The Iceman Cometh

Bedecked in my lovely hat, striped scarf, un-blogged flip-top mittens, and beige tweed wool socks, I braved the winter today and lived to tell the tale.

Colin Cloutes Come Home Againe

I changed up the blog design a bit to add Ravelry progress bars (inaccurate for now due to a Top Sekrit Knitting Project) and the Flickr badges (L. is giving up the shop for awhile), and Reader, I am pretty damn irritated. I know just enough about coding to be dangerous, which is to say enough to know that fixing the width of the progress bars and badges to fill the righthand column in a more visually pleasing manner is possible, but not enough to do it myself. Flickr claims that the badges have to be that size, which is probably a lie, but certainly means that no amount of half-assed fiddling on my part will fix that. The Ravelry progress bars, on the other hand, are very customizable*, but despite fairly clear instructions in the Ravelry fora, I am at a loss. I'll figure it out eventually. I'll never be hungry again, etc., etc.

More successful, however, was my latest FO: the Noro Striped Scarf, concept/pattern from Brooklyn Tweed. Apologies for the lameness of the photos, especially considering Brooklyn Tweed's utterly amazing ones. I had plans to take this outside and photograph it pretentiously on a withered tree stump out front, but I wanted to mess about with the settings on my camera to see if I could have any success taking shots indoors and--well, this is very boring, but suffice it to say that I got a few good shots of the cat and merely serviceable ones of the scarf.

The scarf itself, though: love it. It's about seven feet long and 7.5" wide (I cast on 49 instead of 39 to make it a bit wider than Brooklyn Tweed's). The yarn: Noro Silk Garden, colors 8 and 270. There has been, on Ravelry, a pretty ridiculous series of debates about Noro yarns: blah blah blah they tend to be scratchy, thick-and-thin, and full of vegetable matter blah blah blah but it is art blah blah blah blah. I really enjoyed Silk Garden (composition: silk, mohair, wool) for the same reasons everyone does: the saturation of the colors is remarkable, especially the dark blue. I cannot envision myself ever using Silk Garden or Kureyon (pure wool) for a garment for the same reason--the colors--I think it works perfectly on a scarf.

*L. and I have discussed our desire to make macaroni and glitter pictures for Casey.