UFO Friday, with lots of UFOs...

1. Selected Craft Books, 30% off at Borders & Borders.com

2. I am completely beside myself to learn that Coni (aka Spinster Stitcher) has 48 projects going right now. It makes my 54 53 a wee bit more bearable, to know that there's at least one other person (who blogs, even!) out there with a "starting problem" that isn't connected to a "finishing solution." Be that as it may, I have been working on Getting Things Closer to Finished. This involved frogging the Socktoberfest Socks (I must stew on exactly how to do the pumpkins; I *almost* had it, then I didn't, and I like knitting short-row toes, so re-starting won't be a problem.)

3. Then it involved starting a project small enough to carry around with my injury - ie, under a pound. It's a lovely little Michael Powell bookmark, one of a set of four (and I have to track that fourth one down!) called "Misty Morning". While there are other designers I like as much, whose finished product is just lovely and TOTALLY worth the work, I get the absolute most enjoyment out of Powell's pieces. They tend to be blocks and splashes of color, thus:


And then, suddenly, add lines and something completely different emerges. I just love this stuff!



4. At home, I have two projects active right now. The first is the Angel of Hope cross stitch for my father-in-law. It's done with EternaSilk (which I am NEVER using again - it's lovely, but really, really shreddy), two strands over one on 32ct linen. Yes, over ONE. THIRTY-TWO count. That, my friends, means the stitches are so tiny that for bits of this piece, I can't wear my glasses, since I can't focus small enough with them on. (This also means that I've got the piece about four inches from my nose, and my husband can't watch me stitch, since he's worried I'm going to poke myself in the eyeball. I don't get that; I can see the needle just fine, it's right there!) Anyway, here's the two colors that aren't white done on her left wing:



It's blurry because it's close range with my wee cameraphone
Sadly, I completely mucked up the counting on her right wing, so I'm going to have to very carefully snip out all those miniscule stitches and start again. Luckily, it's not all *that* many stitches, only about 100 or so. I've got one piece - Autumn Queen, that I'm doing six strands over one on 10ct fabric, where I've got about 2000 stitches to take out... THAT takes a while. At this point, about four years.

5. Finally, I'm working again on my Dragon Illusion Blanket. You know, one of those lovely things where one "row" is actually a knit row, a knit & purl row following a pattern, another knit row, and then a knit & purl row that's a mirror image of the last knit & purl row - yep, that's four rows to get one. And yes, I said BLANKET. This is the first non-test-swatch bit of Illusion Knitting I've done, it's an original pattern, and it's a BLANKET. As in "cast on 245 stitches on size 9 needles in worsted-weight yarn; you will need about 2.5 POUNDS of yarn in each of two colors." It's going to be a lovely blanket, and I'm about 1/3 of the way into it, and I can actually see the dragon's head and forepaw and tail now, and it's really, really cool... but there's a LOT of knitting involved. Luckily, every other row is "knit across", which means I don't have to be concentrating *all* the time. This is a photo of the ORIGINAL blanket I started years and years ago, and frogged to restart earlier THIS year, but I'm up to about the same point I was when I frogged it, maybe a little bit past, and coming in from the front of the dragon, not the back. Same yarn, though, and same basic mass.


So, that's this week's UFO report!