A Fix For the Fickle Finger

When we last met, I was telling you about my poor blistered finger, an overuse injury from a weekend's worth of knitting. And how I found knitted help for it on Ravelry, the Finger Protector. Well, here it is:

Made not in cashmere, as I initially planned, but in a tiny remainder of a sock club yarn. Merino, I believe. As you can see, you don't exacerbate your injury much in making this solution, and it really works!

And so, with my digit safely girded, it's onward to the next project--the Sixareen Cape for which the Kep was but a swatch:

414 stitches around this rascal. Three vertical repeats of the fair isle pattern. This is not going to be a fast knit. But I've got a long time to work on it, as I intend it to be a keeping-warm-around-the-house-in-winter type of thing. Warm shoulders while knitting or reading in bed is my motivation. And big piles of snow outside the windows to the contrary (this is late April, right?),  it will be a few months before I seriously need it.

Meanwhile, a photography footnote. This is the first picture I took:

See how messed up the colors are, especially the brown edging? I took the picture close to the window in the best daylight I had on this cloudy day, but the camera refused to meter anywhere but the light center of the circle, making the brown look blue or maybe navy. So a brown background made brown yarn look better. Not my first intuition. And a real life example of how colors on your screen may not represent the actual colors.

Full Retreat

I'm just back from another wonderful weekend knitting retreat with my knitting group at an Undisclosed Location in the Alaska wilderness. For the most part, What Happens at Knitting Retreat Stays at Knitting Retreat, but I think it's ok if I show you one thing:

A display of Hats for Huts created or donated by/to our group for the auction. How could you possibly acquire for your very own one of these exquisite chapeaux, you ask? Come to the group's annual meeting. Bid often and fiercely! You could get yourself a Sixareen Kep or an Alaska Punk hat. Or one of many, many more amazing, delightful, and cosy hats. But especially the Sixareen or the Punk or the Fornicating Moose. I'm just sayin'.  Hey, it's my blog and I can shill if I want to.

Now a lot of people might think that a bunch of women holed up for a weekend in a remote cabin just use knitting as an excuse to eat great food, talk all day long, laugh their tails off, and drink the odd glass of wine. Or Screech. (Check the link. That's Screech, the knitter's rum, not screech, the high pitched noise.) But I'm here to tell you that I knitted so much I got blisters! Three of them, as a matter of fact. And the ever-resourceful Ravelry has an answer for the problem. A knitted answer, of course. The Finger Protector--take a look. I'm knittin' me a fistful of those bad boys. In cashmere. My hard-working fingers deserve nothing less--and so do yours!