Coming along...

I've now got two blue stripes, and 2 1/5 (ish) red stripes. And the scarf is ONE FOOT AND 1 3/4" long! Yaaaay! :) That's almost six inches longer than last week.

I started weaving in some ends; I'll probably do that periodically in non-class downtime so that I don't have to do them all at the very end (which would be really tedious, and I couldn't do it during class -- it takes too much concentration). I've been knotting the yarn, which I know I shouldn't do, but I'm paranoid about it unweaving itself, and since this is just a scarf it's not as though the knots are going to get terribly irritating.

Hoping to get a lot done on the plane next weekend (flying to the other coast for a wedding -- 12 hours of flying, more or less, in the space of 3 days! *dies*), but we'll see. I'm crossing my fingers that my needles don't get confiscated!

Baby's First Mistake

...okay, not my first. But my first on a real project when I wasn't just messing around.

What happened was simple: I finished row 2 in the pattern, forgot to mark that I'd finished row 2, put my knitting down. Picked it up again later, looked at my notes to see where I'd stopped, and started knitting row 2. Again. Twice through the pattern rep I had to set it down, and when I picked it up again I immediately saw that I'd been doing an awful lot of purling for being on the right side of the fabric.

Oopsie.

Well, I learned to un-knit. I probably have twisted some stitches, but oh well -- not sure how to tell if they're twisted before knitting them, and I certainly won't want to rip back to un-twist them once I've gotten far enough forward to see that they're twisted (not to mention I'd probably just twist others trying to un-knit that row again).

I modified my plan and only did 20 rows of red, then 12 rows of blue. I'm back in red now. It's about 8" long (wow, did I really knit six inches in a week?!). Sorry no pictures this week; I spent my alloted weekend knitting-related time frogging the misknit row instead -- I definitely think that that's something I can't do in class while still paying enough attention.

Single Chevron swatch and scarf begun...

I did a swatch for my first project ever, which will be a scarf in the Single Chevron pattern.

Here's the swatch:

For the swatch I cast on 24 sts and did 20 pattern rows. It came out to 6.25" x 3.75". The pattern itself is fairly straightforward and relatively easy for me; it didn't take me long to get the hang of it.

A close up of the pattern:

After I finished the swatch, I started right in on my scarf. I cast on 32 stitches, and did 7 rows of garter stitch before starting the pattern repeats.

Here's a picture of it in progress yesterday evening (which is about as far as it is right now, too):

It's about 2" at the moment. As you can perhaps (hopefully?) see, I'm doing 4 stitches of garter stitch on either side of the pattern. 3 stitches sometimes, actually, because I'm also slipping the first stitch of each row purlwise in the hopes of getting a nicer edge. So that's sl1 purlwise, k3, 3 repeats of whatever row of the pattern I'm on, k4. I'm going to do 32 rows of red, then switch to the blue yarn that most of my swatch is in for 20 rows, and then back to red again for another 32, and so on and so forth.

Yaaaaay for finally starting projects! Hopefully between stats class and plane rides I'll have this done or mostly done by the end of the summer.

WOOHOO!

I HAVE FINISHED MY SWATCH!!!!

Here's a picture of the whole, huge, long, ugly thing:

The middle looks icky because I was doing so many increases and decreases in so short a space.

Here are a couple of pictures of the stripes:













...and one picture of the stripes from the purl side (I think that this one looks kinda cool)...

And here's a picture of the ribbing.

So. Where and how did I actually find the time to finish this, you ask?

Statistics class.

The professor lectures right off of the slides that he has printed out and handed to us. I barely have to take any notes, and if I didn't have something to keep my mind a little busy I'd go crazy from boredom. So I knit. And I am going to be fantastically productive in class for the next 8 weeks. *g*

I went to my LYS and bought myself a pair of size 10 Crystal Palace bamboo straights to replace the crappy plastic size 8s I've been working with so far, and I've been working up a swatch for my next (or should I say very first? *squee*) project. It'll be pretty simple; I'm just going to do a striped scarf in this stitch. I cast on 24 sts for the swatch and will probably do 5 reps of the pattern. I'm on row six right now (one rep and a half) and was amazed the first time I really looked at the work and saw the pattern! It was way cool. I think I made a couple of goofs, but they don't really show because it's a dark yarn (the red in the swatch pictures above). Hopefully the swatch will be completed by the end of the week (I have an hour each morning, yes, but I'm kind of slow and I do have to pause to take notes or actually pay full attention on occasion).

Wheeeeee! This is so exciting!