Patchwork Mouse

Finished the scarf I was making. It's gorgeous yarn, very soft and plushy--really faux fur around a thread-like core. (Sort of like eyelash yarn, except the fuzz is shorter and goes all the way around.) Two colors, a heathery gray/white/black and a vanilla-ish white. It's very hard to work with, though; it doesn't have the give that the other yarns have, and the fur has a lot of friction. If I'd known how tough it was going to be to knit, I never would have bought it. But it is very pretty. And very, very soft.

The scarf has three vertical stripes--wider strips of the gray flanking a thin strip of the white. The original plan was to have each stripe the same width, but the stitches turned out much wider than anticipated; the gauge is smaller (11 instead of 13) and so are the needles, so I thought it would be narrower. Wrong. I should have swatched it, I suppose. Intarsia wasn't working for me (partly because of the yarn, I think) so I cheated: I made long thin strips of each color, then wove them together with more of the white yarn. It works.

It's a Boxing Day present.

Finished scarf #3 on Friday, finished the purple space blouse this afternoon. Started another scarf, too; the soft, fuzzy yarn is hard to work with because the fuzz gives it too much friction. But I persevere.

I finished the scarf I've been knitting. It went pretty fast. Self-patterning yarn in greens and browns. It's a bit short, but I didn't want to buy a third skein of yarn for six more inches. It's wider than it needs to be, too; the next one will be a bit narrower (which will mean it can be longer for the same yarn).

It came out well, although something odd happened where I switched skeins halfway. It gets distinctly narrower right there, although I did *not* drop any stitches.