Happy and sad finish

One of my friends of facebook posted a pay-it-forward 2011 idea and I loved it! It said the first 5 people to leave a comment to the status would receive a handmade gift from the poster at some time in 2011. The catch was that if you left a comment, you also had to post the idea and make handmade gifts for others. I loved this idea so I commented and posted. I only got three comments, so I decided to do a knitted project for each one of them and I didn't mind if they were time consuming ones.

I've had this gorgeous brown alpaca yarn, my first "fancy yarn" purchase (read = not an acrylic bought at Wal-mart or Michael's) and I have wanted to knit the Lace Ribbon Scarf from knitty.com with it. I had tried to make this scarf a few times, but with no success. I'd never done any lace and had a hard time keeping track of the stitches. It hibernated for about 2 years and then I just frogged what I had. Too many mistakes to keep on going.

I knit a few clapotis in the meantime and felt my knitting skills were a bit better. I also fell in love with using a spreadsheet to help me visualize and keep track of my rows and stitches, so I made one for the lace ribbon pattern. This made all the difference in the world. Studying the pattern to make the spreadsheet helped me to understand what the pattern was about. I had a few more boo-boos and bad cast ons, but eventually got it right.

I'm a super slow knitter, but I just finished the knitting on this scarf today and I'm so excited. I moved to a much warmer climate since I purchased the yarn for this and near the beginning of the project I decided it was the perfect color for one of my pay-it-forward recipients. I just have to block it this weekend and send it off. I'm both happy and sad about it. I have loved everything about this project. The yarn was so nice to work with and after a few repeats of the pattern I found the rhythm of it quite soothing. Challenging, but do-able. I'm happy to have completed it, but sad that it's done too because I don't get to work on it some more.

It would have been nice to have one more skein of the yarn to make the scarf a bit longer, but I'm hoping in the blocking it will stretch a bit.

Above is a picture of what it looked like before blocking and I'll be sure to post another picture after blocking.