minor update

Onerva is done done done! It's currently pinned out, blocking. It's nearly dry, so hopefully tomorrow there will be some picture-taking before it goes off to its new home with Sarah. I'm so excited over this project -- the pattern is simple but elegant, and the yarn is just gorgeous. Hopefully she likes it as much as I liked making it.

Because I already got my yarn in, and because I'm an impatient little so-and-so, I started my Quadrat.

By which I mean I swatched.

Erm, by which I mean I started to knit my little 4"x4" square, lost interest halfway through, went "eh, I'm not quite getting gauge but the smallest size is going to be slightly too large for me so I'm just going to say it's close enough!" and started to cast on.

However, Quadrat outmaneuvered me. See, I knew I shouldn't be casting on because the reason I bought the yarn for this to knit it NOW is so that I could participate in a KAL for it. And casting on before the KAL begins sort of defeats the point of doing a frigging KAL in the first place. Well, Quadrat told me to cast on 110 stitches using a cable cast on.

The Cable Cast-On, ladies and gents, is the work of the devil at his finest. I thought that casting on in general was a pain in the ass. I thought that knitting lace was a form of torture. I thought that Intarsia was up there with dancing barefoot on hot coals and broken glass. The Cable Cast-On, my friends, puts them all to shame. I think I made it about ten stitches before the whole thing got so tight that I could barely cast on the next stitch, and then I thought about knitting that first row and how horrible that would be if it was already this tight just casting on. Ripped it out, started again.

Rinse and repeat about half a dozen times before I stuffed the whole mess into a bag and shoved the bag under my bed, and sat down to work a few blessedly mind-numbingly simple rounds on the leg Jason's sock.

Maybe in the meantime I'll actually swatch like I should...