Pilgrim's Progress

It's been a while but lest you think I haven't been doing anything, here are some things I have going.

Headbands
A couple of years ago, one of my co-workers asked me to make her some warmy, cozy headbands, which I did.  She's worn them each winter since and this year several of her friends decided they wanted one.

They're both ccrocheted  One has a rosy flower and the other has a more stylized flower and needs a button yet put on in the center of it to finish it off.  I just need to get up to the attic to rummage through the buttons.

Back behind the headbands, you'll see that I've got some bobbin lace bobbins loaded up with a golden sunshine of a linen thread and ready to start the new project.  It's going to be a fan from a Spanish magazine.
                             

Here's the start of it.  I've put this project off because it didn't come with instructions and I wanted to wait until I felt I had the skills to attempt it.  I think I'm pretty much there although I don't want to be too braggy until I actually get it started and end up with the right number of bobbins and those in the right place!

The real progress of this pilgrim, however, is with my fair isle poncho.  You know, the one I've been spinning yarn for and plotting for a while.  I finally got the inspiration  this weekend and started going to town on it.  (For "going to town" read "obsessing".)
                       

I am completely thrilled with how it's coming along and how the colors are interacting.  The fair isle pattern takes on a completely different look in the chunky yarn.  Now I just need to figure out how I want to shape the shoulders and draw in the neck line and I should be close to being done.  It will need a button band in the front and I'm mulling over how wide I want it to be and what I want it to look like.  I've got some ideas but I need to mull them over a little bit more before I talk about them. 

I very seldom knit with large needles (I'm using US size 8 for this project - very large for me) or chunky yarn and this project has 200 stitches.  Now that I'm doing it, I realize why I don't do it very often.  It's much harder to pick up any speed.  Yes, you have larger stitches and so are probably making progress much faster than you realize but the fact that I have to stop ever 5-6 stitches to move them along the needle where they won't bunch up and stop me in my tracks make it feel like a realllllly sloooooow process.

But once I'm done and get it blocked, I think it's going to be the go-to cover for many years to come.  And all conceived and spun and contrived and designed and knit with me own wee handiest.  For me, that's what it's all about.

By the way, I did the poncho because I didn't think I would have enough yarn for a sweater but now that I'm closing in on the finish line, I totally would have had enough for a sweater.  But, as always, go with the wisdom of the wool.  I wouldn't have thought of a poncho but now I'm in love with it and so glad the wool wanted to be a poncho.  So the moral of the story is: Never doubt the wool.