The time, it flieth

It's time for a few posts, and I think I'm caught up enough that I can actually write some.

My needles have been busy. My sewing machine has been busy. My crochet hook has, sadly, been employed. At least it was to good purpose.

Icarus is finished. I used two skeins of Misti Alpaca Laceweight, and had a smidge left over. The pattern was knit as writ, although if I make it again I'll just do 3 yos instead of 4 in that particular pattern round. It's sitting near the radiator, snug under a desk, waiting to meet its new owner on Sunday.
The Legwarmers are finished. I think I've taken the off a few times ... but I do like them, and they are a definite plus in our cool house. The pattern came from Melville's The Knit Stitch, and used 3 skeins of Shamrock.

Filius's cardigan is finished. Really finished. A few days into working on it, I realized that he never wears anything but sweatshirt or oversized shirts in the winter, and who wears cardigans over things like that? Anything that goes over something of that size is called a coat. I had a small sinking feeling, but decided to finish. There are more boys than one in the word, after all.

The next day, I finished a sleeve ... the stitch count was off at the bottom a bit, but that wasn't too problematic. I was getting gauge, and the sleeve looked quite proper, and so I picked up stitches for the next sleeve and got ready to start down.

Then I decided to count my sleeve stitches. And there weren't enough. So I backtracked. What could have gone wrong? True, I didn't count to make sure there were 309 stitches on the needle when I set the sleeve stitches aside, but who would do that? There were directions to take care of the stitch number, and I'd followed them, hadn't I?

Well, yes. But not quite all of them. One line told me to increase X times, another told me to work increases at the front edges (V-neck, you know) Y times every Q rows, then Z times every R rows, then N times every S rows. I'd done fine with my YZN, but had missed the X part. Wouldn't X = Q+R+S? No, it did not. It was off by 8. Which means 4 increase rows. Which makes for 32 stitches. Which, at 5 stitches per inch, makes for 6" shrinkage in the sweater yoke above the sleeve division. It was suddenly seeming less likely that the finished project would be wearable.

So I cast on some socks. (Sorry, no photos. They're wrapped, too.) And thought, pondered, and otherwise contemplated my options. The next day, I brought a ball winder to craft day, stuck it on the table, and about 10 minutes later ... pfssst ... I have a row of lovely balls of yarn, occupation unknown.

After the socks, the Balaclava was cast on. The pattern (um, springboard?) comes from Homespun, Handknit. I made a few tweaks, took lots of photos of the making of the eye opening, and finished it off today. It's in the Basket of Things To Be Wrapped, and will not be a surprise to the recipient, but wrapping it is still fun. Especially if one's mom does the wrapping.

Now, for the End of Year Contemplation. To be fair, I've been thinking about posting this since early December, but I got otherwise occupied and the idea has been on the back burner. Towards the end of 2006, I had thoughts about working my stash down. There was the Stash of Whole Skeins, and the stash of miscellaneous acquired objects. I'd like to report that, based on my sidebar, I worked 39 projects from stashed yarns.

• The Tesselated Socks used 2 skeins I had bought 'for some pair of socks'
• The Latvian mittens used two colors of Palette from my Palette sampler
• The Anatolian MIttens used two colors of Merino Style from ... where else? ... my Merino Style Sampler
• The Quilt was finished
• The Rambling Rose afghan has been taken over by my daughter, who will probably finish it in 2008.

Admittedly, nothing was done with the Shadow sampler. I have noticed that the Swallowtail shawl takes only one skein, so I may be making one of those this coming year. After my doodle with Angel laceweight, perhaps?

And lastly, it's amazing what a boy can do with K'Nex.