At last, blocking!

Is there a better feeling as a knitter than the absolute satisfaction of waiting for a piece to finish blocking? Sahara is downstairs right this minute, resting atop a towel and a piece of cardboard, carefully pinned into shape and awaiting her unveiling to the world. I feel strangely virtuous, having conquered my knitting ADD and seen a project through to its completion. Photos will follow, I'm sure, though I'm not quite sure how I'll manage to photograph myself wearing it. I live in a house nearly bereft of mirrors, and I'm not quite ready to trust Loki with the camera.

Of course, that virtuous feeling is only enhanced by the knowledge that I can move on to other projects, completely guilt-free! I started on Lauren two weeks ago, made it about a quarter of the way through, and then tried to knit while my boyfriend was in the room. I don't know what it is, but the man seems to be krytonite to my knitting. Maybe it's because we don't see each other very often (he lives an hour and a half away), and I feel secretly guilty wasting any of our limited time together knitting. Maybe it's because he's a rather chatty fellow, and I get distracted easily. Maybe he just sends out powerful dropped stitch mojo. Whatever the case, I did end up dropping a stitch, had trouble finding it in the lace pattern, ended up dropping a few more, and decided to take a break. And by take a break I mean pitch a tantrum and rip the whole thing apart.

After calming down a bit, a started again this morning and am back to about a quarter of the way through. It's a fairly quick knit on 10mm, which is still quite a step down from the 15mm called for in the pattern. The end result will, naturally, be a much closer weave than the original pattern, but I think it will still work.

Here is a close-up of the lace pattern. Someday I will figure out how to take these closeups without the shadow, but today is not that day. This was taken after carefully stretching out the yarn and holding it in place through the power of mind bullets. I'm a bit worried about how well it will block to shape. The man I bought it from said it was silk, but seeing how it didn't come with a label, I'm taking a lot on trust here. It definitely has the sheen of silk, so I'll have faith for a bit longer. Of course, if I were a practical person, I would have carefully blocked out my swatch, but that seemed far too logical for me.

When it's not stretched out, it rather resembles a shapeless green lump. Loki is not impressed, and completely fails to understand why I am paying attention to a bit of string when he is far more interesting.

You know, I did not intend to be the sort of person who always posted cat photos in their knitting blog. However, I did not anticipate what gigantic camera whores my cats would turn out to be.