Lazy Sunday

On Saturday night I swallowed some juice wrong, and coughed a little to clear my throat... and then on Sunday I woke up with a sore throat, and almost no voice! How random was that? :)

The fact that I wasn't feeling great became the perfect excuse for a nice lazy Sunday at home, most of which was spent knitting... there was a little cleaning in there too, but we won't discuss such things here... :)

I seem to have picked up a case of startitis somewhere - I think it started last week when I realised that its already March, and I haven't had a single FO this year! Its shocking, really!

Most of my recent knitting has been focused on Mike's Olympic Sweater - a very large portion of which had to be frogged back in January, thereby wiping out my inital deadline of the start of the Olympics - and the complexity of the colourwork has slowed down my progress, and made me crave something a little more straightforward.

(you can't tell, because of the folded over bit, but I'm almost finished the patterning! yay!)

Mind you, progress has been a lot easier recently, thanks to this little number:

Its one of those magnetic chart stands - so you can read the chart better as you knit, and so you can get up and walk away (to make a cup of tea, for example), and then easily find your place when you come back. I know I sound like a bad advertisement, but I really was surprised at how much better this is than the post-it method I was using before... and this way I'm not wasting all those post-its either! :)

In addition to the startitis, I've also had reason to dive through my stash a lot recently (digging out the scarves and gloves buried beneath the yarn), which has made me realise that I really do need to do a lot of stash-busting, if only to make room for new yarn and new projects. Much of my stash is in random little bits of similar materials, in vastly different colours, however, so I need to be creative in using it up.

So, for example, I've used a bunch of my 1/2-skeins of Cotton-Ease by starting another blanket (the challenge now is trying to find new ways of putting together the same colours/yarns, so all the kids I know don't end up with identical blankets!). This one is destined for a certain baby who should be appearing very soon.... Its almost ready to be sewn together, but I still need to figure out the border, and that's going to require A) some maths to figure out the required quantity, which should never be part of a lazy Sunday (unless Jo is around to help!); B) a trip to the Lion Brand Studio to access their full range of colours (they're closed on Saturday, and a visit yesterday would have conflicted with the "lazy" part of my Sunday); and C) a little direction as to the colours I will be using, which I won't get until after the baby is born - not that I want to make this entirely gender appropriate, but there are only so many colours left in their range that match my existing colour scheme. And since the on-screen colours for this yarn don't really match their real-life look, item B is an essential to the completion of this project. Its going to be so rough, being forced to go yarn shopping during my spring break next week! :P

With Claudia's recent suggestion of a mini-KAL, I've also decided that I need to revisit my dislike of knitting socks, by knitting a toe-up non-sock: Skew, from the Winter 09 edition of Knitty.

So far I've knit the big toe bit. Isn't it pretty? ;) And even better, it counts as stash-busting too, since I've had the recommended yarn for this pattern sitting in my stash for AGES!

I also started 2 other projects (and finished one, thereby ending this potential no-FOs in 2010 curse), but they don't want to be posted just yet, so you'll have to wait a while to see them. The other 'project' you don't get to see (because it got frogged) is the bit of crocheted rectangle that I made on Saturday evening! I'm very impressed with myself for re-teaching myself to crochet... again. Hopefully this time I'll be able to progress beyond the free-form practice 'squares', since Paul from my NY knitting group has offered to give us all a crochet lesson at our meeting next week (yay Paul!). Maybe if I get him to teach me how to read understand the patterns, I might actually stick with it this time! :)