Traveling Scarf Update

I never posted a picture from my photoshoot (ha!) with my finished, blocked traveling scarf, so here it is:

To be honest, I've been grabbing my Noro scarf more often in the mornings, but I still think it's a pretty work of art. More than anything, I love the story of it--where it's been, whose hands have worked on it, and the fellow knitters who are represented by it. Priceless.

How I could I possibly NOT do another scarf with these incredible women?!

My upstream partner (who sends scarves to me) has already sent me her starter section. James brought it to me when he checked the mail Sunday. I was a little overwhelmed because I hadn't even started my own starter section yet, much less mailed it to my downstream partner. It's not that I'm behind, though--my upstream partner just so happens to be one of the most enthusiastic of our bunch and is ahead of schedule. Any time that I have a scarf that needs to be worked on, though, it tends to take priority over all other knitting and most other activities, so Sunday afternoon was devoted to my traveling scarf group.

I resolved to have my starter package ready to go before I opened her scarf package, so I first tackled the issue of the scarf booklet. My last scarf booklet was a nightmare to print and took many hours, lots of paper, and several curse words. Thankfully, this one was much easier since I saved the template for the first one and had the first booklet in my possession to make sure I was printing the sheets out correctly. If this doesn't sound hard to you, consider that I had to manually print double-sided pages that would be folded in half to make the booklet, so each pice of paper had four booklet pages on it that had to be in such an order that they could stacked, bound down the center, and then be in the right order. (It seems like my printer AND my computer should make this easy to do, but not so, apparently). I admit, it sounded easy to me, too, until I first tried to do it. Anyway, it only took about 15 minutes this time.

About a week ago, I had begun knitting my starter section, but I kept screwing up each lace pattern I attempted. I think I ripped it completely out three times over the course of several hours before I gave up and decided to leave it for the weekend. It was very frustrating for me, and when I again started yesterday, it seemed to follow a similar pattern as I ripped out my first attempt after 11 rows. It would seem that not the third, but rather the "fifth time's a charm" in my case, because I finally managed to complete my fifth attempt with no problems! The cotton is a little stiff, so I pinned it in place to take a picture. Pretty, huh?

With my package all ready to go, I opened the waiting scarf and selected the yarn that would best match it. I ended up using my Manos Cotton Stria because neither of my purples were anywhere close to the same shade used in the first section, but this green was pretty close, which is good because my other green is a pale lime color. I ended up using the first pattern I came across (I did consider others, but still came back to this one) which happened to use exactly the amount of stitches I had to work with. Perfect! I think it came out very nice. I think I'll wait a few days (or maybe a week?) in between sending my starter and this scarf so as not to overwhelm my downstream, but it sure feels good to be completely caught up. I can now focus attention back on the Cabaret Raglan, which has been neglected for a few days now.