Wednesday progress

The urge to cast on all of the things from the list has struck again. Last year, I had a similar experience. There's something about setting targets that makes me want to achieve them all at once! I know I've got a year to finish everything on the list, but I want to start it all now.

What I have done this weekend is start picking up the stitches on Eleonora. After my enormous headache trying to figure out how to spread the stitches evenly across the entire piece, I finally relented and created an excel spreadsheet to help me figure it out!

I've been using a crochet hook to pick up the stitches, as it's much easier than trying to do it with only the needle. I'm about halfway around now, so hopefully over the next few days I will complete this onerous task and get back to knitting. I'm finding the whole picking up stitches process quite tedious, I have to say. But it's better than seaming, so I am going to just have to put up with it.

I've finished the knitting on my second Capucine hat and have been making tassels. I need to block the hats before I attach them though, as even though I did the maths and increased the size of the second hat, it's still a bit snug so needs to be stretched out a bit. As the yarn is acrylic, it should be a fairly quick job to pin out and steam them.

I needed something less complicated to knit while I was watching the Wimbledon finals on Sunday, so I decided to cast on another project from the list: the Cwtch shawl in a gorgeous skein of Natural Dye Studio silk/camel blend fingering weight yarn. The yarn and pattern were part of my most recent swap parcel and so far I am loving it! The yarn is so soft and has a beautiful sheen from the silk content. I'm motoring through the plain stocking stitch section at the moment, and can't wait to get to the heart motif border.