True Love

Pat was bitten by a really romantic bug this weekend for Valentine's Day, and wanted me to have everything my little heart desired. He knows how obsessed with knitting I am, and so, as a madly romantic gesture, he took me to several yarn stores and bought me a lot of luxe yarn and tried to buy me a lot of fancy-pants needles, too, before I freaked out and made him stop. So now I have some BEAUTIFUL alpaca/merino in a bluish gray with heatherings of green and violet, some BEAUTIFUL kid mohair blend (with some synthetics and metallics) in oceanic blues and greens and pale metallic gold, some BEAUTIFUL bulky baby alpaca in variegated natural tones which he is going to knit into a scarf for me (he is doing a test scarf in cheap bulky acrylic which I already love), and a gift certificate for some fancy-pants needles when I decide which ones will be most useful.

Well!

I have started knitting an exquisite lace scarf in the alpaca/merino (which is light worsted weight). It's heavier filament than the artist used for the original scarf but as I am also pretty much guaranteed to be heavier than the original, I figured it would be a nice "scale-up" to fit me. I am somehow getting too many stitches in the leaf -- I increase by two more stitches in Row 1 than make sense in Row 3, and tore my work out twice before just going with the flow and figuring out how to reduce it again. Either this is something I am not understanding in the pattern or something wrong with it, as I have very carefully followed the pattern and am still screwing it up. Here's the original. Go admire it and be nice to the brilliant artist, Sarah Sutherland at Parallax Knitting, because, oh my, she is wonderful.

Here is my scarf so far (spread out on my unmade bed.)

I took a crap picture of the yarn but photos don't do it justice so why upload pictures of balls of yarn? You'll have to trust me that it's heavenly.

Don't mind the mistake near the hem. That's my bad. I got enthusiastic with the yarn-overs and I can fix it.

Lovely, no? And how sweet to have a Valentine who's also a "yarn-abler." Yikes. Fluffy stuff will soon take over our house -- but I'll be snuggling in it, very happily.