What did I ever do to you, kitchen?

I have finished my first project since AUGUST! Ugh, I never want to go that long again! It is the star stitch cowl, last seen here a zillion years ago, and you will see pictures of it tomorrow. (With this Daylight Savings Time thing the sun is going down far too early for me to get good pictures of anything.)

I can show you a new picture of my Chevalier mittens, though! I never photographed them too well when I first finished them, so I tried to remedy that the other day:


There will probably be even more photos of them in the future, since I am a little obsessed with like them quite a bit.

Right now I have Apple Cake in the oven, in cupcake form. It smells great & I'll let you know how it tastes tomorrow. I have to say that the baking experience wasn't particularly fun. Today just was Not My Day in the kitchen, I guess. Highlights included large quantities of baking soda on the floor, accidentally cutting my thumbnail (thank goodness it was only the nail!), large quantities of flour on the floor, and, best of all, large quantities of flour in my eye. Uncomfortable! I hope these cupcakes are worth it -- from the current smell of things they just might be.

Final Ravelympics Update!

After doing the first Chevalier mitten, the second one just sorta flew by! I didn't finish the thumb on it until this morning, though, so really I finished up just in time:

I LOVE these mittens! That photo doesn't entirely do them justice, so I will certainly try to take some better ones soon. They are just perfect, though! The cable pattern is beautiful and they fit me just right. I do think some light steam blocking might be a good idea, so I'm going to give that a shot soon, but basically I'm thrilled with them as they are.

You might remember that I did have another Ravelympics project, the Juniper Mitts. Well, I made one. It knit up quickly and the yarn I had looked phenomenal with the stitch pattern...but I really disliked the construction of the mitts themselves. They were basically just knitted tubes with a little hole for your thumb to pop out, which made them fit awkwardly & not look terribly attractive. I'm waffling on whether to make a second one, but at this point I'm strongly leaning toward just frogging the one I did make and using the yarn for something I like better. Oh well.

I'm still so happy I participated in the Ravelympics! It was really fun and motivated me to actually start & finish two great projects that otherwise could've languished in my interminable queue for years.

Now that I'm slightly mittened out my thoughts are turning to socks & sweaters. I still really want to make myself a nice fall sweater and I've been spending truly ridiculous amounts of time on Ravelry looking through basically every sweater pattern in the world, trying to finally make up my mind as to which of them is worthy of my time & effort. My standards are entirely too high but I am starting to narrow it down and with any luck I'll be ordering some yarn & getting started before much longer!

First I need to find something small to cast on for today, though. I have a long bus ride down to Illinois coming up tomorrow and I definitely want to spend it working on some socks (or maybe a hat, or maybe another cowl...). I'll be in Illinois all week, so you may not hear from me for a while, but when I get back I should have plenty of fun things to show you. If all goes well I should be visiting an ALPACA FARM (!!!!!!!) during my stay, which means you can look forward to all kinds of adorable alpaca photos and, if I'm really lucky, some pretty new yarn!

Quick Ravelympics Update.

I've almost finished my first Chevalier mitten! Only the thumb is left to be done. Here it is a few days ago:



It's much more impressive-looking now, so new photos will follow before too long. I'm pretty ridiculously proud of it so far -- it's definitely one of the more complicated patterns I've attempted! Not that it's really hard to do, exactly, but you definitely have to pay attention.

Though the actual thumb isn't done yet, the little thumb hole looks good. I was nervous about this because the thumbs on Dashing and Fetching came out looking a little weird. On Chevalier you need to cast on stitches in the middle of a row to bridge the gap above the thumb-hole. I'd only previously attempted casting on in the middle of the row under the sleeves on my Cloud Bolero and, to put it as kindly as I can...it looked like crap. After some Googling, though, I found this marvelous tutorial on how to cast-on in the middle of a project. I followed it and everything looks lovely!

I've also made some progress on Evangeline. Here's the first mitt a few days ago:


It's gotten just a bit longer since then.

No pictures for Juniper yet. I did cast on for it on the 8th, because I liked the idea of starting all of my projects on the first day, but it needs to be restarted. I was doing the medium/44 stitch version because I'm probably going to give the mitts to Brian, but it was coming out looking much too huge. It did look pretty cool, though, so I'm looking forward to restarting! After all of this cabling it'll be nice to do something a little mindless. (Honestly, even the phrase "miles of stockinette" is sounding slightly appealing at the moment...)