Photographic evidence

margieinmaryland asked if I could post pictures of the finished 'Muppet roadkill' blanket. Sure can! Shortly after my last blog post, I sat down to weave in all the ends, and it is done like dinnah:

But wait, there's more!

We have my husband's Christmas socks: (now a little more advanced than pictured here, I'm just casting off the top at this point)

We have my dad's Christmas hat, which I bought the yarn for on Wednesday, started on Thursday, and finished the knitting of today:

top




bottom




side

I know it looks weird. Trust me, I've made it before, it all comes together at the end. Yarn is Cascade 220, and I was terrified that I was going to run out of the one skein that I bought. The pattern is Morgan by Anne Kuo Lukito, and I made it in the large size because my mom told me my dad has a large head. The pattern suggests two different yarns, one of which comes in 160-yard skeins, and the other of which comes in 240-yard skeins. Two skeins of the first yarn will do for either the medium or large size, but for the second yarn, the medium size needs one skein and the large size needs two skeins. Which means that somewhere between 160 and 240 yards are needed for the medium size, and somewhere between 240 and 320 yards are needed for the large size. Now, as I said, I'd made this before, and that time, it used up about 205 yards in the medium size. Reading through the instructions, the large doesn't take that many more stitches than the medium, so I was hoping against hope that the Cascade's 220 yards would be enough. But I was nervous. And I was especially nervous when I wound this particular skein through my yarn meter and it came out to only about 205 yards.

But, as you can see, I made it. With just 2.5g leftover! WHEW.

I did make one modification to the pattern this time: I did a three-needle bind-off to join the two halves of the peak together instead of the recommended grafting. I didn't want to cut the yarn anywhere in case I didn't have enough and had to rip back to do some yarn-saving techniques; and also, I figured the peak insert would be less likely to slice through a three-needle bind-off over time than through a graft.

I also shot the current progress of my mom's stretchy cotton Christmas socks:

In fact, the only things I've been working on that I don't have shots of for you are the design I'm working on (magazines don't want to publish already-seen designs), which you'll have to trust me about when I say it's coming along really nicely; and the Elizabeth of York vest (because I am actively refusing to have anything to do with it until I work up the fortitude to rip back half of the front border to correct my error - which, you're absolutely right Carrie K, is better than ripping back the whole thing).