Spring!

Well, it might not be full spring yet, but the weekend has been incredibly beautiful, with lots of sunshine and temperatures slightly above freezing (which means the snow is FINALLY melting a bit!!!).  Yesterday I took a walk to enjoy it, and I think there will probably be another walk later today too. Since I sit cooped up in a lab all day, it's nice to be able to enjoy the sun during the weekend at least.

This weekend has otherwise been spent knitting and cleaning up the apartment, as I don't want to leave it too dirty when we leave for the States next Sunday. Can you believe we're leaving so soon?! I'm so excited and happy, we're going to have a blast! All the tickets and hotels are booked, yesterday we booked musical tickets (we're going to see The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, which is just so amazingly awesome I'm almost crying about it!), and all my pre-ordered yarn has arrived at Sarah's. I might have gone a bit overboard with the yarn, but if it really doesn't fit in our bags I'll just have to buy a box and ship it home the regular way. 

I've also been doing some knitting this past week, although not a lot of it I admit. Work has been a bit more busy than usual (which is actually a good thing, it's more fun when there's actually stuff to do as opposed to just sitting around knitting while waiting for patients to show up), but I've managed to finish the Asteria Cardigan too. Which is awesome, as I now have two new cardis to bring with me on the trip! Here's the Asteria:

I haven't decided what buttons to put on it yet, there will only be two of them just at the top where it is fastened with two safety pins in the photo. I'm thinking a couple of small, wooden buttons, or possibly just two hidden clasps. I think I'll go button shopping tomorrow after work!

I also promised to show you a photo of the Coraline Cardigan on me, so here it is:

As I mentioned, the sleeves are a bit short, but I'm not sure if I'll just leave them at 3/4 lenght and call it a design feature. My sister said she thought it looked fine this way, and maybe I'll take the lazy path and take her advise. I haven't gotten a button for this one either yet, but I've decided I'll put it where it is fastened in the photos. The pattern has the buttons at the top, where the smocking pattern is, but since it is just a tad on the small side this looked weird on me. So I'll just close it over my bosom, and call it a day. It will probably be something small and discreet I think.

I unpinned the Evenstar shawl some day in the week as well, and here it is in all its glory, lying on the floor upstairs:

I noticed after I took this photo that the place where I kitchenered the last stitches of the edging together was pulled way too tight, you can see it at the bottom of the photo. I've fixed that since then, so now it looks perfect. I'm definitely bringing this baby on the trip! Artholine asked me in the comments on the last post what I thought about the pattern, and I liked it a lot! It was very easy to understand, and I didn't even use one lifeline in all the project. I definitely recommend it, even though it took me forever to make! Mine used about 1300 m of yarn, but I knit it on size 3 mm needles. I bet if you use smaller needles you can get the yardage down if you want to. I like mine just the way it is!

After I finished the Asteria cardigan, I decided I needed something else to knit on at work, since both the socks I'm working on (Devon socks by Cookie A., and they're mostly resting right now) and the shawl (Panama shawl by Monika Eckert) are a bit too difficult to knit on at work (I haven't made much progress on either, so no new photos). So I cast on for the St James top, in a very interesting colourway of KnitPicks Palette yarn, called Conch. The knitting is very simple so far, it's knitted top down with raglan increases for the sleeves. The top of the collar rolls something hideously in the photo, but at the end of the project I'll pick up stitches here and make the actual collar.

The colour is actually fairly accurate in this photo, it's a kind of weird pink/apricot/orange/salmon colour. I've had it in my stash for about a year, and I still haven't decided whether I like it or not. I guess I'll have to try it on once it's finished, and see if it looks good on me or not. If it doesn't I can always over-dye it. I'm also thinking of making the collar and hems in black instead, to make it a little bit more interesting. Oh, and I'm holding the yarn double, in case you were wondering :)

The last week of March will see another Knitting and Crochet Blog Week! I participated last year (if you want to read the posts from that week, just go to the left column on the blog, find my Labels cloud, and knit on the labels KnitCroBlo1-7), and it was so much fun! I'm definitely going to try to make it this year as well. The topics are well thought out, and it's so much fun to read all the other bloggers' posts too.

Now I think I'm going to make myself some breakfast. Since we're leaving next weekend, I'm not sure if I'll have time to post again before we leave. I don't know how our internet access will look on the actual trip, but we're bringing one of our laptops, so I'll be sure to document everything so I can tell you about it later!

/ Jenny