The scarf -- here lounging on a lampshade for its glamor shot -- will be a Mother's Day gift for my mom. It's about 18 inches long so far, and I've used about 1/3 of the 550-yard skein. I figure that'll get me to nearly five feet unblocked. There's lots of room in the lace, so I'm hoping for some nice extra length in blocking. I'm thinking I need to figure out how to block lace in the next week or so and find a six-foot-ish by two-foot-ish space untrammeled by dogs and kid to pin it out. Ha.
The knitting is fairly simple for a lace piece, since the patterning happens on only one out of four rows in the repeat. Ripping back to a straight knit or purl row is easy in the case of mistakes or dropped stitches (yes, I know this first-hand).
I've had lots of time to knit this week, being on spring break from teaching. I intended to spend time working on the endless dissertation and also taking in a few documentaries at a film festival. Instead, I've been spending lots of the week confined to the main level of the house watching my dog while my dog watches me. Poor greyhound Grover had a spill on the stairs last Friday night. He got a big cut on his upper front leg, but the city was pretty much shut down all weekend with a big snowstorm, so he had to wait until Monday to get stitches. Now he has to wear one of those awful cone collars -- which we're affectionately calling his lampshade -- to keep him from doing what dogs do and ripping them out.
While nothing on the to-do list is happening, I suppose there are worse things than being required to sit still and listen to spinning podcasts while working on a lovely project. Why listening to spinning podcasts? Because I've got two fleeces waiting on two animals -- a Finn ewe named Dolly and an alpaca named Abbey. I need to figure out how to skirt, wash, card, and spin this stuff, and shearing weather is fast approaching. More on that later...
