Starlight

First, good news. Last Sunday I attended a Barbara Kerr finishing workshop at The Point - a birthday gift from my parents. Boy, did I learn a lot. There are some things that it's really difficult to learn from books, and finishing is one of them. Not only did I finally learn how to seam properly, I also learned how to do short-row shaping for sweater shoulders, how to graft in a sleeve, and a bunch of other stuff.

Now, the bad news - I decided to frog my Demi sleeve and start over, this time adding a stockinette stitch to each edge. It will make finishing easier and better looking, and I wasn't so far along (about 2 inches more than in the last photo I posted) that ripping was a disaster.

I haven't actually done the ripping yet, since I have raging ripaphobia. I will stall FOREVER before ripping something out, often completing a project or two between the decision to rip and the actual ripping. (Wondering what happened to my Pemaquid hat? I didn't like the way the decreases were going, so I need to rip back to before I started them - STALL.)

So instead of ripping out the Demi sleeve, I made a scarf and started on Starlight. The scarf is just a simple cartridge-belt rib scarf out of some yarn my parents got me from Argentina - 100% Patagonian wool:

I thought it was variegated, but it turned out to be self-striping:


And this is what I've got so far on Starlight:

The yarn is my birthday Ella Rae Classic. It's a much deeper red than it looks in this picture, about halfway between red and burgundy. I'm going to cut off the pink cast-on yarn at the end, put the live stitches on a needle, and do two more rows of garter stitch and a picot bind-off for edging. It should look similar enough to the edging in the pattern, which is knitted separately and then sewn on.

I'm working both sleeves at once, which is what I'm going to do on Demi when I get around to restarting it. The markers are just there to help me remember which direction I'm working in - I get distracted when I knit and watch movies at the same time.

I'm not quite getting gauge - 28 stitches and rows to 4" instead of 30 - but I figure a little extra ease and length is probably a good thing, especially since I am not adding extra stitches for hippage and I am making the size for my real chest size (which is significantly smaller than my hip size). I am increasing more frequently on the sleeves, though, since I don't want those to be too long.