Bounty

There's nothing quite like the arrival of some stash enhancement to really test your resolve to keep plugging away at the Christmas knitting. Yesterday marked the arrival of my latest Knit Picks order. I got twelve balls of "Capretta", an 80% merino/10% cashmere/10% nylon fingering weight yarn, in the "admiral" colourway:

Which I will be using to make the (freakin' incredible) Lestrange Cloak, from The Unofficial Harry Potter Knits magazine; a design I have deeply coveted ever since I saw it, but never thought I could afford to make because it uses a lot of yarn. However, thanks to a lovely sale, I was able to pick all that up for under $50 (before shipping and taxes, of course, but still).

I also took advantage of the sale to get thirteen balls of "Wool of the Andes", a worsted weight wool yarn which I will be using for my husband's Christmas gift next year - I'll be making him Durrow. You may remember that I already started making him that sweater out of the same yarn in a very vibrant purplish-blue as his intended Christmas present last year, but finally accepted that it was a colour he would never actually want to wear. Hence my purchase of this, which is the "blackberry" colourway, a very dark eggplanty kind of purple:

(I know it looks navy in this shot, but it really is purple. And as much as I wish it was more obviously purple, I have to admit that it is probably the only purple I could convince my husband to wear. He's anti-purple for his own wardrobe, for some reason.)

At any rate, all this is extremely tempting, as I'm sure you can imagine...but I must be strong. I calculated two days ago that I need to get 36 rounds done per day on my brother's scarf to get it done in time (and yes, I am factoring in the soaking, blocking and drying), and dammit, I'm going to do it no matter how seductively or often the new yarn calls out to me.

However, on the first day of this resolution, I blew past my 36-round minimum by about 11 rounds, and yesterday I blew past it by about 6 rounds, so I felt perfectly justified in casting on for my Lestrange Cloak last night:

I know, it's not much to look at, but it's going to get better! I've even worked on it a bit today because I'm at home sick and have been resting and knitting a lot - after blowing by my 36-round daily minimum by 5 rounds, I did some more work on the cloak. Tee hee.

The scarf, therefore, is coming along quite decently although it is an incredible slog:

At least now I'm over half done.

And now, off to steam my sinuses...