Remember all that starting I did?  Well, the other day I went to go work on one of my recently started projects and I just froze up.  I absolutely couldn’t decide which one I wanted to knit.  I was wandering around the dining room table, where everything was temporarily parked after pictures and blogging about them, picking them up, putting them down, just not feeling like it was the right time to work on any of them.  So, what did I do?

I started another project.

A really cute fair isle hat for which I will teach a class at The Spinning Room.  Of course that meant I had to buy the yarn for it.  Which I love.  It is Juniper Moon Farm Moonshine:  40% wool, 40% alpaca, 20% silk.  So soft and wonderful to knit with.

I worked on that for a while, then got my wits about me and decided to buckle down and finish one of my started’s.  So I finished my Windward scarf/shawl:

And here is a closeup of the colors:

But, let’s back up.  Before it got pinned to these nice new blocking towels I bought for the purpose of good picture taking – the pink striped/flowered ones were pretty annoying, you have to admit – it needed a good soak.

Here is what the water looked like:

Sometimes dyed yarn will bleed a little when you soak it.  But not THIS much!  So I dumped the water out and rinsed it again….several times:

Putting vinegar in with the bath is supposed to help set the dye – setting the dye is something the original dyer was supposed to have done – so I went to the cabinet, only to find I had no distilled white vinegar, just apple cider vinegar.  So I tried that and rinsed again….

Then I tried it two more times, soaking it longer each time.

Finally, after practically making our well go dry and rinsing the water thirty million times, the water got to this point:

And I called it “good enough”.  That is what it would look like “normally” after the first soak, if it was going to bleed a little.  Seriously, I rinsed it at least thirty times.  How much dye is in this thing????

The reason for making sure the water runs clear is so that if, when wearing the item, it gets wet, it will not bleed onto your clothing.  So, I will have to keep this in mind and wear it only during dry weather and/or with dark clothing.  Or put it on the care tag if I give it away.

Having finally finished something, I went back to the hat.  Had the ribbing done and was moving on to the chart.  However, 3 rounds in, I was faced with having to rip out those 3 rounds….

My main color (MC) is the dark blue.  My contrast color (CC) is the light blue.  On the chart, the main color are the white (or lighter) squares and the contrast color are the gray (or darker) squares.  See where this is going?  That’s right, I switched them and started knitting the gray squares with my dark color and the white squares with my light color.   I didn’t even look at the key because it just seemed so obvious to me.  Trying to do it the other way is like looking at the word “red”, printed in blue and trying to say what color it is printed in. Right?  So I ripped it out and am now back on track – slowly.

Oh, and this came yesterday:

Another coupon purchase.  I forgot about it.  Now I know it’s getting bad when I can’t even remember that I ordered something.  Someday I’ll show you my bookcase…