I've missed my blog!

I'm glad to say that I survived the meeting in Montreal and I'm home again now. Montreal itself was fine, but my meeting was quite bad (though not surprising). All the more reason to come home and knit!

Thank you, KarenK, for all of the information on the yarn stores! It turned out that I didn't have time to go anywhere and they were all far from where I was staying. Maybe I'll have another chance sometime... I also missed my plane, lost my new boarding pass, and generally had a long time getting home, but my cat was glad to see me and that made up for everything.

I did quite a bit of knitting on the flights there and back, in the airport, and in my hotel, and today I have pictures. The camera at work still isn't back, though. I don't know what the deal is, but I try to wait patiently. Today I went with the scanner, which I do like a lot because it shows off stitch texture so well. So here are my updates.

While I was gone I spent most of my time working on Mist. I got up to some part of the armhole shaping before I ran out of the yarn I'd brought with me. I really like this sweater and the rhythm of the seed stitch. Since I've gotten home, though, I've gotten excited about other projects, so this one is hold for a little bit.

Project number two is the Nicole lingerie. I didn't work on this too much while I was gone. I'd made a mistake somewhere and put it down for the better part of a week, and when I picked it up again I couldn't sort it out. So out it came. The whole thing. There wasn't a lifeline and I'd gotten sick of picking back a stitch at a time, so I ripped the entire thing on a mostly-empty flight between Montreal and Philly Thursday night. By late Friday night I had completed the first pattern and moved on to the second. It's a lot easier the... fifth? sixth? time. I think I'll stop counting; it will be healthier.

(Click for a view of a whole panel.)

But now I'm really happy with it and making good progress. There are some very small mistakes, but I've decided to adjust as I go and live with it if it's little. I've figured out that the mistake usually appears if I knit the yo in with the stitch adjacent to it if they'd gotten stuck together, so I've been able to watch out for that and it seems to be going well. I'd like to finish this before Someone comes to visit in early March, so it's been my main priority.

And finally, I started a baby sweater for a collegue. It's a pattern from a Diana Baby magazine that I bought in Germany in the fall. The back is deathly boring, (more on that in a minute) but I'm almost to the armholes, so that should help. Here's a little sample. I love the cast on in the contrasting color.

The front has this stitch at each side, cable patterns that remind me of leaves, and a center panel with a diamond with stems and flowers (in the contrasting color) in the center. Hopefully I'll get to that next week and you'll see what I mean.

So on the topic of boredom, the back of this sweater is more boring than seed stitch. One row is *k1, p1* and the other row is just knit. (Well, it's written as a row of purl, which is what you need on the front of the sweater, but for the back I decided to knit that row instead to maintain my sanity.) I don't understand why it's so boring. The only thing I can think of is that when I do the k1p1 row I'm working from a row of purled stitches, so checking the alignment is harder than with seed stitch. Maybe I'm just really into that silk-wool yarn and not excited about this baby yarn. (However, it really is fabulous. Super soft and superwash, and the color is darling.) I'm looking forward to the front, and even the sleeves since they have the leafy pattern up the center. Maybe I'll get to them by next week.

While I was gone I also made some progress on my Koigu hat, but only because I'd run out of yarn for Mist and was too worried about missing my plane (missed it anyway!) to count carefully enough for the lingerie. I'm not in any hurry for it since I think that my current hat is warmer anyway, so if it slowly matures toward spring that should be fine.

I think I have a pretty solid week of knitting ahead of me, so hopefully there will be more pictures soon. Have a good week!