Windows and Gimp are your Fair Isle Friend.

So, everyone was picking on me tonight at knit club, because I haven't updated in a while. Seriously, they ALL ganged up on me.

Or did they just mention it?

One or the other... Anyway, yeah. I'm plugging along. I've been working on the mittens some more. In theory, they are supposed to go in the mail in a few days, but they may be a bit late.

The fair isle was puckering a lot, so I frogged the first mitten 4 times, but I think I have it good enough now that any puckering will block out of it. We shall see.

I'm calling the pattern Norwegian Chaos, because it's, obviously, inspired by traditional Norwegian mittens, but one mitten had a butterfly and the other will have a hurricane symbol. I was having a doozy of a time graphing out the hurricane symbol, until I found a site that does actual size knitters graph paper. I printed out a page at the guage of my project. Then I found an image of a hurricane symbol and saved it to my desktop. I opened it in GIMP and resized the image to be the size of the space I had to fit it in on the graph paper and printed it out. I taped the hurricane symbol up on the window, then taped the graph paper in place above it and traced the shape on it. Voila, easy-peasey fair-isle graphing.

In the meantime, when I don't feel like doing the fair-isle, I've been working on the Backyard Leaves scarf. Oh, the cashmere is like buttah. Picking it up this time has been a lot easier than before. Goofs are rarer and easier to correct. Working from the graph has been cake this time. I'm really, really enjoying the project now that it's not such a struggle. Already I'm 5 repeats through the 22 the pattern calls for. I think that it's going to be shorter than I was hoping, though, so I'll probably aim for 26 or 28 repeats instead. Also, the project is coming out much poofier than I expected. I'm not sure how much of it is going to come out with the blocking. I may have to poke around on Ravelry for some advice regarding that.