an FO to brag about and some progress on the Mystery Shawl
I have an honest-to-goodness FO to show you! Here I am modeling the Rebecca Apricot cardie. 
Specs:
Pattern: Apricot Jacket from Rebecca magazine #27
Yarn: Rowan's All Seasons Cotton, purchased on super-duper sale from the eBay vendor Cucumberpatch UK for $24.99, in color Copper. Not my first choice, but did you see the price?! Actually, now I like this color. I'm on an orange kick, so sue me.
Rants: Boy oh boy. The instructions suck ass. I looked at the photo to figure out what I was supposed to do. That's ridiculous. Thankfully, there's a knit-along on Craftster and it eased my pain to know that I was not alone, cussing in my apartment.
Wearability factor: pretty high, but it's so snug! And my buttons are too small for the buttonholes, so I keep busting out. Maybe it'll stretch and I'll redo the crochet edging to make the button loops smaller (chain 1 instead of chain 2).
I've spent most of the weekend knitting on the Mystery Shawl 2. The edging is loooooog. I ball-parked it at 50 repeats total, but I'm at the half-way point and I've done 30. *sob* Fortunately though, knitting this 10 row repeat 30 times means I almost have it memorized. Yes, I still look at the chart. I'm in my comfort zone, ok?
The first photo shows my progress mid-weekend, and the second shows what I had by sunday night (well, photo taken monday morning). I can really see this shawl emerging from its crumpliness...
You know the best part about this? The Mystery Shawl 2 knit-along contains 5 "clues" (chunk of the pattern), one per week. This is good, as I would cry if I saw the entire pattern. Anyway, it's taken me one week to complete each clue, and now I'm at 2 weeks for clue 5. Which I thought was pretty good. Until I saw Eunny Knits' blog. She knit a larger shawl, on smaller needles than I'm using in oh, about one week. How is that even possible? Do you realize it took me the entire day on sunday to knit 23 repeats (that's 1/3 of the total)? I console myself in thinking that maybe she became obsessed with the shawl, could not think of anything else all week, and went a little batty. Whereas I kept my sanity (mostly) intact. Right? Right?!
