I haven't been doing very good logging of my knitting lately, or spinning, for that matter (though I've been doing less of that because when I try to spin at home I end up with cats in the wheel).
This is a scarf I've been working on, very slowly, for Noel. It's knit from the Blue-Faced Leicester I spun at the Black Sheep wool judging last year, and I call it my $4000 scarf because of how much time has gone into it. I'm about halfway done, but the pattern is very fiddly (I'm using a couple of Alice Starmore cable patterns) and scarves are inherently boring to me, so it's taking forever. I've been carrying it around in my knitting bag while I work on other things, which does not actually work to get a project finished.
This is a pair of gloves I knit up over a couple of weeks. I've been playing around with glove design and while my experiments were interesting, I finally just decided to just use a pattern, at which point it went much faster. I still need to weave in the ends on the right glove, and sew the buttons on, but they're pretty much done. I got the yarn at Madrona this year, and it is a much nicer colour than it appears to be in this photo. I like knitting gloves, and I have some nice orange yarn I will probably use for another pair, though not with the button detail.
This is my second go at the Swallowtail Shawl. Goldie ate a big hole in the first one I made several years ago, while I was working on the edging. This one is going much faster and I am keeping it well away from animals. The yarn is Malabrigo Lace, which I really don't like at all, because it feels too soft. I know it has its own strength but I dislike feeling like the yarn I'm using might not survive blocking. I love the colour, though.
And last night I decided to play around with the Turkish cast-on, which is a seamless round cast-on for toe-up socks. I have several balls of Knitpicks Essential sock yarn a friend gave me, so I'm going to make a pair of knee socks. Since I'm going to Sock Summit in July, I felt like I should knit a pair of socks (I knit one pair when I was a teenager and was not enthralled). So far so good, and the cast on was nicely fiddly, but I am kind of dreading the dull expanse of the leg. I am liking theses little 4" needles, though; they are a lot easier to handle on small projects than 6" double-pointed needles. I bought a whole set of them from Knitpicks a while ago; I don't think they sell them any more.
The reason for all this productivity is that a month or so ago I spent some time organizing my piles of yarn (I inherited a bunch of yarn recently), and I hate having piles of unused materials hanging around. I decided that I should actually sit down and work on knitting projects more often to use up the yarn, and oddly that has meant I've been finishing projects rather faster than I was before (I'm not sure how that works, really). I want to use up an entire bin of yarn this year, but we will see how that goes.
