Normal? Me? Who?

NEW - Snowdrop cloth for DH's aunt

It's my guess that normal people use the weekend to catch up on things. For me, however, the weekend is apparently the ideal time to increase my workload. Yes, it's another new project. We recently received an invitation to DH's aunt's wedding (after years and years of living together, her guy finally popped the question this past Christmas). The invitation reads "No presents - just your presence!" Yeah, okay, whatever. :) You can't be my husband's coolest aunt, and put something like that on a wedding invitation and expect me not to knit something, can you? No way. I completely get why they don't want people to worry about getting them gifts - they're past middle age and apparently quite nicely off. They have everything they need. So actually buying them something is kind of pointless. But my reasoning is, surely they would enjoy something beautiful and handmade with love to celebrate this special occasion? Thus I started on Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's Snowdrop Shawl pattern. The wrinkle (you knew there had to be one) is that I am not making a triangular shawl. I want to make a square. I figure this could be put to lots of purposes, whatever floats their boat - piano seat cover, tablecloth for an end table or nightstand, really big centrepiece doily for a dining room table, whatever. So when I finish the triangle, I'm then going to do the whole pattern over again in reverse, decreasing back down to a point. I haven't worked out the best place to put the decreases yet, but I've got plenty of time to mull it over. The yarn is a fine 2-ply, 63% silk noil and 37% cotton, 6000ypp. Cream colour with some dark grey slubs here and there. Here's where I am so far:

This is my first time doing lace, but I don't think it looks too bad. Besides, I understand that lace knitting looks much better after blocking. I certainly hope very strongly that this is true!

NEW - Sweater with patterned arms

On Friday, one of my co-workers wore a fantastic sweater to work. At least, I thought it was great. Solid colour body, with maybe a little bit of subtle texture patterning (can't remember that part too well). But the sleeves had multi-colour patterning on them - many different patterns, too, going down the sleeve in stripes. There was also fringe at the cuffs and hem. It looked great! I don't have a pattern, I don't have colours in mind, I'm not even 100% sure whether such a sweater would even end up in my possession (although that would be excellent). I only know that at some point in the future, I would like to make one.

Cape Cod sweater for MIL

Took this to work with me today. Didn't get a whole lot done on the morning commute, but I haven't given up hope of meeting my 1-centimetre quota for the day.

Self-designed sweater for baby MacDonald

The hell continued. I ripped it back again, and cast on precisely 170 stitches. Then I joined it in the round, making ABSOTIVELY POSILUTELY TRIPLE SURE that I hadn't twisted it. As I worked through row 1, I kept checking and double-checking that there was no twist, and it kept coming up good every time. Excellent! Until...at the end of row 1 I realised I'd made a pattern mistake somewhere along the row. I looked back, and sure enough, it was near the beginning. "Screw it," thought I, "I'll just keep going on row 2, and fix the incorrect stitches of row 1 before knitting the row 2 stitches as I come to them." Yeah. About ten fixed-stitches into this dumbass idea, I said "Screw it" again and tinked the first row back to my original error. Sigh. This project is doomed, I tell you, doomed. The nice news is that after that, the project started to take off. I'm now on about row 6 of the ribbing. No more mistakes so far. Pray for me.

A Very Harlot Poncho for moi

More got done this weekend. But visually it doesn't look much different from the last time I took a photo, so I won't bore you with another one.