About a month ago I joined a linen themed knit-a-long on Ravelry. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to make some progress on one of my works-in-progress. I really wanted to wear my Emma shrug this summer and a knit-a-long deadline was just the thing to push me to get it finished. Even with the deadline looming it’s been slow going though. The linen is tough to work with. I love the fabric it is making but it’s slippery and inelastic and my hands get sore after about a pattern repeat. I also seem to have a bit of trouble remembering to follow the pattern correctly. I don’t think I’ve ever gone backwards so much on one project. I’ll be knitting along and realize I missed on the yarn overs on the previous row or made all the decreases the wrong direction and have to tink back and redo it. Even two-steps-forward-one-step-back progress is still progress though and I’m a little over half way across my shrug. I’ve got 8 days until the deadline and 8.5 repeats left to go. I think if I keep at it I can finish on time (and nothing bad is going to happen if I’m a day or two late).

I finished my fiddlehead mittens with just 25 minutes to spare on Tuesday night. I wanted to post another in-progress update while I was working on them but realized it was going to cost me vital knitting time. I finished the first lining on Monday night and cursed myself for not working on it more on Sunday afternoon because I now had only Tuesday left to do the whole second lining. The only thing to do was knit as much as I could on Tuesday and see how far I got. I made it through the whole cuff of the lining just using up those little bits of time that usually get wasted in the course of the day (waiting for kettle to boil or the car to warm up etc.). After dinner I plunked myself on the couch and knit.

And knit.

And knit.

And when I ran out of purple I grabbed the leftover ball of red (because it's lining and why not) and knit some more.

And then I cast off and wove in my ends and looked a the clock and it was 11:35.

(And then Rob and I spent ten minutes trying to convince my computer that I really did have a keyboard and mouse so I could log my finished status in the knit-a-long group on Ravelry).

I've worn my mittens a couple of times already but we've been enjoying a nice warm spell and I haven't been able to really put them to the test. All the layers seem like they will help keep out the wind and I'm hoping my hands will stay a little warmer when Abby and I go out for walks. Environment Canada says the temperature will be dropping again by Monday so I'll have an opportunity to see how warm they really are.

*We're having a bit of a bandwidth issue with my site this month (something about spiders and search engines) so I'm limiting the quantity of stuff that needs to load when you visit the main page. More pictures can be found over on my Flickr stream.

This morning my fiddlehead mittens looked like this:

Ten minutes ago they looked like this:

If they dry by tomorrow morning (which is actual possible considering I rolled them in two different towels and the humidity is pretty low) I will have one day and two evenings to knit the linings. Monday is Knit Night and I'm pretty much guaranteed a few hours of solid knitting time but for tomorrow and Tuesday I'll just have to keep my knitting handy and work on it whenever the cats are calm enough to leave me alone. Plain knitting should go a little faster, and be a little easier to pick up and put down, than the colourwork. I'm permitting myself to believe I really can finish these mittens by midnight on the 31st (the knit-a-long deadline).