Scarf for charity

Last summer I donated a custom scarf to the Brenda Novak's Auction to Benefit Diabetes Research. The winner would get to choose what color scarf she wanted, and I'd make it and send it to her along with the story behind it. She asked for a long, thin, gray scarf, so this is what I designed and made. I'll mail it, along with pictures and the life stories of Rambrandt the Shetland sheep and Sterling the llama.

In case you knitters are curious how it's made. I cast on 185 stiches using size 13 circular needles, then used only a knit stitch, except for the fifth row and the fifth from last row, where I knit two together, then yarned over, and repeated for the entire row, except for the first five and last five stitches.

So, the scarf is now done and ready to go in the mail. I hope she likes it!

Work in progress

I wasn't going to post anything about this until it was done, but I've never done anything this big before, and I need a little encouragement. I'm making an afghan from Teddy's and Latte's wool. It was originally just going to be from Teddy's wool, but I realized fairly quickly that I wouldn't have enough, so I decided to also use Latte. Teddy is a brown and white spotted ram -- my only brown and white spotted sheep, so I decided to mix it with Latte's wool, since he's a fawn color. I think it will take at least two years worth of wool from both boys -- maybe more. It will be Teddy's wool on both ends, and Latte's wool in the middle. I'm using two strands of double-ply yarn that Katherine is spinning for me. I thought it would go faster than it's going, but then I'm making it big enough to fit on our full-size bed in the guest room.

Things were going along perfectly until the past week. First, I knitted a row that I should have perled, so I had to unknit that entire row, which was terribly disheartening, since each row has something like 140 stitches in it, and it takes about twice as long to unknit as it takes to knit. Then I was working on it when Carmen went into labor, and I immediately stopped in the middle of a row to come home. I never stop in the middle of a row. When I picked it back up yesterday, I started knitting in the wrong direction. When I got back to the stitch I'd started on, I knew something was wrong but couldn't figure it out. Had I dropped a stitch? No. But what had I done? It obviously did not look right! I asked Margaret to look at it, and at first she had the most puzzled look on her face, then suddenly her eyes got huge, and she gasped, "Oh, no!"

"That sounds bad," I said. "What is it?" When she explained what I'd done, I whined, "No! No, no, no!" like a two-year-old. So, I started unknitting again. Being the sweet daughter that she is, she offered to do some of it for me. As she pointed out, it's much less frustrating to unknit something that is not your own project. I agree.