Actual knitting content!

My commute knitting progress got seriously derailed when I discovered that I could quite happily watch old episodes of Stargate on my laptop while riding to and from work. Well, in the last week I have run out of things to watch and keep forgetting to transfer new files over when I am at M's. So I'm back to knitting!

This week I made a very simple tunnel lace scarf out of some old stash yarn, and started on my lacy alpaca sweater (from the handspun stash). Yay for using up the stash! Moving my yarn and fiber stash to Virginia in it's current state is just a ridiculous proposition, so I am trying very hard to resist the urge to start projects that require new purchases. However, I have not a single scrap of yarn suitable for this project. Knitting wool penguins is about as geeky as it gets, but I think M will like one, Linux geek that he is. Or maybe a pair of them, with little outfits! He's going out of town (well, off the continent really) for 10 whole days, so hopefully by the time he gets back he'll have at least one cute little penguin in a dashing outfit waiting for him.

It's no worse that knitting an army of felted mice really...

I'm trying to decide what to make out of some really lovely black alpaca and white silk handspun that I did a long time ago. It's kind of lace weight, maybe closer to fingering, and the white silk makes the whole thing shimmer like moonlight. Clearly, this needs to be something elegant, but what? I was thinking some sort of shawl or wrap, I'm just having a terrible time finding a pattern like, or even settling on a shape. Everything I've found so far seems either too modern/trendy for my taste, or too old fashioned for the yarn. Gah. Hopefully I will come up with something soon. Some sort of shrug thing might work...

This is pretty much the one major drawback to using handspun yarns. Once I've spent what feels like an eternity spinning something (especially if it's fine or really wonderful fiber), I am terrified to make anything out of it that I might one day get sick of or makes me feel like I wasted the yarn on a less than perfect project. So I hem and haw about the project, and end up making nothing or ripping out 100 times. Which is just perfectly silly, and gets me nowhere, but there it is. Once I get going, all is well, but it takes ages and ages to get started on anything.

In non-knitting news, work is getting progressively more interesting. I am finally getting a second person to help me with this project, and people seem to have finally worked out that hiring in this group is actually an urgent need. We're moving to a new building next week, which should be nice, at least I'll have more room and my eventual team will fit someplace in the same area. My commute is slowly robbing me of my will to get up in the morning, but what can you do? I'm slowly adjusting to having actual sociable housemates, which is a mixed deal for me. After a long day at work and a crap MUNI experience to get home, the last thing I want is to be sociable, but it's probably good for me to not sit around and stew for the hour and a half I manage to remain awake.