beautiful things

Did it!

How determined am I? Very determined!

When did I run out of yarn for the ruffle? Very close to the end, that's when!

And so I set about ripping my swatch to salvage enough remaining yarn to complete the ruffle without having to buy a whole new skein that I only needed a few yards of.

How easy it is to rip back mohair? Not easy at all! Actually, ripping out the regular stitches was a breeze compared with trying to undo the picot loop bind-off. It was very near impossible and I almost gave up. The extra skein would only have been $12 and I could have given the rest away to get it out of my stash... but it was the principle. I was determined to bust some stash!

It paid off. Here's how much yarn I had left (not enough to register on the scale):

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And here it is completed!

I still have to block, and right on cue, I picked up my Knitter's Block kit from the post office today. I'll let you know how it goes.

So much for relaxing knitting and so much for stash busting

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So yeah, having declared myself to be in such a comfortable relaxing place with my knitting, I decided to shake things up by finishing a few projects, one of them being on-again-off-again uniscarfity (photos to follow) and the other being lala scarf II.

I realize this blog is not called Frustrating Things quite deliberately but... ARGH!!! The ruffle is very pretty but now that I am halfway through, I am realizing that I am going to run out of yarn for sure. I mean, I knew I would most likely run out of the Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted but it never occurred to me that I would run out of the Madil Kid Seta left from the first lala scarf.

To get very specific, I had 20g of the 25g ball left in this particular color (gunmetal 422) and the entire first scarf only took 17g. Yes, there are a lot more stitches on this border, and I'm using the yarn doubled up to get more a thickness to match the Shepherd Worsted but still, it didn't occur to me that I would run out! I'm half way through the ruffle bind-off and I have about 6g left. The yarn was also used to k1, yo all the way across and purl all the way back so it's not like I need another 14g. Probably another 10g. I'm going to be left with exactly the same partial skeins that I started with for both the main yarns used!!!! How annoying is that?!!!!!

Yes, it's going to be really pretty. Yes, it's going to be worth it. No, it's not even going to cost that much. It's just the principle, that's all. My stash busting project spectacularly failed to bust any stash!

Increase section completed

So there it is, the increase section complete. I ended up increasing 11 instead of 7 times, and I've actually since done 3 or 4 of the straight section repeats too.

Here's my dilemma... the pooling. Ok fine, I'll take some quick photos to show you but they're not going to be a good ones... :)

I was ok with the pooling in the increase section because there wasn't much of it, and the dropped stitches will eventually break it up, but I'm getting increasingly annoyed with the pooling in the straight section as not only is it more pronounced but, being in the straight section it's probably not going to shift that much, right? I seem to have managed to hit on exactly the right, or rather wrong "frequency". One more or one less repeat on the increase section would probably have done the trick... HOW ANNOYING IS THAT???!!!!!

I don't know if you can see it but I did try to fix it in the last few rows I have knit by first of all also knitting from the center of the ball every 2 rows, and also just skipping a bit of yarn in the original thread, and it's helping a bit, but my yarn then got so tangled I got even more aggravated! I think I'm going to have to knit from 2 balls at once every 2 rows and when it's from 2 separate balls it shouldn't tangle as much.

To cheer myself up I decided to cast on for a worsted weight La La Scarf as I have been thinking about for a while - my second one using the remains of the Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted from the wrist warmers. Look at me, stash busting! (Except if I run out of yarn and have to buy more...) I love this color! Isn't it pretty?

Of course, I already made a mistake I didn't discover until about 20 rows later (forgot a yarn over) but I am really trying to ignore it as I do try not to be a perfectionist in my knitting. It's a challenge though!