Simplicity at its Finest

One scarf.
One skein of yarn.
One 4-row garter-based lace pattern.
One enormous mess.


















Look at all those ends. It takes real talent, I tell you, to knit a one-skein scarf and end up with TWENTY MOTHERFUCKING TWO ends to weave in. But it's my own fault for trying to be clever. I was innocently knitting this Crazy Zauerball through the color changes -- sky, green, violet, navy, all very charming and rustic -- when I came to a large block of solid, flat black. I mean, a large run of black, so much so that I would have ended up with a good 4" of scarf in dense, dead black.

So I clipped it out. I figured I could find a spot in the ball where the color more or less matched the piece before the yarn transitioned to black. And I did, too. In the middle of the ball.

So I clipped it in the middle and started knitting, and next thing you know, I'm clipping again to avoid a lifeless bit of gray. And again to match the colors pre- and post-gray. But that becomes a problem because following the post-gray is a color that duplicates the pre-pre-gray. If you follow.

Well, even if you don't follow -- the upshot is that I had that entire Crazy ball reeled out through my living room and I basically repatterned the color changes through the last 14" of scarf. Crazy ball, you so crazy-making! I had to rip and reknit the end of this scarf four times to get it right.


In other news, The Foxy Redhead would like it to be known that there are chipmunks on the back patio. Or, there were chipmunks a day or two ago. She'll continue to keep vigil in case they return. This means she'll be unable to mind the fireplace a/k/a the Magical Bird-Producing Box for more pigeons. Please inform her at once if any birds should appear there. She would really, really hate to miss them.

Travel Knitting

And the winner of the "Which Yarn Gets to Travel This Summer?" Sweepstakes is...
::drumroll::

The Crazy Zauberball!

This is a really terrible picture. In true life, the yarn colors are a saturated purple and green with hints of gray, navy and black, but my orange-ish kitchen table always throws off the colors in my photos. Darned if I can figure out how to fix it. I suppose that's the punishment for having an orange-ish table in the first place.

The yarn? Eh. Splitty. Like, bad splitty. The lovely, textural, rustic look is achieved by a loose spin and loose plying technique, so even though the finished fabric is very pretty and intriguingly textured, the knitting is a bit tricky. Even with this extremely simple lace pattern, the k2togs frequently are more like k1.5togs.

The pattern? The lacy baktus, a freebie found via ravelry. The pattern is so simple that it hardly rates as a pattern. It's an 8-row garter stitch repeat, with 1-stitch increases on one edge in rows 1 and 5 and lace (yo, k2tog across) in row 7. Then, after the scarf is about as wide as you want it, you work decreases instead of increases in rows 1 and 5. It doesn't get any simpler than this, which is in part why I chose this for travel knitting.

I've knit about 18 inches so far. Maybe more. Would have definitely been more if the flight home had been more, shall we say, peaceful. It was a very stormy evening. My flight was delayed, and the in-flight turbulence was dreadful. It was hard to even read a book, let alone work with a very splitty yarn like this. I ended up ripping about two inches because of a dropped stitch, but it's my own damned fault for trying to knit on that flight in the first place.

I thought about taking Mendocino because I love it so much, but in the end, I didn't want to pack it. I'm already on ball 5 and it's growing -- would've required a good-sized chunk of suitcase space to pack it. That will be fine for Stitches when room and luggage restrictions are not an issue, but for business travel, it just wasn't going to work.

The trip itself was lovely. I accomplished a surprising amount of work for someone who spent so much time in the bars and parks. Many stories to tell, but none of them, alas, suitable for print. ;)