April 30, 2006 Shrug sleeve

After some confusion, I was able to pick up the I Do Shrug again and get working. Maybe it was a mistake to put down a lace project for so long, as I had a hard time remembering where I was and what I was doing. After some fits and starts I got on a roll and am now 10 rows away from being done with sleeve #1. I'm a little nervous about switching to the flat knitting, but so far so good. Don't, however, look closely as I'm sure there are loads of errors. One worry is that sleeve #2 will look so much better due to practice and I'll have to rip out sleeve #1 and start it over.

April 27, 2006 Finished the back

I finally finished the back of hubby's sweater- a huge relief, it looks like it will fit. I'm taking a little break to resume work on my "I Do Shrug". I picked it up last night and could barely remember what I was doing. That's one of the dangers of doing lace I guess, keeping track of where you are when you take a break. Hopefully it will turn out ok. I'm almost up to the elbow- about 1/6th of the way through I guess. Its also nice to pick up a lighter project as the weather gets better. Its hard to have a big blanket of a sweater over your lap when its warm and sunny.

April 19, 2006 Bogged down

As you can see my posts have been less frequent over the past week. I think its partially because I've just been bogged down on hubby's sweater. Its that giant swath of stockinette that's getting to me. However, progress has been made- and, as you can see I even worked on it on the Great Wall! Last night I made it to the point where I started decreasing for the raglan sleeve insets- yea, something different. I'm looking forward to the front where I can work in intarsia- something a little more interesting. I might need to take a short break to work a bit more on the I Do Shrug- I miss that little, delicate piece of lace. I am going to Mexico in about 6 weeks- I'll definitely want to take something lighter like the shrug for knitting on the trip.

April 6, 2006 China Post #2: Knitting, knitting everywhere

It's amazing how you see knitting everywhere, once you start becoming obsessed yourself. As our tour bus was driving through Beijing I spotted this young woman knitting something big and orange while sitting on the curb. Another instance of "knitting-spotting" happened as we were pulling up to the Sacred Way of the Ming Tombs. Of course vendors are everwhere, but there were some women waiting for tourists to come by and were wiling away the time by knitting. I wanted to get a photo, but they quickly squirreled away their knitting when they saw us coming.

April 1, 2006 China post # 1: The Great Wall

Just back from a 10 day trip to Beijing and Shanghai, and am going to try and catch up on my blogging. I actually have a few posts to write about things in China. I wanted to blog while I was there but we were busy doing things practically every moment- from 7:30 AM until late in the evening- there was so much to see and do. This first post is about a quick little stocking cap I made on the way over to Tokyo on the plane. Based on a headhuggers pattern, I whipped up this black cabled number to wear during the windy days in China. As you can see it came in handy while traipsing along the Great Wall! China is an incredibly service oriented culture- a testament to this is that I lost this hat for 2 days and it had been turned into the lobby desk at my hotel. They brought it to me carefully wrapped, like a special little present. I did bring hubby's sweater along on the plane, and did get some work done on it, although that hat definitely distracted from that. Not as much knitting time as I would have thought. Go figure, when I was on the bus or train, I wanted to be looking out at the sights constantly.