I'm on my "real" computer today, so I'll be putting in real links! As much as I wish I were plowing through the sweater I started for my daughter, I'm devoting all my knitting energy to "the shrug". I don't know about you, but when people (non-knitter people) ask me, "What are you making?" and I say, "A shrug!" they look at me blankly. Being as out of touch as I am, I just assumed shrugs were a normal thing you could, like, shop for.
Either way, I bet you know what a shrug is. Or you will shortly. And then you will want to knit one!
I'm making a very slight modification to the Lacy Hug-Me-Tight pattern in Knit 2 Together. My yarn is 100% linen, Fibra Natura Flax, in a color that might be discontinued because I got it on sale. :) I'm using size 4 needles for the body and size 5 for the lace. (That's a note to myself, by the way.)
This is me trying to decide if I've knit enough of the body section (by clipping one sleeve on). I think I have. Which is about 20" in length instead of the 60" the pattern calls for! (That's the slight modification.) I might decide to add a little more, but I'll get the other pieces done first to be sure.
And this is a slightly clearer picture:
The first sleeve lace is blocking now and next I have a lot more lace to knit, but it's going pretty smoothly. It took me a while to warm up to the linen and I almost ran off to the yarn shop for super pointy lace needles because even the k2tog's were horribly frustrating at first, but I've gotten into a habit of pushing the needle in backwards to open up the stitches before trying to k2tog like normal and I think I won't go for new needles after all. (Now that I type that, I realize I should point out this reasonableness and avoidance-of-knitterly-purchase thing to members of my household who will otherwise not notice!)
The other slightly tricky bit was grafting the provisional cast on to the final row — the number of stitches matched so I didn't bother with trying to simulate the two yo k2tog's that should have been in the last row (the grafting row, the row you sew in, is the last row, i.e. I didn't knit the final row of the final repeat). There was a triple yo (yarn over) in the previous row, though, and figuring out how to graft that was harder than I thought. To be honest, I'm not sure how I finally did it, but I did it and I guess I'll figure out something similar again the next two times I have to.