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.

On a Kick

After finishing my Corazon mittens, I was in the mood to knit some more colorwork mittens, so I cast on for another pair, knowing full well that they probably wouldn't get completed for quite some time. I had seen the Vespergyle Mittens on Ravelry a couple of days earlier, and I knew I had a lot of colorwork-appropriate fingering weight yarn in my stash, so it was an easy choice to make.

This is Jamieson's Shetland Spindrift that I acquired from Kenny. It's my first time working with shetland, and I can see why it's so often used for colorwork -- this stuff is sticky! I somehow dropped a stitch at some point and it literally went nowhere. I'm significantly past where this picture shows at this point (the thumb gore is almost done). I'll have to take another picture when I can get some good light to do it justice, because the pattern is really pretty.

Meanwhile, I've also been keeping myself somewhat busy with my Lady Eleanor Stole, which now has about five skeins of Noro Kureyon worked into it. Unfortunately, it's turning out a tad shorter than I expected considering I've used half of my yarn at this point. Here it is thus far, with a book for scale.

As luck would have it, the colorway I picked is now discontinued. Luckily, a bit of Googling turned up an online yarn store that still had some in stock, so three more skeins are on their way to me. I'm hoping that the extra yardage and a good blocking will result in a stole I can really wrap around myself.

Baby Watch 2009 continues. Tomorrow is my official due date, but I think it may be a while yet before Rainbow makes her grand debut.