On the Needles…

On the needles at the moment is a Liesel scarf (ravelry link) using some of that lovely yarn I broke all my spending rules for a few weeks back. This will be the third time I’ve attempted this scarf – I love the pattern soooo much, but as of yet have never been able to successfully complete it.

The first attempt was a number of years ago and I think my lace skills were just not yet up to the task. I don’t follow written lace instruction well – it’s very hard on my eyes – and I hadn’t learned to read charts yet. So after many many mistakes, it got frogged.

The second try probably would have gone better if not for a stupid mistake on my part – I was much more practiced in lace work by that point, and had become quite proficient at reading charts. However, when I reprinted the pattern, apparently my printer had been dying and those little boxes on the chart that are shaded to indicate “no stitch this row?” Yea… I didn’t get the memo. I frogged and restarted the thing probably about 4 times before I realized why it wasn’t working, and by that point I was just burned out and put the pattern away.

This time is going much more smoothly. The yarn (picture reposted above) is just beautiful, and at this point the lace pattern is almost mindless for me. Almost. I still can’t be watching anything that requires a huge amount of thinking while I knit it because there are still one or two rows I need to pay attention to – but not much of what I Netflix binge requires a huge amount of thinking anyway.

The only bad news is that I’m not sure I’ll have enough yarn for a full size scarf. The pattern says you only need 210 yards – and I actually have 270 yards between the two skeins – but I’m almost finished with the first skein, and the scarf is only a little over a foot and a quarter long. I know it will stretch during blocking, but even if it doubles in length it won’t quite meet my requirements… I like to be able to loop my scarves a few times. So if it does end up short, I may just sew the ends together to make it an infinity scarf.

But only time will tell.

What are you all working on?