Arabesque

I took a short break from the sweater to finish my lace scarf. I'm quite proud of it, my mistakes are limited to those I can barely see (a few extra pairs of yarn-overs - the holes), otherwise I think this ended up being a really nice marriage of yarn (silky merino from Blackberry Ridge) and pattern (from Marianne Kinzel's Second Book of Modern Knitting).

This is before washing and pinning out (blocking). It's all scrunchy and the edges are curly.

This is partway through the pinning process. I worked pretty hard at pinning it out evenly: I determined the width the scarf wanted to be (about 11") and drew a very long rectangle on brown paper (I have rolls of this stuff lying around from Christmas). I then decided the squares wanted to be 5" and pinned that interval. Then I pinned the center edge of each square (at the top of the leaf)....

...then I pinned pretty much every row, resulting in a lot of freakin' pins.

Here is Gwen "helping". Gwen usually thinks of blocking time as "love mememememe!!!" time. It should be sweet. But it isn't.

And here is a close up of the lace. Pretty, huh? (Happily, I managed to not take a picture of one of my mistakes!)