It's Christmas Eve, babe

The stockings are hung by the chimney with care. You can see we need to go out and get more wood. And we should clean out the ashes! My pile of knitting on the left...

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a very wonderful 2016!

Another winter solstice comes

My Temperature Scarf is done!

It should, I suppose, be called the Temperature Cowl now.  

Some have called it "garish," and some have called it "nice." 

I like it and it is certainly warm! 

What I have used/have left: 

Darkest blue, for -15ºC and lower: used 25g, have 25 left
bright blue for -10 to -14: used 26g, have 24 left
pretty variegated icy colours for -4 to -9: used 40g, have 10 left
green for -3 to +3: used 92g, have 8 left
green variegated for 4 to 10: used 87, have 13 left
yellow variegated for 11 to 15: used 74g, have 26 left
yellow/orange for 16 to 20: used 71g, have 29 left
orange variegated for 21 to 27: used 61g, have 39 left
and red for 28 and above: used 30g, have 20 left

I needed two skeins of the yarn for everything from -3ºC to 27ºC. Most for -3 to +3!

I'd love to see what other places need. Hmm, when we retire to Vancouver, I'll do another one, but in laceweight yarn!

This thing is huge.

Done doodling

I finished this up a few days ago, sewed in all the ends, blocked it nicely. You will notice that I didn't end up doing the leaf edging. I thought I could get it to work on the wavy edge, because Stephen West does suggest doing a few rows of garter before casting off. But in fact the width of the knitted-on edging didn't work in the dips of the knitting; everything got squashed together too much. Maybe if I had stuck with it and blocked it, I could have got it to work, but I decided that perhaps I'd best just do what the designer told me to.

 Now you get lots of detail pics:

The very end

The long cable up one edge

A wee bit of the long wavy edge

The lovely wavy edge

The whole thing laid out on the floor

Everyone seemed to do this pose

A bit cold for these outdoor shots

It'll be very warm, I think

I ran out of every scrap of yarn. I knew the red wouldn't last, and indeed I ended up using all the red, all the orange, and a bit of another reddish sock yarn you can see in the top picture here. I did four wedges of the green, interspersing a few orange short rows here and there, and had about a foot of the green left before the last increase row. I used the thrift-store yellow for that row and a couple beyond, before casting off in all the little tidbits of red and orange.

 I kind of like it, but have enough wool shawls! I am donating this to a group here in Toronto collecting woollies for refugees. It will certainly keep someone cosy and warm.