Isn't that pretty? Here's a detail:
Yeah, so close-up, those are only diamond-ish, not diamonds. Who cares?
And then I thought, Man! I am getting really tired of the Bird's Nest Shawl. I want it done. So I finished it:
As you can see, if you're into noticing that sort of thing, the Bird's Nest Shawl has fallen victim to Yarn Bandit's hair. I know it was him because he likes to sit on my lap when I knit and this was a large item that kept brushing against him. The washing and blocking helped a lot, but it's still hairy. That's OK. I tried it out this morning, and it works.
And then I thought, Crikey! Champions League resumes next week! I better finish the Viola scarf so I can wear it during their match with Bayern Munich and impart good karma! So I wove in umpteen hundred ends and finished it:
That really is a nice shade of violetty/purple, just like the Viola kits, although it photographs blue. And it also features the white and gold of their logo, and the red of their third kits, which they wore this weekend when they got clobbered by Samp. I am concerned that the Viola scarf might be broken. Either that or it's a bad karma scarf that makes teams lose. Or maybe it's like the Bianconeri Scarf of Drunken Champions League Woe, which works sometimes, and other times not so much.
And then I thought, well, my oldest remaining project is the November sock club socks. I hates it and I wants it to go away, and I'm a bit compulsive, so the way to make disagreeable knitting go away is to finish it:
The pattern is nice, but a little fussy. The problem here is the yarn. The dyer over at Blue Moon likes the effect when you take a multi-colored yarn and overlay the whole thing with black. It's a nice idea, I suppose, but in practice, it creates a slightly sticky feeling yarn that turns your hands purple because the black dye rubs off. I've had purple fingers for a week. I hate that. I want my hands to be clean! I may grow to like these socks once they've been washed a half-dozen times and I find out what color they really are.
And that's it for the sock club. I decided not to renew this year. Which is not to say that I am no longer knitting socks, cos I am. Here is one that happened to be handy when I decided to take photos:
It's brown, and the dye stays in the yarn. However, I dropped a stitch in the middle of a cable, so I've had to rip them back and inch or so. Bummer. Now I have to carefully thread the needles through the stitches again, get them all lined up and purty, figure out where the row begins (shoulda thought of that before I ripped it off the needles, huh?), and THEN figure out which row of the pattern I'm on. Shudder.
