The Three Project Shuffle

It's Thursday, so it's time to link up with Carole and friends.

This week I'm doing a bit of a shuffle with my three active WIPs. First, there's my Darkwater, which is growing slowly but surely. I have been hoping to be a little more productive this week, but a certain small person in the house has been most uncooperative this week about getting to bed in a timely manner, so my evening knitting time has been sparser than usual.

As much as I'm enjoying the process and the combination of colors, the colorwork designer in me is getting a tad annoyed at the exceptionally long floats. There are many rounds where there are a good seven or nine stitches over which the contrast color is floated, so I am taking extra care to spread out my stitches on the right needle to ensure that my floats are loose enough to avoid puckering. I might even be tempted to add my own motifs in those stretches were I not already so far into the yoke. But if you're thinking of knitting this sweater and keeping an even tension in stranded colorwork is a challenge for you, consider yourself warned.

In any case, I'm about halfway through the stranded portion of the sweater and hope to finish it up by the weekend. My mahjong group is getting together Sunday afternoon, and the body would be the perfect thing to knit while I play (yes, I do knit while playing mahj -- doesn't everyone?).

My lunchtime knitting this week has been the handspun hat, and though the stitch pattern is such that it's not super fast knitting, it's growing nicely.

I love how handspun always stripes to some degree, even when you don't specifically plan for it, and I really like how it's striping here.

The third WIP, which has been seeing significantly less attention, is my sock yarn granny square blanket. I've added a few more minis to it, but there are still many left to be added. You can see some of the latest colors on the edge here (I didn't want to try to wrestle with it this morning so I left it in the project bag):

My plan is to add the rest of the holiday minis to it, then add the other sock leftovers that are in the bag, and then see how big it is. I'd love it to be as big as our queen bed, but I might run out of steam before then. Plus, I'm already plotting my next one, which I've already told Rainbow will be for her and will use all sock yarn scraps, not just Fibernymph Dye Works yarn.

Reading update: I finished Red at the Bone earlier in the week, and my goodness, those of you who have read it and raved about were right -- what a good book it was! I gave it four stars only because I felt like it didn't really have a plot and was a bit hard to follow at times, but the writing is simply gorgeous. I'm still reading Olive Kitteridge in the evenings before bed, so it's slow going because I only manage a few minutes at a time, and this week I started The Overdue Life of Amy Byler through Prime Reading. It's fairly fluffy and easy to read, which is a nice complement to the more complex, heavier books on my shelf. I'm hoping to make progress on both this weekend, especially since my next to-be-read book is waiting for me thanks to a hand-me-down from my father.

Happy weekending to you!