WIPs

Oh WIPs (works in progress), do I ever have a few of you! 8 at last count! I'm a bit of a starter and unfortunately not much of a finisher, but I'm working on that.

I have two that I'm working on pretty much everyday. The first is my new mittens for 2011. I shared some details in this post. I cast on a few days ago on 2.0mm dpns with some lovely yarn from my stash. Naturally Haven 4 Ply is a fingering weight yarn from New Zealand in a bold raspberry red. It's very soft, a bit splitty, but that could just be me knitting on tiny needles.

I'm a bit further along than this now and still loving every minute of knitting this. Now that I've separated for the thumb I think the rest will fly by. I was surprised by how much attention this pattern required from me to set up. The lace and cable combo isn't difficult but you need to keep track of how many rows you knit (every 7 rows you cross the cable) and the lace pattern is a 5 row repeat and the thumb gusset increases every third row. So lots going on at the same time. I love the challenge!

The second project is for B. He has only ever asked me to knit him 2 things, a neck warmer (done and at his work somewhere, sadly with no picture) and a scarf. Well this scarf has been on the needles for a long time in some incarnation or another. He wanted black, well, how boring and so I frogged that.

Then I found a rather nice Malabrigo Sock yarn in a lovely deep green that works for me so much better. The pictures are a bit misleading. The true colour is deeper but there are hints of blue and brown in all that dark green. The pattern is called Thierry by Celeste Glassel (same lady who came up with the Wandering the Moor Shawl I blogged about here). It's simple to knit and creates a very nice texture that looks stunning on both sides.

Unfortunately I'm knitting it with a sock yarn and it's taking a long time to knit up. B's Scarf  became the traveling project that I took on our holidays and knit on exclusively. I finished the first skein so half the scarf is done.

I wonder how long it will take me to finish the second half?