A little sprint

I finished up the knitting on my Mum's socks last night, and have just grafted the toe closed and woven in the ends. (No picture because the sun is now too low in the sky to nicely illuminate my front room.) I still haven't made a decision about which cake of sock yarn to dig into next, but that's okay, because last night I looked at a calendar and realized that it is less than one month until the Mister's mother's birthday, and I had offered to make something that could be presented as a gift. I even bought a gradient mini-skein kit - a Sweet Georgia Yarns Party of Five set, in Swell, which is a set of green-blue shades that Mister felt would suit her, both in terms of her tastes and in terms of looking good on her.

Less than a month is pretty tight turnaround time for not-summer knitting. It doesn't strike me as impossible, though. (She says now. We'll see if my tune has changed come the end of the month!) Last night I showed Mister a couple of pattern options that are in my mental I would like to make this list, and he picked one. hot oatmeal (by Jenny Faifel).

Now, there's a small problem here. The pattern calls for 709 - 735 m of yarn. My gradient pack has 480 m. Those numbers are not the same - not even close. I'm not planning on finding more yarn kicking around here to make up the difference. Instead, I'm going to pretend that the yarn is one long gradient, instead of five mini-skeins arranged in a gradient, and join new yarn at the last possible moment to try to stretch out the yardage. I'm also accepting that the scarf will be smaller than the dimensions given in the pattern, but I really think a slight ensmallening is okay, because the pattern specs say that as written, the finished dimensions place the length at 72" and the depth at 52". That's pretty big.

So this is the plan. I've just got to wind the yarn, and then I can get this party started.

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