Gentle readers, I have a fully functional set of armwarmers.
Naturally I leapt directly into doing up the faggot lace scarf. Which isn’t going as quickly as it could, really, because I’m using size 15 needles in wood, which are blunt, and the wool/silk/cashmere yarn isn’t as soft and slippy as the merino was. (Ah, merino. I miss you already.) I could use my shiny metal turbo circular needles and just use them like regular needles, but they’re a different size. I’ll give this version of the scarf another four or five rows and see how it goes.
(Note: I have nothing to knit once the scarf is done. Augh! I could do test swatches in the acrylic I have stashed in the cupboard for arts and crafts, but it’s acrylic and it’s scritchy and doesn’t flow well. I have become a yarn snob in less than four weeks. It’s awful.)
Lots of snow out there. And it’s still coming down, in much fatter and fluffier flakes than it was this morning. Evidently everyone forgot how to drive this morning, because it took HRH an hour and a half to get into work instead of twenty minutes.
The boy is now at the coughing stage of the cold. Lovely. I suspect we will be running out of tissues very, very soon. We’ll bake cookies after his nap, and have them with real hot chocolate topped with frothed milk.
Faggot lace is longer to do than regular knitting, I have found. Don’t get discouraged: I thought I’d get the hang of it in no time, but I’m still making mistakes with my yarn-overs (fewer as time goes by), and it’s taking a lot longer than I thought it would. :)
My problem is no longer the yarn overs (yay me!) but the k2tog, believe it or not. The yarn I chose is uneven, which is lovely and rustic but makes a regular stitch tension impossible. Getting the needle through two stitches is a battle. I tried it on the size 15s, my little turbo 6.5s, and my straight wooden size 10s too, and on each of them it was the same. I gave up and am using the size 15s doing a straight knit. Turns out that yes, as I’d originally plotted before I got ambitious and tried to teach myself lace, the big size needle and a regular knit stitch give me — yes — the illusion of lace. Which is good enough for me, dammit.
*headesk*
But yes, when I was doing the faggot lace, it was much slower. It’s the time needed to get the k2tog, I found. When it was (mostly) working it created a beautiful effect, as far as I could tell in the big loopy stitches the size 15s gave me.