Chugging Along

Phew! Things have been rather busy here lately. It looks like the job market is going to pick up soon, and I've been keeping busy generating momentum on that front. I had lunch on Friday with a new contact in the theater world down here, and he gave me some more leads to follow up on so hopefully things will start looking up.

In knitting news, I totally finished my Autumn Arbor stole last week! I didn't get a chance to block it out until last night, but I was wearing it all over my cold apartment this morning and it's warm and snuggly and pretty and I love it. I did end up having enough yarn to do 8 repeats on each side, so it ended up being 12 inches longer than it should have been, but there was plenty of yarn left over. After a lifetime of things being too short, I never consider extra length to be much of a problem. :) I don't have any modeled shots yet, but I'll try to get some this weekend.

This was the first stole I have done in which I had to graft two pieces together. It came out pretty well, I think. I was careful to graft the two halves together very loosely, and then go back with a small crochet hook to tighten them up to the proper tension, so they match the rest of the stole. Unfortunately, there was a stretch of very light-colored yarn near the end of my grafting so it looks a little out of place, but I didn't care enough to do anything about it. This stole is for me and me alone, and it's perfect enough for me! :)

That stole knocks a ton of yards off my count. Only 19224 to go for the year! Unfortunately, after not adding any yarn to my stash since before Christmas, I did order some sale yarn and it all came in the mail today. I'll post more about that another time. But again, the point is not really to get rid of all my yarn, but to use up old yarn that's been sitting there for a while. So far so good!

Also, as an aside, has anyone else been trying to find copies of that new magazine, The Knitter? Cookie from Shut Up and Knit said she found a copy at her local Barnes & Noble, so of course I ran out there this weekend. Did they have any copies? NO...and they didn't have it in their system, either. In fact, they had old issues of IK out so I'm not really holding my breath with this branch. :( You know what's probably going to happen is that I will eventually find a copy after months of trawling through book stores and driving longer and longer distances in search of this elusive magazine...and it will totally suck. Anyone lucky enough to have a copy care to prove me wrong? How is it?

ETA (by suggestion of Julie): Here's a link to a little preview of the magazine. It is a British publication, but the publishers also have an office in California, so I see no reason why it would not be readily available here. In fact, Mason Dixon Knitting had a little contest about it last month, but ever since then I haven't heard or seen anything about it.