WIP Wednesday

We are back from the cottage and I am happily resettled into my cozy, suburban nest.

I finished a thing.

I call it 'Solar Vortex'.  I knit the first one during the hottest week of the year and the yellow in the yarn is really bright and sunny.  Unfortunately, the photos do not do the lovely colour justice.  The yellow is bright and the grey is tonal ranging from light to very dark grey. The yarn is by a local-to-me dyer.  She owns a shop called The Black Lamb in Port Hope Ontario and her yarns are absolutely gorgeous!!

Also, the way the spiral pattern ends at the to reminds me of sunrays, so the name just picked itself, really.  Do you enjoy testing knitting patterns? I will be putting out a call for Testers in the Ravelry Tester's Group in the next couple of days,  It has been graded for three widths and is with the tech editor as we speak.  I have cast-on the second sock.  I am looking forward to wearing these.  I am not looking forward to cold weather, but having lovely, squishy, knitted stuff to wear kind of makes it bearable.

I have also made some progress on my Cecily Twinset:

I have about 5 more inches of easy-peasy stockinette before I start the lace border.  It's starting to look like a sweater!

And in news of the weird, it's pretty amazing I ever get gauge on any project when I am using measuring tapes like this:

The tape measure on the top is correct.  The tape measure on the bottom is f#@*ed!  Instead of each inch actually measuring 1 inch, it measures 1.25 inches.  I started to question the accuracy of this tape measure when I was knitting something that was six inches long.  It felt like I had been knitting forever, and it looked like six inches - I have an excellent eye for what six inches looks like (because of all the knitting I do - minds out of the gutter, people) yet the tape measure kept insisting my work was only four inches and a bit.

I purchased a few knit kits on ebay several months ago for a ridiculously cheap price, and now I know why they were so ridiculously cheap.  You get what you pay for!  I have since spent way too much time obsessively checking the accuracy of the dozens of tape measures I have stashed all over the house: in my purse, in my knitting bags, in the sofa cushions, under the furniture, you know how it is with tape measures and stitch markers, they just wander off.