Burple

Actually, it's lavender.  I have been doing a little, a very little, knitting on the band for the Jupiter cardigan.  It's nearly six feet of k2p2 ribbing, and two feet in I'm bored to holy-cats-get-me-ouutah-here-level boredom.  So, I picked up an old project to keep the mojo going: the Lavender Leaf Lace Scarf, which uses the ancient (2005) Knitty pattern Branching Out.  When I started this project, I was still fairly new to knitting, and pretty darned new to lace knitting, and this pattern was ambitious for me for that time.  I had completed about two feet of scarf with plans for just knitting until I ran out of yarn -- I'd chosen a moderate-sized ball of sort-of DK weight handspun lavender wool that I'd just finished plying.  I never entered it into my Ravelry database, because I had thought of sending it to a friend who also uses Ravelry and I wanted it to be a complete surprise.

Fast forward something like eight years.  My friend is no longer a Ravelry regular, and I'm much better at lace knitting than I was, so I put the scarf in the database and dropped it into the knitting basket by my chair, ready to go whenever I needed it.

Last night, I needed something else to knit.  In order to stave off the rampant startitis that I'm suffering from -- bad enough startitis that I even made a Knitpicks order for yarn for the Cloud Chaser vest -- I picked up the Lavender Leaf Lace scarf and tried to figure out where I'd left off in the pattern.  It took me less than one minute to find my place in the chart by reading my knitting, and off I went.  Three repeats later, it was bedtime.  Looking at the remaining ball of yarn, which isn't very big, I think I'm in for something around seven further repeats, five rows of garter stitch, and a cast off.  We're talking just a few evenings' worth of light knitting and I can put this good girl to bed.

Why, you may wonder, was I on Knitpicks in the first place?  Well, the yarn hunt for the Cloisonne mittens yielded no gold.  The yarn I thought was a worsted weight brassy gold was actually a lovely shade of reddish brown with goldish highlights, so it wouldn't do although I did think very hard about changing my color scheme and making it do.  I held my nose and went over to the local yarn store to see what they had, and although they have a pretty large yarn selection, they don't have much for workhorse worsted wool, which is what the mittens should be made out of.  So off to Knitpicks I went.  Wool of the Andes, in a heathered brass color, check.  While they had me there, I found the perfect shade of blue to go in a Saxon hoarde, and put one ball in the hopper.  Then, I saw that their wool/silk blend was on sale, and the color I'd thought about for the Cloud Chaser vest was included... and I fell for it.

I've been spinning yarn for Cloud Chaser for at least four years.  I've got about half of what I need done, and I've got plenty of fiber left to spin, so I don't fear running out.  The problem is that I picked the least pleasurable means of spinning that particular fiber, so I avoid working on it.  If I hadn't been stubborn about spinning the yarn myself, (and such a cheapskate about buying a nice wool/silk blend) I would have knit that vest a long time ago.  Well, I have no excuses left, except other projects in the queue and the amount of time I'll have to devote to knitting.