Hmmmmm

Okay, the linen stitch pull over, I want to do it again, in wool, for fall. Inside out st. st. this time and I'm really taken with Knitpicks City Tweed.

But what color? Colors?
A bunch of the blues and greens or browns and greys? A V pattern with a march of colors up the body, or get 2 and work together into a marl?

Help!

Sackboy is done

And is a big hit.

A couple things that actually show progress

So I have one pattern on Ravelry without a demo of it, I'm fixing that:
Knitpicks Gloss in a lovely purple they're not making anymore and Imagination in Looking Glass. These two make a very nice fabric for mittens, soft and with a lovely silky hand.
And for my next project, SACKBOY from Little Big Planet. Pattern is here, in case you have fans around the house.

So slow

Okay, things were crazy and of course when you think "well, that has to be it" things go more off the rails.
I'm still, very slowly, putting together the peacock pattern. And the wedding stole, which right now looks like a very large, very elaborate dicky, is coming along. But slow.
So I decided to make a pair of mittens. I'm finally going to knit up a pair of the daisy mittens. Here's the start. I still mean to go back and design some gryphon mittens, I just don't have it together enough to find my way out of a paper bag these days.

It's this again

I've now decided to alternate between 2 projects that will take me forever to finish. Not content to work on a beaded project with lace weight yarn, I've picked up the Roses pullover again. I like the colors in this yarn and the patterns are coming out nicely, but once again I'm winging the pattern as I go.
I need some boring straight stitch in my life. Maybe some mittens. Maybe I should dust off that plain white thing I started in the early spring. Anything I can finish before I turn 50.

This is from last night

Here's a shot of the shawl from last night. I didn't post it last night because the keyboard wasn't working. Fat kitties sitting on your power strip tends to unplug things. You can see the beginnings of the center window. I think it will look pretty interesting once it's blocked and the patterns all sit the way they're supposed to.

Thoughts on technique

I don't have a picture to show - yet - lace weight yarn is making things slow, but . . . .
So I'm working on Putnam's shawl. Cruising along, the edges are a modified rose leaf pattern and the bottom is a diamond pattern with beads at the center. So this morning, I decided it that was going to be a heck of a lot of diamonds - both for me to knit and for anyone else to wear. It needed to be broken up, so I'm in the process of putting a window into the center of it. The frame is the rose leaf pattern again, don't know what I'll do in the middle of that. Maybe more diamonds, maybe something else. But it got me thinking about flexibility and technique. Traditional shawls start with a center rectangle or square and once that's done you pick up around the edges and work an edging or series of them until the shawl is the desired size. There's a really interesting post about different techniques here. Now, these techniques have never appealed to me, but why?
I love picking up sleeve and other edgings and knitting down because the joins look so nice and smooth. I'm not afraid of ratios. or even of mitres and corners. I guess I get freaked out by the sheer number of stitches. 500 plus and that's a HUGE investment before I can see if I like it, and I tend to work on the fly. So now, I'm realizing that I've made up my own, simpler way of having this kind of flexibility by seeing how it looks and dumping in more sort of faux Shetland panels into the middle.
Basically, I seem to be a never ending well of ways to cheat.
I'll post a picture of my big fake once I have more done and it photographs well.

Stuff

It's summer, and you just never have as much time for fun stuff as you think you will. Anyway, Putnam's wedding shawl is coming along - it's a metric TON of knitting, but it's so simple I'm quite taken with it.
As I found I was running out of yarn for the Glacier scarf, I ordered another skein. Wah wah wah, different dye lot. High ho. I figure out something for the scarf, but what to do with new random skein? It's lovely, and brighter, than the orginal skeins.
What about a new pair of mittens - I was think go insane and pair it with purple and chart up a gryphon. I like this one.
Whatcha think? Sorry that middle picture is blurry, the camera was running out of batteries.