercial yarn (Madelinetosh Vintage, to be specific).

I wanted to make sure that it worked out in commercial yarn before I bothered to write up the pattern, and while this sample still needs a good blocking to even out the stitches a bit and make it a little slouchier (I'm counting on the superwash to stretch!), I'm quite pleased with it. I have a draft of the pattern written up and a hard copy of the chart sketched, so I'll just need to do some calculations and some computer work to finish it up.

Meanwhile, I started something new yesterday in two colors of Mountain Meadow Wool Cody, a delightfully springy and almost velvety sport weight. I'll wait until it's done for the big reveal, but here's a sneak peak of the guts:

The colors aren't quite accurate -- the yarn on the left, for instance, is more reddish in real life -- but you can tell that this is stranded colorwork. It's been a relatively quick knit, one I've been working on while working my way through the last of the Doctor Who episodes that are streaming on Netflix.

After this sample is done, I have one more to knit up from the yarn I brought (another hat, so I expect it'll be another 1-2 day project) and then all that's left is personal stuff. I think my Color Affection will wait until everything else has been done, so that means that the next project in line will be my Dalgada Cowl -- yes, you read that right, I'm going to try to crochet again! It's been years since I crocheted anything other than a simple chain or a single-crochet edging, so it will be a bit of a challenge, but I'm going to give it a go. After all, I have this gorgeous yarn all caked up and ready:

This may well be the prettiest skein I've ever wound up like this. It's my handspun (a pseudo-gradient I made from a Fat Cat Knits club shipment earlier this year) and quite a bit lighter than the yarn called for by the pattern, so I'm going to need to make some adjustments. Luckily, if I run into trouble, I happen to know the designer, so I'm sure she can offer tips if I need them!