It's been nearly a year since I started this (you can tell because the gallery was started on March 4, 2008), but it's done! Done! *does a happy dance around the living room*

Now I just need to weigh the leftover yarn and see what I ended up using. I think I may have inadvertently used some sportweight in the border, which I hadn't realized I still had. In any event, I'm extremely pleased — it's a stashbusting project and it came out beautifully! Yay! I need more of those. :)

ETA: I was able to take 922g of yarn off the stash worksheets after finishing this project! (I obviously used more yarn than that, but the stash was weighed with this in progress.) I'm out of "yarn debt"! My destash weight is now at 555g — a positive number for the first time this year!

I guess this was just one of those blankets that was meant to be small. Afghan-sized, even.

Uber-Woolo there is sitting in the little space which is all that remains unknit on this blanket. I am really looking forward to finishing it, which is making me work on it that much faster!

It'll need a border when it's done, probably in black, and when I'm done with that I'll need to decide if it needs a backing, too. It might. It might not. If it does, I'll look for something sheepy. :D

I'm up to four (and the center square plus first stripe on another). I'm definitely enjoying how these are coming out, although it'll be really ironic if I need to go buy more yarn in order to finish a scrap project. I keep telling myself I can make small blankets, but I'm not sure I believe me!

And thus I have stayed far, far, far away from it. I own a rotary cutter for sewing, but that's as close as I've ever gotten. I have lots and lots of hobbies, and never feel like I have enough time for any of them! Quilting would just be one more thing that would have to fight for its time with me, and I don't want to give up my knitting or cross-stitching or crocheting or reading or writing or World of Warcraft. (Although maybe that's something I should think about — if I ever stop playing WoW, I can start quilting. It might help with the withdrawal pangs. But it's not too likely — I just got myself a second account. >_>)

Anyway, recently — probably due to my newfound lust for Vera Bradley bags (I own a book cover and three different bags and a wallet now. My only defense is that, since they're all in a discontinued fabric, they were severely discounted — and also they're amazingly perfect as knitting bags, since they have tons of pockets but no zippers to catch on your work!) — I started thinking that it might be cool to make my own bags and book covers. After all, then I could have bags and book covers with sheep-printed fabric!

After a while I ended up looking at books (I hear Eleanor Burns is awesome) and eyeing fabric and very, very nearly buying a self-healing mat and one of those enormous rulers. I held off at the last minute, and the urge seems to have passed… sort of.

I've had a bunch of Wool-Ease around forever; I had plans to make a mitered-square blanket with it. However, the mitered-square blanket has been languishing under the bed for months, and I had all these quilt pictures in my head, and I thought, "Scrap Log Cabin Blanket GO!" Two squares later, I haven't even made the slightest hint of a dent in the Wool-Ease. Not even a little. A square is about 80g, and I have a total of 2315g. It looks like I'll be able to make roughly 28 squares (without reclaiming the wool from the Powers of Two blanket); it would take 36 to make a queen-sized bedspread. On the bright side, squares take up very little space around the house and are easy to do while reading. On the not-so-bright side, I bet I won't be finished with this until September. On the other bright side, September is when blankets start becoming needed around the house…

Anyway, here's the other way in which quilts have insinuated themselves…

I own this beautiful book of cross-stitching patterns by (or inspired by?) Paula Vaughan — one for each month of the year. This is the very beginning of the February quilt. I'll need to get more floss if I'm going to finish this one, but I can get along for quite a while just on the floss out of the stash.

…sigh. It sometimes seems like I'm never going to dig my way out of my stash or finish any projects.

But at least I haven't started quilting yet.

Today I was so close to finishing this project that… what do you know, I put it off until I could post about the completed item.

This is not a habit I should get into, but it's awfully fun when I have a finished project to post about!

So anyway: Here are a pair of epic purple bracers armwarmers, knit for a friend for warming of arms! Before I send them off, I'm going to see if I can get a mana restore enchant on them. The only problem is, I'm not sure Teu ever got that enchant… maybe a Major Stamina enchant would be just as good!

(Love and hearts to my favorite boomkin!)

Several marathon crocheting sessions later, it's done! The stripey blanket is finished, and it's big enough to cover the bed, which is awesome. (The nightstands are a little messy. Please forgive my excitement, which outweighed my desire to present a clean bedroom for photographs.)

This used 2040g of yarn. If only that were enough to actually start destashing. Ha! It isn't. But every little bit counts, and now I'm on to another project.

Well, that was what I thought until I tried knitting the first fifty stitches. My hands couldn't take the lack of stretch, and I quickly decided to shift gears and make something fast. What's fast? Crochet.

And so now I've got a crocheted blanket-in-progress to go with my Mystery-Blanket-In-Progress. Sigh. It is going quickly, though; I'm nearly halfway done with it. :)

It's 30" x 36" and made of the nicest, softest acrylic I've ever worked with (Dark Horse Fantasy). It took 382 grams, which certainly helps my stash statistics. :)

Hey, speaking of statistics: I said quite a while ago that I was going to try to complete/toss/frog 1.5 projects for every 1 project I started. Now, when I made that goal, I had a closetful of incomplete projects, and I was hoping that I'd use that goal as incentive to stop starting projects and not finishing them. However, at this point I'm down to nine WIPs, two of which will be done by the end of the year, one of which I plan to frog when I get around to it, and two more which may or may not end up frogged. I'd be down to five if all that happens, so it really looks like I've kicked the startitis habit. (No, seriously, that's a perfectly reasonable number of WIPs! It is!)

My current ratio is 102:101 (which rounds off to 1.0:1), and that's counting yarn I bought and stashed (but haven't yet worked with) as "new projects". Without counting that, I'd be at 102:88 (1.2:1). Not bad at all. :)

I was also going to try to knit 2 projects from the stash for every 1 project made out of new yarn. WHICH I HAVE DONE. \o/ My ratio is 2.0 exactly, counting yarn I've bought but haven't used and cross-stitching patterns I've bought but haven't worked (wow, why did I start counting those in the spreadsheet? The yarn, I think counting that is probably the right thing to do, but the cross-stitching?). Without the cross-stitching, my ratio would be 2.6:1. :)

The destashing goal is definitely a better one for my sanity, better for reclaiming closet space, but it's nice to see I wasn't as far off with the original goals as I thought I would be by the end of the year. :)

The one and only thing I'm not crazy about with this sweater is the need for buttons. Although I mind it a lot less when they're cute fish buttons:

This is the last of my Microspun — apart from a little Dark Horse Fantasy and some Wool-Ease, it's the last of my acrylic. It's certainly the last of the acrylic that I don't consider fun to work with! The destashing, therefore, continues apace. :) This is 135g destashed, along with 55g that got destashed to someone on Ravelry. \o/

…however, for my birthday I did add some yarn to the stash. 750g for two sheep projects (and to look at colors for a sweater project which calls for five different shades of grey). This means I'm down 190g, but up 750g — a net gain of 560g. But a finished project is a finished project, and I'm really pleased with the way this one came out.

Baby Surprise Jackets are a great little project for using up a couple of balls of yarn here and there. But after knitting two of them in the very recent past, I think I'd rather use up some of my other yarns with hat or mitten projects, especially now that I've gotten most of the acrylic out of my stash. I do have one more baby sweater to knit — I really want to try out a Baby Bog Jacket in some of that acrylic I've got left — but after that I think I'll be done with both acrylic and baby sweaters. The only sad thing about all the acrylic being gone is that I no longer have much on the trade/sell page on Ravelry; most of the yarn I have left, I want to keep! That's going to make destashing a bit harder. :)

However, luckily for this blog, the recipient (the person who's sewing the squares together) took some pictures of the squares as they came in! Hooray! And so here's the rest of the squares I made for the acrylic/synthetic blanket:

I got thirteen of those suckers done in a weekend, destashed all of my yellow, blue, and red Shine Sport, used up a bit of my Dark Horse Fantasy, and helped complete a blanket. :)

I have also managed to create six wool rainbow squares. Unlike the synthetic blanket, I'm not making squares with interesting stitch patterns; I'm just making stockinette squares and letting the color provide the interesting part. (I'm using leftover yarn from the rainbow sheep.)

Love comes in many colors.

My pictures are horrible and awful, because the good camera is currently in Las Vegas along with SheepLad. However, here they are anyhow:

From left to right, the stitch patterns are: the 'prismatic' diagonal herringbone from this scarf on Feather and Fan, stockinette, seed, an unvented garter rib, stockinette, triple rib.

Well, it turns out Sneaky Sheep has been going on missions. So far he's managed to infiltrate the study, while I was raiding Tempest Keep:

…the bathroom, as I was brushing my teeth…

…my bedroom window, as I was going to sleep…

…and now the kitchen cabinets!

(For fun and prizes, find the bonus sheep in each of those pictures. There are eight, plus an "extra".)

I do have other things going! I've been working on shopping bags, and two friends have graciously agreed to help me test a pattern. (It's crochet, requires about 300 yards of not-too-stretchy yarn, and roughly an H hook — mileage varies.) I'm also working on a shawl project, but it's a gift for someone; as such, I won't be posting pictures of it until it's complete and in the hands of the recipient. :)

Not to say that it isn't wrapped around one.

Yarn used: Dark Horse Fantasy. Needle size: 4mm.

I was surprisingly pleased with this scarf. Dark Horse Fantasy is definitely the nicest acrylic I've ever laid hands on, and I'd work with it again, no problem. And the pattern came out lovely! So lovely that I decided to do something I've never done before — I wrote up the pattern.

Yes, it's basketweave k3p3 with a 4-row repeat and 3 stitches of knitted-on I-cord border, and yes, a knowledgeable knitter can simply figure it out by looking, and yes, it felt strange to write such a "simple" pattern up… but I found myself thinking that maybe I should do it anyway. Not everyone in the world can hear the above phrases and turn those into a pattern!

Like everything else on the site, and every pattern I'll ever write, now and in the future, it's Creative Commons licensed. If you're curious what that means, I encourage you to check out this page, where I provide a few links and clarify my personal feelings on Creative Commons licenses as they apply to my patterns. :)

It is entirely possible I'll have another pattern up next week — this one for a crocheted grocery bag — but it might take me a little longer. My charity auction is finished, and it's time for me to cast on for a shawl. Wooooooooo shawl! :D

Thursday, be on the lookout for sheep. Some sneaky… some brightly colored… all very proud, and most of them (though not all of them) members of my personal flock. :)

I think I've mentioned my Pink Prismatic Scarf before! It was an experiment both with the pattern (which gets five stars) and this yarn (which does not). Here's how it's looking right now:

I've tried it on both plastic and bamboo needles, and it's not making me happy at all. I'm going to finish it, because I like the color and the pattern is made of awesome, but I won't be working with this yarn again!

Here's the other scarf on needles at present:

It's an improvised basketweave pattern with built-in I-cord edging, using Dark Horse Fantasy. This yarn, unlike Comfort, is MADE OF WIN. I first heard about it through synecdochic on LiveJournal, who hails it as the best acrylic-based yarn ever, and she's totally correct about that. It's pricey for acrylic, but would be worth it if I absolutely had to have an easy-care fiber right now (it's sold at my LYS, unlike Shine from KnitPicks and such).

Both the sheep in these pictures are from Indiana — I think they may have come from the Wool 'n' Ewe shop one year at the State Fair. They're a cute iridescent color, and are from the Russ Berrie company. :)

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Yarn used: Comfort by Berroco, color 9810. Needle size: 5mm.

The sheep in question is a small sheep who lives in the library. She is a sturdy and stable sheep, standing easily on her four hooves! (A noteworthy talent in plush sheep.)

I've been curious about acrylic/nylon yarns for a while. It's much, much, much nicer to work with than straight acrylic, but I don't know if I'd want to do anything bigger than a scarf or a hat with this particular yarn!

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease, worsted weight. Needle size: 4.25mm.

Pink Pads Sheep is confused about why I'd ever want to feature a project without her. She's that kind of sheep, you know; the sort that's about half wool (and polyester fiberfill), and half ego.

Oh, excuse me. She's now bleating that it's more like one-quarter wool and fiberfill, and three-quarters ego.

Now she wants me to go get her a nice patch of organic wheatgrass.

The things we do for sheep.

…work continues on the Obama socks; one sock down, one leg in progress!

…I started working on the Powers of Two blanket again!

…and the Meditation Knitting project continues, too!

Also, I frogged the Anya scarf; I could not deal with lace on every row and not just the odd-numbered rows. C'est la vie; I'll find another project for that orange laceweight, I'm sure!

So it's been a productive weekend/beginning of week, just not so much with the camera. Pictures to come on Thursday!

Clockwise from bottom left, you can see a stack of books I'm currently reading ("Communicating In Sign" is on top — I've been taking an ASL class at my local community college, and have been reading as much ASL/Deaf culture stuff as I can get my hands on). This is not all the books I'm reading. This is just the two books I am reading that are stashed in the bedroom. There are three books I'm reading in the study, two in the middle bathroom, three in the back bathroom, and a pile downstairs waiting to be tackled. It's kind of like a sickness, a ravenous appetite. Unfortunately, reading this many books at once results in not finishing anything at all. I need to buckle down and start finishing things!

Piled between the books and the alarm clock are my abacus bracelets and a couple of stitch markers.

Next is my alarm clock, with lamp on top. Yep, the lamp lives on top of the alarm clock. Why not — it fits! The clock is one of those things that will play CDs (that's why it's big and flat like a sandwich) and has two wake-up times, though right now we're only using one. It also has different settings for weekday and weekend, so we don't have to remember to turn it off over the weekend and turn it back on during the week. I usually wake up about five minutes before the alarm goes off.

Hand lotion in the back; useful when you're knitting and have dry skin.

Black object is a rear speaker. Yes. It lives on my nightstand. I suppose we could put them on the floor… or something… but the nightstand is where they have always lived.

Far back corner is a Kleenex box. All hail Puffs Plus With Lotion. It saves my nose every time I get a cold.

Foreground, in front of speakers: three sheep. There may be a fourth sheep hidden under the knitting project. They're sneaky, sheep.

Foreground, right: knitting project and its chart. I recently switched it to a 32" needle instead of a 24" needle. I may need to switch it right back when the sleeve stitches get put on holders. I also just tried it on (it's top-down and the stitches get put on thread) to see if I could make myself a sweater one size smaller than I was thinking, and the answer was a resounding "Hell, no". Sigh. I really wanted to be on to the next part of this sucker. But no. I've got another eight-ish rounds to go, and then I should be ready to divide sleeves. Yay!

On the bright side, I have another diamond finished (well, nearly!), and will be dividing off for sleeves soon. It'll be so much faster when I'm no longer doing so much increasing — not to mention how much less bulk there'll be on the needles, at least for the time being.

I'm still really enjoying both the project and my abacus bracelets (I've got one for the larger cable and one for the smaller cables), and lately SheepLad has been watching Lord of the Rings, which has given me an unexpected bonus knitting time with the husband. And talking of which, I hear hobbits from the next room. Off I go!

Still — since Tuesday I have completed one entire repeat of the diamond panel on my Cable-Down Raglan! :D

Yarn used: Zitron Polo in colorway 41 (grey, slightly heathered). Needles: 3.75mm.
Sheep: Ovistine, from the Auckland airport in New Zealand.

So here's one of my unpopular knitting opinions: I like cable needles. I really prefer working with cable needles to working without 'em, even though many people (especially lately) dig the on-the-fly, without-'em method. So cable needles are an integral part of a cable project for me; I tuck the cable needle behind my ear when I don't need it and pop the stitches onto the thing when I do.

Here's a shot of the project with my essential tools for cabling:

The cable needle is part of the set from KnitPicks (here). I'm using the smallest needle, and so far so good — though I'm honestly not sure if I wouldn't be happier with my Brittany Cable Needles instead. I may switch to the Brittany when I do my next pattern repeat.

The other item is a Knitter's Abacus Bracelet. Like the poster there, I heartily endorse the ones made by Hide And Sheep; they're beautiful, put together very well, and shipped fast fast fast. :D (Though I found these on Etsy, I actually bought them through the actual storefront on hideandsheep.net; the Hide And Sheep website had the two colors I desperately wanted (Starry, Starry Night, grey and black, and Stardust and Denim, sodalite and dark blue), and why make them pay Etsy listing fees if I don't need to? :) I think I may have to order some stitch markers, too, and if I'm lucky, I'll be able to get ones that match the bracelets.

Anyway, if it isn't obvious from the picture what you do with an abacus bracelet, there are nine small beads (to represent the ones) and ten large ones (to represent the tens), and at the end of every row (or the beginning, as you prefer), you slip one of the small beads through the loop of four beads. After you reach nine small ones, you slip those back to the starting side and slip a large bead through.

So clever! So awesome! So much better than my katcha-katcha row counters — I just put one of these on my left wrist and I'm good to go. (I may end up wearing two when I start the part of the pattern where I'm juggling two kinds of cables. We'll see.)

Yarn used: Lily Sugar 'n' Cream. Needles: 4mm.

The three sheep pictured are the Sheeplinglings. Um… maybe I should have had Sheepling (their father) pose first! They are Precious Moments sheep. Precious Moments makes some weird-looking, but strangely adorable, sheep.

Lately I've been having an urge for complicated projects, probably because my daily 1.5 hours of guaranteed knitting time has been devoted to less complicated projects (things I can knit on the bus). At first, I thought I could satisfy this urge by picking up a languishing WIP:

Yarn used: Gossamer, Rose Garden, Knit Picks. Needles: 3.75mm.

The sheep modeling this scarf-in-progress is a Sleepy Sheep we got in New Zealand. She squeaks if you squeeze her. AWWW!

(Incidentally, if my mom or my mother-in-law are reading this, my nightstand totally looks like that all the time and I did not have to move any chocolate wrappers off it to take this picture.)

This is the Candle Flame scarf. And it turns out there's something to be said for putting a pattern away for a month or two several months close to a year, because you might start off working with a chart that looks like this:

and, when you pick it up again, discover that there is a NEW PRINTING of the chart that looks like this:

(This, btw, is a free pattern from Knit Picks — don't squint at the pictures, download the thing yourself! See how nice the new chart is?)

Seriously, that first printing was the worst chart I've ever worked from, bar none — I'm really glad they reprinted it.

After a couple of days of trying to work on this, though, I realized that what I really wanted was to cast on new lace. Okay. I tried three different patterns before settling on Anya:

Yarn used: Shadow, Campfire, Knit Picks. Needles: 3.75mm… I think.

The sheep in this picture is another of our New Zealand sheep. Look how cute! I don't think this sheep gets enough attention.

Naturally, after I cast on Anya, Interweave Press released The Top 5: The Best of Interweave Knits Readers' Choice Awards as a free download (until May 15th — if it is after 5/15/2008, you're out of luck, guys, so hurry!), and I was overcome with the urge to cast on a Cable-Down Raglan. Only in grey, because everything I knit (that I plan to wear) is grey. Okay, it's not, but I love grey.

Yarn used: Zitron Polo, Grey. Needles: 3.75mm.

This would be Ovistine again (I'm reasonably sure she's modeled on the blog before). I'm 14 rows into the first repeat on the center (and sleeves) cable, and so far so good. It is just possible that I didn't swatch as thoroughly as I should have, but if it's coming out oddly, I can rip back and restart. I have a ton of this yarn, so I'm glad I finally found something to do with it!

Other things on the needles now: Baby Surprise Jacket #2 (bus knitting), Obama socks (I keep not posting a picture of those — it's okay, they're boring navy socks, nothing to see here, move along), and a few hibernating projects (like the Powers of Two blanket). But I'm happy; I got my post in on time today. ^_^

So in addition to the This Is A Triumph wrap sweater, I have completed a baby surprise jacket that I'm calling the Hobbes Jacket:

Yarn used: Microspun leftovers! Black, white, and mango. Needles used: 4mm.

I hate sewing on buttons, but for this project I was willing. ^_^ (I have another one coming, too, for which I'll need to sew on another five buttons. Someday I will do frog enclosures instead.) Back in the '80s there used to be a device that would automagically attach buttons for you. I wonder if that still exists (and how it would work on yarncrafted projects).

The sheep posed near the Hobbes Jacket is Meredith Rodney McSheep, named for Rodney McKay of Stargate: Atlantis. I'm not sure he really likes being so near something so orange, but perhaps the fact that it's mango (really!) and not citrus will appease him. What do you think, Rodney?

There will be pictures, but I seriously forgot about posting today in the wake of finishing a work project yesterday and getting my epic flying mount in World of Warcraft. Oops! Thursday!

ETA:

Here's the This Is A Triumph wrap sweater!

Yarn used: Microspun, Royal Blue and Mango. Needle size: 4mm.

I was actually told by one person that those are Denver Bronco colors — so I guess this could be a Denver Bronco sweater as well as a Portal Sweater. Makes no difference to me! I'm happy it's finished. :)

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Yarn used: Lion Brand Microspun in Royal Blue and Mango. Needles: 4mm.

The Mango I bought doesn't quite match, and the color change is suspect:

But it's the best I can do, and it's good enough, and it's actually fairly hard to notice in person unless you're under some really awful florescent light.

I forgot to introduce the sheep on Tuesday, though I think you've seen these two before. These are the official traveling sheep — PicoÃœber and Reclining Sheep. They've been to England, New Zealand, Canada, Las Vegas, and Indiana. :) They're sized appropriately for carryon bags, and never complain about having the hotel rooms to themselves.

I have, at this point, done all the seaming (and let me tell you how proud I am of it — it's fantastic) — all that's left is an I-cord border for the back neck and little I-cord ties. I'm going to be putting the dual-orange side inside, so that it won't show when the baby's wearing it. Um, no, I still don't know what baby! Ah well. It's been fun to knit.

That said, bleh, stockinette! I won't be doing another baby project in stockinette anytime soon. I can see why Elizabeth Zimmermann favors garter stich so much — I think I'll probably do a Baby Surprise jacket in garter in the near future.

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Yarn used: Lion Brand Microspun in Royal Blue and Mango. Needles: 4mm.

In fact, there's a bit more than that, but I've now run out of orange yarn, and that means this project is stalled until I get more. It shouldn't be difficult. But then, of course, I'll be left with more scraps of orange to get rid of! Maybe I can put an orange collar and cuffs on another baby sweater or somesuch.

Short post today, because I have a Cold of Doom and I'm not really full of energy. Hopefully I'll be feeling better Thursday!

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease (worsted) in Black and Pines. Needles: 5mm.

As expected, I didn't have enough Pines to finish this project. Also as expected, I was able to use black to cover the shortfall. The black yarn is on the shoulders in back and front, stopping 13 stitches short of the edge of the garment (thus maintaining a Pines-colored shawl collar all the way up). I had no trouble grafting the garter-stitch at the top of the collar, thanks to all that practice with my Bog Jacket. :)

Dorset Horn approves of my colorwork! She's obviously a very discerning sheep. ^_^

After all this, I get to start Cherie Amour (and I'm very excited, because it's getting toward the time in the year where it'd be too warm to wear it). I just need to wind up some yarn and then swatch. :)

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease Sportweight in Wheat. Needles: 3.75mm.

Total yarn for this project: say 4 balls of Sportweight to be safe, which is maybe 1500 yards. Beautiful Sheep, I couldn't have done it without you!

Of course, this project is not without its flaws. For one thing, I did not realize that all those short rows were not just tapering the sleeves (and I have to say, they did a great job of that), but also turning the sweater into a V-neck. The original plan calls for a straight high collar, and if you look at what I did to disguise that, you'll see it right away:

As you can see, what I did was just to pick up stitches at the appropriate V-neck place. It came out looking pretty good. I think I should probably sew a couple lines of thread through the fake inner plackets and then cut them off — if I'm going to do more work on this thing, that is.

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Yeah, it's sort of mutated, and when I put it on, one side's longer than the other (and I have no idea how that's even possible, because it's the same number of rows exactly). But it's mine, and it's finished. I did it. :) And, hey, I think it fits quite well — it's the right length on body and sleeves, it buttons over the breasts, it has waist shaping. I can only go up from there.

And meanwhile, I have some more work on the Powers of Two blanket:

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease, worsted weight. Needle size: 4.25mm.

Pretty spiffy! The squares just above the big green square on the left mark the upper left-hand corner. I'll be expanding to the right to fill it out and define the upper edge. When it's wide enough, it'll be time to start it growing down.

It turns out that I have a TON of the "white" (actually natural), light brown, dark grey, and red yarns in my stash, so I'll be using those fast and furious as I go. I'm hoping I won't run into problems with having nothing but those colors by the end of the blanket.

Last but not least, I've dragged something out of the UFO (unfinished objects) pile:

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease, worsted weight, "Pines". Needle size: 5mm.

The adorable sheep modeling this vest is Dorset Horn. She (yes, she — in the Dorset Horn breed of sheep, both rams and ewes have large, impressive horns) comes all the way from New Zealand! One of my many sheep from the New Zealand flock. In New Zealand, the tourist shops are full of sheep. It is nothing short of a woolly paradise.

The vest looks like a whole lot of nothing right now, for which I can only apologize and say: It is a lot of nothing right now. It's simple garter up to the armpits, which is about one inch further than I've got it at the moment. Sorry! It'll look more interesting next time, especially if I run out of yarn and have to substitute in some black. Most importantly, this comes from the UFO pile. I have no idea how long it's been sitting around unknit, but it's no short amount of time. It definitely predates the beginning of the year. Not only will knitting this up net me a vest, it'll get my ratio up.

Current stats for the year:
15 projects started up new
22 completed/tossed/frogged projects
11 completed for the year to date (yay!)

WIPs:
7 have been on needles since before the beginning of the year
14 currently in progress/hibernating

And the vast majority of this year's projects have been from stashed yarn (almost a 5:1 ratio of stash:new), which is also making me pretty happy. (Of course, that doesn't count the yarn that came into the house for projects but hasn't been used yet… which bumps that ratio down some. But I'll take my victories where I can get 'em!)

* * *
Yarn used: Wool-Ease sportweight in Wheat. Needles: 3.75mm.

I've got one half done completely, except for edging and perhaps notions, and the other half is nearly there, too. Strangely enough, all those short rows are leading to a V-neck — which I don't mind, but it's a surprise, I'll say that!

I'm not sure what I'll do for fastening. I may do a zipper. Buttons are probably out, although I might be able to create buttonholes if I do an I-cord edging. The fit looks good so far, but I'm sure a second edition of this sweater would look even nicer. I'm pretty happy with the sleeve length and the waist shaping, though!

Meanwhile, the Powers of Two blanket is going along, as is the second project from Mindful Knitting. I've got a few more squares done on PoT, but nothing really worth taking pictures of. And as per the last time around on Mindful Knitting, I'm waiting until I have a finished project to post any pictures.

Tuesday! Will I have a finished sweater, or will weekend mean spending all my time with the adored SheepLad? I'm betting on the husband, but I think I'll get the knitting — if not the edging or the fastenings — done. :)

Instead of knitting sweaters, I have been knitting scarves. Let me point you at the following:

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Yarn used: For the Meditation Scarf (red/orange/yellow), Shepherd Multi in Flames by Lorna's Laces, needles 7mm. For the Triple Rib scarf (grey), Wool-Ease in Oxford Grey, needles 5mm.

The sheep modeling the Meditation scarf (on the left, red/orange/yellow) are a pair of wooden sheep with a wool outer coat. Are they doorstops? Footrests? Outdoor sheep? Honestly, I have no clue, but they've been around for years. For a while there, they were my circular needle holders, but that looked messy. And for a while, they lived in the bathtub upstairs, startling both me and SheepLad when we would open the shower curtain to find… SHEEP! (It was the middle bathroom; we don't shower there very often.) Now they live in the library, because we really cannot think of anywhere to put them, but neither do we want to release them into the wild. They have been part of our flock since we lived in Indiana. :)

I have been working on the Meditation scarf since January. I've decided to try meditative knitting, based primarily on the book Mindful Knitting by Tara Jon Manning. The first project is a garter stitch scarf, and the suggested yarn is variegated. I decided to splurge and buy myself some nice new yarn for the project, since all my variegated yarn is acrylic. When I saw the Shepherd yarn from Lorna's Laces (which, by the way, is superwash — not that I can really imagine machine washing this thing, but you could), I thought "ah ha! An excuse to try this yarn out!"

Well, it turns out the Shepherd yarn is gorgeous, glorious, beautiful, fantastic, and lovely to work with. I couldn't be happier about it. :) I took a ton of pictures (one per day's work — I did not successfully get to the meditation knitting every day or it would've been done far sooner), and have linked you to their album. Click on the image to see!

The sheep modeling the scarf on the right — the Triple Rib (grey) scarf — is named Ultra Soft Lamb. That's what F.A.O. Schwartz (in partnership, I can only gather, with Russ Berrie, for there is a smaller sheep that looks just like her made by Russ directly) named her, and that's what we call her. She is, in fact, ultra soft, and she's one of the few sheep who really isn't very anthropomorphized at all. She's got hooves, four legs… lamb shanks, so to speak. But don't worry! She is not on the menu. (Lamb is never on the menu around here. Would you eat kitten? How about puppy? This is how I feel about eating lamb.)

The Triple Rib scarf is based on a pattern from a stitch dictionary (k3 p3 on the right side, p1 k1 on the wrong side), and while I love the pattern to little bits, I'm just becoming less and less fond of Wool-Ease as time goes by. I know the sheep are giving it their best! I know they're contributing all the sheepy glory they can! But, alas, there's not much that can be done. It's still mostly acrylic, and I still don't care for the stuff!

But I care enough about it to try to use up the rest of it in another blanket project. Behold, the Powers of Two blanket:

Yarn used: So far, five different colors of Wool-Ease by Lion Brand. Needles: 4.25mm, subject to change without warning.

You may look at that sheep and think, "Oh, another sheep." But no! That's a special, glorious sheep. That's Pink Pads Sheep (ignore the tag, which reads "Muttons" — what an undignified name for such a wondrous sheep). Pink Pads has the distinction of being the sheep with the largest ego in the entire flock. In my flock, that's one hell of an achievement. All my sheep are awesome, and all of them know how great they are, but Pink Pads sort of takes it to a whole new level. When you hug her? She knows it's because she's the best sheep in all the world. When she sits upon the shelf, she tends to climb to the highest vantage point (on top of the other sheep, don't you know) and survey all the bedroom around her, thinking to herself And they got all this just to impress me! How excellent of them.

Pink Pads claims that she is the only sheep cool enough, fashionable enough, to model such an awesome project as the Powers of Two blanket, and thus I have acceded to her wishes and given her the modeling job.

The Powers of Two blanket is a mitered square project. It's a scrap blanket, all in all. My self-imposed restraint is that each square must have a number of rows/ridges equal to a power of two. So 2² (4), 2³ (8), 2⁴ (16), 2⁵ (32), and so on. (So far the largest squares have 32 ridges, and the smallest have 8. I will probably go as high as 64 or 128, and as low as 4.) The fact that I can work on this project away from home as well as at home is great — I can seam or work in squares as I progress. There will never be trouble finding a place to put them, because each square can fit perfectly in other squares. If all else fails, all I need to do is make tiny squares to fill in room. :) I look forward to seeing how this shapes up; I have a lot of Wool-Ease I can put into this blanket.

Yarn used… you know this already, right? Wool-Ease sportweight in Wheat, size 4mm needles.

Even Beautiful Sheep is having trouble making it look interesting. I've finally cast on the extra sleeve stitches, though (I did short rows first). Hopefully next week I'll have pictures of a sweater to show you.

To make up for that, here are two completed dishcloths that have been sitting in a box in my yarn closet for months.

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Yarn used: Sugar 'n' Cream solids, size 4.25mm needles.

Finally, finally, finally. Say hello to Little Ty Sheep, returning to model the dishcloths. Awww.

The yarn closet is looking better now! Well, actually, it's looking much the same (full of yarn). However, I have found the rest of the craft room, and I am delighted. The unfinished objects now have a place. The finished objects that may or may not find their way to Etsy have found a place. And I got rid of another couple of projects in the bargain — one frogged, several tossed. This delights me — and bumps my completed/frogged/tossed-to-new ratio all the way up to 1.6 for the year. Yay!

Here's a picture of all the Wool-Ease I have left. Some people stash Homespun and then try to get rid of it; for some it's Red Heart. For me, it's Wool-Ease:

Yarn exhibited: A shit-ton of Wool-Ease in every imaginable color. Most of it is Worsted, a little bit of it is Sport.

Exhibited along with the yarn is the cutest Kleenex box cover ever made. I could try to make something out of crochet or plastic canvas, but I couldn't beat that, and I don't think I can be bothered to try. That Kleenex box cover comes from New Zealand (you can't really see it, but there is a New Zealand logo on its front). Those are two of the sixteen to eighteen sheep that came back with us from New Zealand in 2005. :) Yes, I brought home a flock. (Also some souvenir yarn. Most of it is still in the stash. I almost don't want to knit with it! Some of it is gorgeous, though — hand spun, even — so someday I'm sure I will.)

What am I gonna do with all that Wool-Ease?, you may be wondering. I'm going to make practice sweaters. I would like to make sweaters that look like they belong on a human body, and this is where I'm gonna start. The Bog Jacket 2 is actually part of this project, being made out of (so far) two balls of Wool-Ease sportweight. (It will take about three by my current estimations… maybe a little more, maybe a little less.)

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease sportweight in Wheat. Needle size: 4mm.

I've reached the part where I put in the yarn that separates the front of the sweater from the sleeves, and I've been doing my short rows again. This time I've decided to just say "the heck with doing them at random". Instead of being random, they form a V pattern that goes in sort of a reverse-raglan shape from the center of the back towards the arms. When I go "up and over", I'll reverse the shaping on the other side. I hope it turns out okay; the whole idea is to get nicely-shaped sleeves, and I'm just at the point now where I've cast on (invisibly) for those extra sleeve stitches. Pleaseworkpleaseworkpleasework!

Speaking of working, look how hard Beautiful Sheep is working at her modeling job! Ignore the part where she's nibbling a small piece of grass out of the waste yarn in the short row detail picture. She's helping, really!

Yarn used: Sugar 'n' Cream cotton in purple. Hook used: I (5mm) by Susan Bates/Boyes).

I like loofas. I use a loofa daily. When I saw the crocheted, cotton bath puff, I thought it was kind of a neat idea. And it was indeed fun to crochet! It also used most of a ball of cotton yarn, which was handy — I have tons of that put away in various places. But in terms of usability, not so much. It's heavy, doesn't absorb water well, and doesn't lather much. I'll stick with washcloths. Well, really, I'll stick with my loofa, but sometimes I use washcloths when traveling.

The sheep loofa is decorative only. I wouldn't want to risk destroying a SHEEP! by showering with it too often! And no… that isn't the only sheep loofa in my collection.

Yarn used: Wool-Ease Sprinkles in Burgundy Heather. Needles used: 5mm.

Here's another of my "use up the Wool-Ease" projects. This one's a farrow-rib scarf, and I have to say, farrow-rib is becoming one of my favorite stitch patterns. This is probably kid-sized. The knitting part was finished ages ago; it took me about a month to bother sewing in the one remaining yarn end. Oops.

Not-A-Blanket-Either Lamb is happy to be featured on the blog; her twin brother showed up to model the March of Dimes Blanket, but she hadn't gotten a turn in the spotlight lately. :)

Yarn used: Wool-Ease Sportweight in Wheat. Needles used: 3.75mm.

The second Bog Jacket is working up a lot faster than I'd expected! Given that there's an extra 70 stitches on the needle due to the gauge change, I was expecting it to take forever to get to this point. Instead, I've nearly gotten it done up to the armpits, where I then get to do interesting stuff again. The garter's not so bad, though! It gives me something to do while I read, watch movies, and so on.

Beautiful Sheep is happy to be returning, and bleats that she will volunteer to keep modeling Bog Jackets for as long as I keep making them. I'm not sure if that's a vote of confidence or not. *eyes sheep suspiciously*

So I've decided to modify my stashbusting/WIP-completing goal for the year (seen here).

• Old goal: "work or throw out one in-progress project for every two new projects I start"
• New goal: Complete, frog, or throw out 1.5 projects for every 1 project I start.

1.5? Well, it's a ratio, and the point is merely to finish more than I start (rather than to finish only half as much as I start, as was the previous goal, or to finish as many as I start, which is only keeping even). So far, my ratio is 10:13 (or 0.8:1), which is not so great. But I did toss or frog four projects I was never going to complete over the weekend, which bumped up my stats and cleared out one of the secret caches in which I store my stash. Ideally, by the time we hit the midway point for the year, I will have cleared the yarn caches out of every room except the yarn room (which is where the yarn stash belongs), and the yarn room will be clean instead of having yarn piled on the futon.

Don't get me wrong; I love having a stash. But my stash contains a lot of yarn I don't love, and I'd like to be able to rotate out yarn I don't love in favor of yarn I do love. I'd also like it more organized. And, oh yeah, on Ravelry. But a smaller yarn footprint is one step towards all of that (or so I hope), and thus I am going to try to keep completing projects just a little faster than I start them.

The end of a bog jacket, as modeled by Beautiful Sheep.

Now, I know I should listen to Elizabeth Zimmermann when she says things like "12-13% of [k]". I know this! But I looked at my knitting and I looked at my arms and I thought, Oh, geez, 16 stitches won't be nearly enough to make full-length sleeves! So I cast on 40.

A rough estimate about how many stitches I am over the mark? 24. *facepalms*

Well, there was that. There was running out of yarn. All these, oh yes, I was prepared to deal with. But then… take a look at the picture.

Take a look at where the tan waste yarn is on the left, and at the beautiful grafting job I did on the right.

*&@$*&@$!!! I grafted the wrong *&*&*&%#% part! TWICE!!! (Because I had to rip out the first grafting due to doing it wrong.)

OMG, y'all. There are times it's worth struggling with a project to make it come out right, and times when it's not. When you've got sleeves that are about a foot too long, that's not a time to struggle the rest of the project into shape.

Now, I do want to make another Bog Jacket. I really, really do. The side shaping was fantastic, and the garter actually looks good draped against my body. Seriously, this has potential, it does.

But not this time. And this is why I decided to make my test sweater projects out of stash yarn — so I wouldn't feel bad when I threw it the hell away.

I'll be swatching and casting on again today, but this version of the bog jacket is toast.

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Yarn used: The now-discontinued Merino Light in maroon (#8 on the color card), Lion Brand Wool-Ease (worsted and sport-weight doubled) in Black. Needles used: US10.5 — 6.5mm.

The gist of the sweater is that (shaping aside) you're knitting a square, and where the tan waste yarn is, I'll separate sleeves from body and later weave things together. (I'll take more pictures of the process when I get there.) I did discover that I'm running out of maroon yarn faster than the project is reaching completion, so I've dug some black Wool-Ease out of the stash and started using that as a stripe on the top. Hopefully it'll look good… and I won't run out of that before I'm done. I suppose I could dig out ivory Wool-Ease at that point, but I do hope it won't come to that.

I'm not really a big fan of knitting with Wool-Ease (though I don't mind crocheting with it) due to the high acrylic content. It just hurts my hands to work with it, since there's no give. However, this should flush a bit more of it out of my stash!

Smile for the camera, girls!

Yarn used: Lion Brand Microspun in Lily White, Royal Blue, and (now discontinued) Silver Grey. Hook used: G (4.25mm).

The pattern (as noted last time) is from Lion Brand (registration required), but now that you can see the finished elekk, you can see all my modifications. It's the legs, the tusks, the helmet, saddle, and banners that make her an elekk, and I left off a lot of the detail. Still — very cute, no?

 Also in the works: a new scarf (same as the old scarf):

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Yarn used: SWS [Soy Wool] from Patons. Needle size: Supposedly 4mm, from Boyes, but it is a LIE. They're closer to 4.25mm.

Last time I posed ÃœnterSchëpenfloppen with the scarf; now I'm posing the scarf with FloppenCousin, a close (but larger) relative. The pattern is the same (Farrow Rib), and the colorway is the same (Natural Earth). This scarf is being done by request, and unless someone else I really love wants something made out of this fabric, that's it for me — it splits even more than Microspun, which is saying something! Still, it's very soft and looks really nice.

Yarn used: The now-discontinued Merino Light in maroon (#8 on the color card). Needles used: US10.5 — 6.5mm.

Beautiful Sheep bleats hello!  Here's our check-in to see how I'm doing on the Bog Jacket. Answer: Quite well; I'm nearly up to the bit where I split off the arms and add some more stitches to the arms. It stopped being mindless garter when I had to do waist shaping (waist shaping is my friend, since I have a quite large bustline and quite small waist), and I'm sort of sorry for that, as I was enjoying having something I didn't have to look at at all. But it seems to be working out nicely, and the yarn is much, much nicer-looking on 6.5mm needles than it was on 4.5mm needles.

Thursday I hope to have a finished SWS plus a bit of progress on that Bog Jacket.  Maybe something exciting like the arm-dividing bit?  We'll see.

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Yarn used: Microspun by Lion Brand, Silver Grey. Needles: 4.5mm.

Now I just have to figure out how to get it where it needs to go. Mail? In-person delivery?

I have a little under two balls (or a little over a ball and a half) of Microspun left. I'm thinking little hats.

Yarn used: Lion Brand Wool in Blue and Orange. Needles: 4mm.

This sheep hails from the mall. She comes from a baby store, and is actually the third of her family to join the flock. There's another one who looks just like her but happens to be twice her size, and there's the original, who has been in the flock just over a year, and is holiday-themed. She has earmuffs (though, strangely, they are not on her ears) and a nice red-and-white scarf. I may need to knit scarves for the other sheep sometime soon.

The pattern… well, it's being improvised, and it's double knitting, which is new to me. I'm not sure how it's going, but at least I haven't ripped it out yet.

Yarn used: Essential in Shale Multi, KnitPicks. Needles: 2.5mm.

I cannot for the life of me remember where this sheep came from, which makes me think it was probably a present from my parents. :) I just keep looking at this picture and going "AWWWW!" So. Cute.

I wish I had even the faintest clue what I was doing with the socks. So far I got nothin'. I'm sure I'll figure it out once I'm done with the ribbing section.

Yarn used: Lion Brand Microspun in Silver Grey. Needles: 4.5mm.

This sheep plays music, much like Twinkle Sheep, but I can't remember what song. I know it's not "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." It might be "Mary Had A Little Lamb." (A not-very-surprising number of musical sheep play that one.

So this project has a bit more story than most. A friend of mine recently had a baby — two months early! While in the midst of reading about her adventures as the brand-new mom of a preemie, I got a knitting newsletter whose charity of the month happens to be a knitting program for premature babies. I'm not knitting for that specific charity — it's in Iowa and I was hoping for something more local — but I did a bit of research and found that the local chapter of the March of Dimes collects blankets and other knitted items for preemies, and that Microspun is one of the preferred fibers, as it's very soft and machine-washable.

I have issues with acrylic yarn. It hurts my hands to work with it, and I'm not fond of it. However, like most knitters, I cut my teeth on it, and so I still have some left in my stash here and there. I happen to have just enough of this to make a nice blanket (and, honestly, might have enough left over to make some tiny preemie caps), and I'm very happy to be able to get it out of my stash. (At some point, I may break down and collect all my leftover acrylic and take it to Goodwill, where knitters who are looking for a bargain and don't mind acrylic will hopefully find it and take it home.)

At any rate, the pattern is a very simple k10/p10 (repeat for a total of 160 stitches), 14 rows per square. I eyeballed the height, but that should be about right — they may be just a little long. I plan to do a couple of rows of single crochet around the edge when I'm done with the knitting; it curls just a teeny tiny bit, since the squares are stockinette, and that should even it out some.

Musical Sheep is in fact sitting on a crocheted project of mine. I can take a picture if anyone's interested in an ancient crocheted blanket. It is really very cool-looking. :)

There are still three projects hiding around my house that I haven't gotten onto the blog, so if I don't make significant progress on my current WIPs by Tuesday, that's what you'll be seeing. >_> With any luck, I'll finish up the blanket, at least, and maybe pick up another one of my languishing WIPs.

I think I sent out only one of my pre-made scarves. Oh well.

So here are the scarves I finished in the last month or so:

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Yarn used, from first to last: Patons Soy Wool in "Natural Earth", 3 skeins (primarily because I wanted to match colors seamlessly), size 4mm needles.  Schaefer Yarns' "Little Lola" in Georgia O'Keefe, 1 skein, size 4mm needles.  Lion Brand Wool-Ease Sprinkes, Green Heather, 5mm needles.  Cascade 220 Quattro, 2 skeins (with lots of leftovers), size 4mm needles.  Cascade 220 Superwash, 1 skein, 5mm needles.  Patons Classic Merino in Forest, 1 skein, 4mm needles.

Lest you think these are all the scarves I'm working on, I also have one "traveling" knitting project on needles and one garter stitch scarf I'm doing as a meditation/knitting project.  Oh, and I finished another scarf, whose picture has not made it into this colleection.

The stitch patterns: Farrow rib, 2×2 rib, garter, 2×2 rib with pompoms, broken rib, 2×2 rib. The traveling project is triple rib.

The sheep who are being so kind as to model my projects are, from first to last: ÜnterSchëpenfloppen, a Steiff sheep from Las Vegas; Twinkle Sheep, who has a wind-up music box in her back; Agnes, from the Auckland International Airport; Sweetest Softest Lambie, from Bath and Body Works in the Redmond Town Center; Lavender Sheep, an aromatherapy sheep with a warmable pouch in her tummy, from the Discovery Channel Store in Bellevue, WA (before it closed); and Woolo, who hails from somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. All of these are cherished parts of my sheep collection. :)

Scarves are awesome for travel knitting. A pair of needles, a ball of yarn, and I'm off to the races. I can crank out one in an afternoon (the finished one not shown here is one of those), and they often don't require a lot of attention. A 2×2 rib scarf is a perfect thing to take to the movies; the last of those scarves was knit almost entirely during "I Am Legend". (No, I don't need light to knit by for a project like that.)

I travel-knit when I'm out to eat, when I'm at the movies, when I'm over at a friend's house, when I'm on a long car ride, on the bus, or any other time I know I'm going to need to fill more than a few minutes. The only trouble with using scarves for this is that it tends to leave me with a lot of new projects, which sort of goes against my New Year's goal. Still, I've been keeping that goal, having finished four projects, thrown out one WIP I was never going to finish, and started only… counting the travel knitting, right?… five. I'm at parity!

Giving myself permission to toss WIPs I'll never finish is really handy. I'm hoping to do more of that in the upcoming weeks. Who knows — it might clear out enough of my stash closet to get the yarn currently living on the craft room sofa into the closet itself. Maybe. >_> <_<

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Knitting bag for me!

Look at all the sheep. :) The sheep next to the bag is Ovistine, who is named for one of my most-often-played WoW characters. Then there are the sheep on the bags, and finally there's the sheep in the bag — a measuring tape! Pull her tail and you get a measuring tape; squeeze her tummy and it retracts. Somehow I have only two of these sheep, but they are of course my favorite measuring tapes.

Here's the hedgehog I knitted, in various stages of completion:

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Yarn used: Cascade 220 for the dark brown, Wool of the Andes in Chestnut for the paws, and Lion Brand Fun Fur for the "spines".

As you can see, felting shrinks a project a good deal (and here we have a good argument for using the same sheep throughout the photography process!). The pen sheep… I have no idea where she came from, but it's not the only pen/sheep combination I have. This one lives in the study, in a pencil cup, near other desk sheep. :)

Next up: Holiday (and later) scarves!

"Hoosier Fan Scarf", as modeled by Not-A-Blanket Sheep. One ball of Cranberry and Fisherman Wool-Ease, this was part of the ongoing Get That Wool-Ease Out Of My Stash And Make Christmas Presents Early For A Change project. The scarf is about 6' long and was made on 10mm needles (from Lantern Moon, which are beautiful and nice but damn, they got heavy in the long run).

Not-A-Blanket Sheep is one I picked up in my local yarn store, Ben Franklin. I was in the checkout line when someone behind me pointed at him and said "You're not going to cut him up and make him into a blanket, are you?", sounding very defensive of the sheep. Horrified, I clutched the sheep to me! "No!" She seemed satisfied.

2.
Yarn used: Wool-Ease, 80% acrylic/20% wool.

"Stripey Hat", as modeled by Godiva Sheep. 5mm needles. Leftover bits of Dk. Rose Heather and Rose Heather Wool-Ease, part of the abovementioned project. Coordinates with a scarf I finished recently.

Godiva Sheep was picked up at a Barnes & Noble in the U-District after one Easter. It originally came with a small package of chocolate which I did not eat, because at the time I was clearly insane.

3.
Yarn used: Wool-Ease, 80% acrylic/20% wool.

"Blue And Navy Ragg Scarf", as modeled by Deathbleat. The scarf is simple, 2×2 rib on 5mm needles.

You may be wondering how such a cute sheep got the name "Deathbleat". Deathbleat was (is, if I ever return to it) my first-person shooter name. This was the sheep who sat on my lap while I played such games — she was new and cute and cuddly and who doesn't like to have a sheep in their lap while they flak their friends to death? (Don't answer that. I know, I know…) Anyway, her name according to the manufacturer is not very dignified*, so I rechristened her Deathbleat. She continues to keep me company when I play violent video games.

4.
Yarn used: Lily Sugar'n Cream, standard kitchen cotton.

"Random Dishcloths", as modeled by Not-Blankets-Either Lambs. This is pretty self-explanatory. The lambs were found at the same Ben Franklin, only this time I picked up both the one with pink hooves and the one with blue hooves.

5.
Yarn used: Lily Sugar'n Cream, standard kitchen cotton.

"Finished Half-Pique Washcloth", as modeled by Gund Sheep With Rattle. I'm still not that thrilled with this washcloth, but I will pawn it off on someone for Christmas. The sheep is one of the ones that tends to live on or around my desk, and he has a rattle in his tummy, making him very difficult to pose!

* "Jiggles".