The biggest bit of progress was finishing the knitting of Lavori 07/30!!!!! (yes, 5 exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind) It wasn't as quick as I had predicted in my last post. I made a knitting error in a difficult-to-fix area, several rounds before I noticed its existence. I took the knitting back, stitch by stitch, until I felt comfortable about trying to fix it. The fix isn't perfect but it'll be pretty unnoticeable. But after that, I cruised to the end, all several thousand stitches left to knit. Several days later, I had a few hours available, and was able to do the crochet cast off. (hopefully without dropping any stitches, which would be a very unhappy blocking surprise)
I've hidden some of the ends and am not sure how many more I'll bother with. While knitting, I ended one ball and started the next by tying simple overhand knots. They're relatively unobtrusive unless I go looking for them. Heck, I had trouble finding my final end which was poking out on the cast-off round. There's so much thread and so much else going on that any one little thing is not usually all that noticeable. Hopefully that's also true of the areas where I imperfectly fixed knitting mistakes! I fixed a lot of my knitting mistakes perfectly so those definitely won't be visible after blocking.
I'm not sure when I'll have the time to get it blocked. I'll need a few hours and a fairly large space, and maybe more pins.
I have no idea how much thread I used -- my estimate is in the 1500-2000 yard range, give or take a bit, but I'll need to weigh it to get a better estimate. I did manage to finish without needing to use any full balls of thread. That means that I have 1050 yards (3 full balls of 350 yds each) of this Clarks Big Ball #30 crochet cotton (plus a few small partial balls) to use for a future doily.
On the whole, this was a very straightforward knit except for the inaccuracies in the chart. I'll probably repeat this and bloviate a bit longer about it all when I do the final report after blocking.
Here's a photo, unblocked, showing that I have indeed done the cast-off.
Other than that, I, umm, still haven't done much. I was fairly motivated to finish the doily and barely touched my sweater. I still haven't completely decided how to handle the back vs the front, but I want to start knitting on it again so that may well start up again soon. I won't bother to share a photo since it looks like a generic blob of knitting, nothing too interesting.
The travel shawl is slowly growing. I made a mistake somewhere in the most recent increase (to over 300 stitches per row), but it was easy to kludge something without knowing exactly where the mistake is. I was off by a stitch when I started the next set of eyelets, a very quick fix. Dunno if I have too many or too few stitches -- I'll figure it out later. Again, it does not matter at all in the grand scheme of things.
I've started to think about future projects but haven't really decided on anything yet. I don't want to think too hard about doilies until this one is really and truly done. I should start more projects -- maybe a hat or some socks, fingerless mitts or full mittens, something like that. And the spinning wheel plus my fiber stash are whispering. But it's also a busy time of year and I don't always have space for works in progress unless they are small and easily stored away when necessary.
And that's really about it for knitting (and other suitable blog topics) this month.
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