I Need a Knitting Vacation

Is it really only Thursday? It's been a very long, very busy week. On Monday and Tuesday, we had late nights due to Passover seders. Yesterday, under the stress of a crazy work deadline, I worked through lunch (so no knitting break for me) and stayed at the office an hour later than usual. All this is a way of saying that I haven't had very much time for yarn this week, and frankly it's making me grumpy.

What knitting I have managed to accomplish this week has been on the sleeve of my Quill sweater. I finally finished up the short rows and have moved on to the sleeve, which is just about to my elbow. It would be moving a lot faster were I not alternating skeins -- I'm switching every round, to keep the beginning of the round neat, but that means a lot of moving of skeins to avoid tangling at the beginning of each round.

The shawl that I have been working on during my lunch breaks (when I get them, haha), is slowly growing. Though it doesn't look much different, there are definitely a lot more stitches on the needle (at this point, it's around 250) and they are getting crowded enough that I can't fully stretch out the shawl to get a sense of its size. I've got to weigh the skein of Corriedale to get a sense for how much I've used up, but I think I'm getting close to being ready to join the other color and start working the design.

The weather forecast for the weekend ahead is looking rather gloomy and rainy, but I'm thinking of that as the perfect opportunity to work on these projects and perhaps start a couple of new ones. For one thing, I need to cast on my Zuzu's Petals, the current KAL pattern for Knitsburgh Yarn Shop. I dug deep into the stash and pulled out this merino/sparkle that I spun back in the fall of 2013, originally intending to make something with it for Rainbow. It's been sitting in a ball ever since, so I'm claiming it for me.

The other thing I need to cast on is a baby hat for one of Rainbow's teachers, who is expecting a little girl next month. Rainbow has been taking in her knitting to school to show it off, and this teacher was so impressed that of course I felt I had to knit a little something. I've picked out the I Heart Cables hat pattern, and I'm using some of the pink Knit Picks Swish that Rainbow had set aside for her first piece of knitting but hasn't used (and likely won't). The teacher is on maternity leave as of tomorrow, so I really should have started this hat a long time ago, but I'm assuming that the school will be able to get it to her once it's done.

Do you have any big plans for the weekend?