Holy crap, I finished stuff!

Well, the knitting of said stuff, at least…but not the finishing. Since my last post, I’ve completed two projects, both of which have been on the needles a ridiculously long time. The first of these was the scarf I’ve been knitting for my dear friend Wyl (who blogs over at Carriage Return; the first mention of the scarf here on my blog is here). He’s moved back to the chilly midwest from sunny California, and I wanted to get his scarf done as soon as possible so that he had something nice and warm to wrap around his neck. The scarf has been on the needles for over two years, I think, and was actually lost for awhile, but none of that matters, because it’s done! Here’s a picture of the finished scarf:

And here it is all folded up nicely:

Now the only thing left to do is to give it a good bath before I send it off to meet Wyl. The only problem being that I can’t find my Eucalan. Anywhere. My husband and I have turned the apartment upside down trying to find the stuff, and we can’t. In the worst-case, I’ll just have to buy a new bottle (since I have several other wooly things that need washed, and I can’t wait forever!), but it’s so annoying because I know we moved it here with us. Oh well. One upside to our massive search was that another thing that had gone missing in the move was found…my Sundara Sock yarn! Here’s the glorious green stuff that has been missing for several months:

I’m thinking of knitting the Embossed Leaves Socks with this yarn, though I’m slightly in doubt about whether there’s a little too much variegation for that. I guess I’ll just have to try it and see. Speaking of trying and seeing, I cast on for yet another sock I’ve been dying to knit the other day…Pomatomus, from Knitty. I got through ten rows of the chart before giving up, but not because of the difficulty. No, in fact, I found the pattern to be quite intuitive, and I love how the sock feels, knitted up. But the yarn I was using (STR Lightweight in Lemongrass) was pooling in a very, very ugly way. See?

That’s the first side. But now look at the second side:

See how one side is yellow and the other is green? Yeah. Not what I was going for, at all. So, as much as I enjoy the pattern and love the feel of the sock in this yarn, it’s going to be ripped. I would love to knit it in a solid-color of STR Lightweight…maybe I will, one of these days. But for now, I am not going to allow myself to look at getting that yarn, especially since (as I mentioned in my last post) I broke my stash-bust on a (very cheap) sweater’s worth of Araucania Nature Wool. Which arrived in the mail yesterday. Aren’t the greens just gorgeous?

I love it. The slight variegation is so lovely. I already know exactly what I’m going to knit with it…this, but without the hood (I plan to make it sort of a turtleneck), and closer-fitting. So basically, I’m just going to take the idea of cables running down all of the places where they do in that sweater, and design a different sweater to put them on. But I’m excited about this, because I really want a nice cardigan. I love pullover sweaters, but cardigans are really practical and handy.

Speaking of pullover sweaters, though (goodness, this is a long post…sorry, y’all!), I finished one other thing. Last night I decided that no matter what, I was finishing the sleeves of Rogue…it took me 3 hours, but I did. So here they are, in all their crumpled up glory:

I added 10 rows to them to add almost 2 inches of length, since I have ridiculously long arms for my height. Now I just need to find that stupid Eucalan so that I can give all of the Rogue parts a good bath and block them before I attempt to seam them. I’m rather terrified of the finishing work, because I am not good with the sewing. But I will do my best. I’ll leave y’all with a photo of the complete Rogue, in its unblocked, unconstructed state:

I can’t wait until I can wear it!  This one’s been on the needles for almost a year, now!