This post could have gone up hours after the last one, but I’ve had a dose of the denials which has meant I’ve waited a week to publicly say it: I don’t have enough yarn to finish the Woodland Capelet.

The main section is finished, and all that’s needed is for the top darts to be sewn up and the ties to be knit. However, the ties are made up of around eight rows of stitches. Each row is 208 stitches long, and I have this much yarn left:

My Frankenstein Lego Man kindly offered to step in for scale, and also provides a fairly accurate representation of my furrowed brow when I had to face facts; no amount of happy thoughts are going to get me there. I’m not quite ready to give up on this project yet though, so if you have some unwanted Bendigo Woollen Mills Allegro in Scarlet floating around in your stash that you would like to sell, I would love to hear from you. I think I need about 20 to 30 grams of yarn and I’m not fussed about the dyelot at this point. Besides financial compensation, I can guarantee that you’ll be a contender for my favourite person for the second quarter of the 2011-12 financial year.

Now that my attempts to knit a quick project have been thwarted by my picky taste and/or my stubborn resolve to use up that Allegro even if it’s the last thing I do, I have turned back to the bigger projects I originally shunned. The funny thing is, I feel like they’re flying off the needles when before progress felt so slow I could have been frogging instead of knitting. ‘Tis just another reminder that pretty much everything is relative.

I’m not sure how well I conveyed it in my last blog post, but I was really looking forward to making a Thousand Splendid Suns cowl. Really really looking forward to it. As soon as the secret squirrel project was finished, the swatching started. Sadly, something just didn’t feel right as I knit with the Jitterbug.

Then I swatched with the Madeline Tosh sock, and I got the same feeling. It just wasn’t quite right. Now that I look at the photos of the swatches, I think the ‘suns’ don’t translate that well to thinner yarn, they just look a bit measly. In theory either yarn could work well if they were double stranded (not together though, that probably wouldn’t look too good), but I doubt I have enough to make a cowl from a double strand. It’s a little disappointing that it hasn’t worked out, but it’s better not to force these things I feel.

Putting the cowl on hiatus meant in theory, I could start working on the other pattern mentioned last time, the Man scarf. Instead, I got distracted by the Woodland Capelet and its pretty scalloped edge.

I’m running the stash gauntlet again with this one, using the Bendigo Woollen Mills Allegro that was meant to be for my knee high Kalajokis. There wasn’t enough yarn then, and I’m not convinced there will be enough yarn this time either. If there is enough yarn, it’ll be a very very tight squeeze. What can I say, I like to live life on the (pretty scalloped) edge.