Starting over

So, the other night I spent the whole evening pulling out my Kauni. I'm stilling going to use the traveling leaves design from the Tailored Jacket pattern but I'm using Ruth Sorensen's cardigan pattern for shaping and gauge. Since it looks pretty sack-y in the pics on Ravelry, I'm adding some waist shaping as well - 3 sets of decreases (at 10, 12 and 14 cm) and 3 increases (at 16, 18 and 20 cm). I've put so much time and thought into this now, the damn thing better fit. Here are some pictures of my progress so far - one with flash and one without. Neither gets the color quite tight, it's somewhere in the middle.

It's been a long time, sorry

It's been a long time, sorry.  But if you haven't abandoned me, I can say I've been knitting Christmas presents.  I have 3.5 out of 5 done and I only started in October, so I feel pretty good about my chances of getting this done and still having time to ship them.  I'll post some pictures tonight.

Today at work, I noticed I have these 2 birds outside my window, they look like they're playing chess.  Watch the video here.  Then they fight, one leaves, the other sits in the tree outside my window looking all hunchy and territorial until the first one comes back, then they play chess again and fight more.  It's sort of fascinating, so I filmed it and I'm posting it here.

Hopefully everyone is getting ready to have a relaxing holiday - we're going to make this stuffing (it's totally awesome, we tried it last weekend) and some of the usual fun stuff - like white chocolate mousse and pecan pie.  I'll have Wednesday at least partially to myself to go grocery shopping and clean, which is always kind of fun.  We don't go anywhere or see anyone for Thanksgiving, usually, so it's quiet and nice.  Which of course is making us flirt with getting a dog, because too little chaos just isn't allowed in our world.

I've been trying to get back to abandoned projects this year, and I have on thing I need to take out and do over.  My Kauni jacket isn't gong to fit, so I need to to repurpose the yarn - I've seen a really cool vest pattern on Ravelry . . . .  but if you do a pattern search for Kauni vest you get some pretty awesome stuff.

Okay, lunch is over, back to work!

Happy Thanksgiving

Working on the Kauni is like eating potato chips or something; once you get going on the colors changing, you want to keep going to see how they'll resolve themselves.  This is the front steek and left hand side front, hence the pattern weirdness.

In other news, we went to Hilton Head.  It was amazing.

Kauni jacket snaps

Funny, usually I feel like my pictures don't do the yarn justice in terms of intensity of color.  Not so with Kauni.  I started the edging with two balls, then swapped to the other 2 balls to get a nice divide of body/edging.  I plan to do the same on the cowl neck and sleeves, probably not the same placement though.
I hemmed and hawed forever about where to start the balls relative to one another.  Has anyone else worked with this stuff and have any smart ideas?  I'd love to hear if there's some collective wisdom on how to use this stuff.  First I thought of keeping the rainbows close, but then I feared that one-color-off matching would give long patches of yellow and orange, blue and green, which I knew I didn't want.  Muddy, you know?  But starting across-spectrum (red - green, yellow - purple) seemed scarily loud.  Obviously, "in for a penny" thinking won here and I went with cross spectrum patterning.  Here it is again.  It's, well, cheerful, as Elsie would say.