Smidgens of progress

I made a teeny amount of progress on the uber-fuzzy scarf. I hope to be less afraid of it as I get more used to working with the yarn and the needles.

I must be doing something right because there's a curve on the edge.

I also started a skinny scarf with a skein of silk blend yarn that's been sitting on my ottoman for months and months. This yarn was really expensive (but bought with a groupon, which is why I even bought it) so I wanted to wait for the right pattern to come along. Hopefully I found it, but it's kind of hard to tell this early in. It's supposed to be 9 inches wide, but at the moment it's more like 6. Maybe after blocking it'll be closer to what it's supposed to be. I will say this: it feels divine.

It's also way less scary to work with so I've kind of been concentrating on this one to the detriment of the fuzzy one.

Difficulties

I've been casting about for a new project. A friend gave me some scrumptious yarn a while back and I've been looking for the right pattern for it for ages. I was pretty sure I'd found it, but this yarn is ... difficult. It's SUPER fine, but also extremely fuzzy, which makes it hard to tell exactly where the stitch is (although it feels awfully nice), especially because lace patterns have tons of yarnovers, which are tricky to manage under the best of circumstances. I keep ending up with the wrong number of stitches (although I just successfully finished two rows with the right number, so maybe I've conquered that little problem).

I'm using Addi Turbo needles for the first time and I'm not entirely sure I like them. They are so damn slippery ... just this morning I was nine stitches into a row and somehow lost my grip on the right needle and it slipped entirely out of the row. After a brief moment of panic I managed to get the stitches all back on, but wow, I already have a love/hate relationship with knitting. I don't need the aggro. Plus the loop in the middle keeps getting in my way. I much prefer bamboo.

Eight rows and my OCD counting list. So far it looks exactly nothing like the pattern. I'm not sure how much that matters.

A closeup of the fuzz. The FUZZ!!

More mittens

I took it easy this week and started and finished one mitten and got about halfway through a second. This is the same pattern as the ones I made a few weeks ago, only with the colors reversed. I like making mittens ... they're quick and easy.

And since that's about all I managed to do this week, here's a little gem of gorgeousness for you to gaze upon. I'm pretty sure I've posted about this before, but it's too spectacular not to post about again.

This is a closeup of an amazing cape woven from spider silk.

Read all about it and view a video here.