Current projects

I'm working on a few things at the moment. The oldest project is poor Clapotis which has mostly been staying in the darkness of her bag since I last blogged about her. When I bought the yarn for it at the Álafoss outlet, I asked the nice guy who works there if I could use their computer to check the amount of yarn I needed, which he said was no problem. So I went to the pattern page and saw that I needed 4 balls, which is what I then bought. A few days later when I had finished a ball and not gotten very far into the scarf, I reread the yarn requirements and realized that I had bought 4 x 50g balls and the scarf requires 4 x 100g balls - Oops! The Álafoss outlet is just outside of Reykjavík, maybe a 20 minute drive or so, and considering the issue of global warming and the cost of gas at the moment I decided to wait for an excuse to drive there (this just means that I was too lazy to get up off the couch, but let's pretend that I was being environmental.) The excuse presented itself when Cassie arrived in Iceland. The outlet is naturally on the top 10 list of places to take a tourist knitter in Reykjavík. Now I have all the yarn I need and should be able to finish it, assuming that I'll work on it occasionally. It looks like this at the moment:

A friend of mine recently had a baby, and in my usual fashion I began a gift project just a few days before the birth, despite having known for roughly 6 months that the wee one was going to arrive. Happens every time! I'm making little Kjartan a garter stitch sweater from "Strikk til Nøstebarn". This is a really nice and simple pattern that offers a lot of creativity. The original sweater pictured in the book is in a single color with a crocheted edging and an embroidered pattern in a contrast color. I decided to use up some stash yarn and for the main color I took a beige yarn, of which I had the most, and knit until it was all done. Then I began the striping with yarns that I had only partial balls of. I like the green and yellow combination, it reminds me of spring.

This friend of mine lives in Germany, close to Berlin, and since I'll be going to Berlin with my girl-friends in the beginning of October, I have to have it finished by then. Shouldn't be a problem - baby sweaters are pretty small, right? (Although there's going to be a hell of a lot of ends to weave in!)

The last project I'm actively working on is a sock, of course. Last year my brother was in San Francisco and when he got back he gave me three hanks of hand-painted sock yarn. It was a lovely surprise since I didn't expect it at all. The hanks have been lying dormant since then, but a few weeks ago I took one of them out and started a sock, which will naturally be for said brother. The yarn is quite colorful so I'm making plain stockinette socks with a k2p2 ribbing. Very mindless and very satisfying.

This weekend I've also been knitting a few swatches. It's time for another sweater, it's long overdue in fact.