Only one color!

Yesterday I cast on for the Song of Hiawatha stole (pattern by Hazel Carter). This is my main Amazing Lace project, and will be a birthday gift for an old childhood friend. I was getting a bit nervous about timing, since gifts like this have a deadline. I was also just really itching to jump into those awesome lace charts.

I think I needn't be worried about time, though I'm afraid to say that too loudly. While the stole is huge, I may not make it quite as big as the pattern says. And inch for inch, it's a whole lot faster going than the fair isle sweater. I didn't knit all of the above last night, but I could have if I'd wanted to.

The photo is of the completed middle of the stole, called "The Starlight". It was pretty easy going, as the horizontal repeat length is pretty short. The next section ("The Feathers") has a much longer horizontal repeat. The Starlight got repeated 18 times across, and The Feathers is only repeated 5 times across. So it may take a bit more concentration to prevent mistakes. I didn't make any errors in The Starlight (or at least none that I can see, and none that affected stitch count), which I attribute to the short repeat length and the fact that I actually used a lifeline. I will continue using a lifeline, so Murphy's Law doesn't come to bite me in the bum.

I haven't abandoned the sweater sleeve. I just needed a change of pace. The sleeve has actually grown a good bit since the last time I posted a photo, but still needs somewhere between 5 and 10 hours of solid knitting (not counting bathroom and email breaks) before I reach the beginning of the cuff. Since I've determined that there is no way that I'll ever finish the sweater before the Cheshire County Fair (which is in a week or two), and thus will definitely be entering Ingeborg instead of this sweater, I feel absolutely no rush to finish this sweater this summer. Maybe I'll enter it in the fair next year, if I don't have something I'm more in love with by then to share with the world county.