Festival of Finishing

There's been a Festival of Finishing round here. The Scaruffle is off the needles: I didn't really block it, just gave it a soak and then squeezed it in a towel and laid it to dry naturally, no pinning. The photo above shows how much yarn was left over from one ball of Kidsilk Haze - not enough for another Scaruffle, but still quite a lot. From being unfeasibly frothy, it settled down and now looks like something you might wear seriously and not as part of a fancy dress costume. It's very pretty. It looks terrible in the last photograph; I'll try to take a better one tomorrow. I didn't think to measure it before soaking but the neck edge is a lot longer. I'll definitely do this again. It would look lovely in Kidsilk Spray, or with some beads scattered here and there, and I'm wondering whether it would work in stocking stitch: the Kidsilk is so light, I don't think the curling would be a huge problem and anyway I could do a few stitches of garter stitch at each edge. In stocking stitch, it could be striped, a sort of mini Earth Stripe Wrap. Very mini.

The Mavis scarf is finished and is blocking. I didn't pin it very rigorously, just enough to make the points nice and pointy. Seeing it in bright daylight today, I realized that the colour that I thought was cream is actually a pale pink, and not really all that pale. The colours around it must have sucked the pink out of it.

While I was doing the Mavis scarf, I decided that I would revisit the neckline of the sweater after all, just undo the cast off and knit another couple of rows with a few decreases, but when I went back to it tonight I could not for the life of me find where I'd finished and woven in the last end. I seem to have managed a perfect bit of finishing. I'll have a look at it in the sunshine tomorrow and see if that helps.

And I think the VLT scarf is finished. I haven't actually cast off yet, because I may as well continue with it until there's space to block it, but it won't be getting much longer. I don't think there'll be any sort of border on it after all. I even thought about putting a fringe on it in the crocus blue, but I feel that would limit it a bit. I may change my mind (surely not?) once it's blocked, but I don't think so. I can see quite a lot of mistakes in it but I never built up any confidence about taking it back, so I carried on regardless. I suppose it's because there aren't any plain rows in it, there's never any basis of sanity that you can return to.

Strangers on a Train was on yesterday afternoon. I watched the beginning and wondered when Margaret Rutherford was going to show up, and then remembered that was The Lady Vanishes, and anyway it was Dame May Whitty, not Margaret Rutherford. I eventually realized that I've never actually seen Strangers on a Train before, although I knew what the plot was and I've seen clips, so I watched it all. I even put my needles down for the last ten minutes; I was quite transfixed.

The Dale Damask pattern went for just over £11 ($22.55) but I don't feel any pangs of regret. Rather more amazingly, Solveig Hisdal's Poetry in Stitches was on eBay last week, and went for nearly $200. I have a copy of that already.

I was successful in my bid for the All Seasons Cotton in Organic yesterday although I almost paid full price for it, so I will start an ASC sweater this week, in either the Organic or the Iceberg. I'm sort of tempted to do something with a bit of gansey patterning on it, since ASC has lovely stitch definition and there's one in No Sheep For You which I could do, or there's Chrissy from Rowan Book 31, seen on the left. There's no surprises or anything to show off here, but I do like a classic, and sometimes they're the hardest patterns to find. Or I could be the last person in the western world to knit Rogue, although I think that I would rather do that in a darker shade, maybe the dark blue ASC that is currently in the wardrobe. Or the grey. Cheerful, eh?