What the...?

This winter has been fairly mild in London, mild enough that the daffodils have started poking out of the ground, and snowdrops have made their appearance. That mildness came to a crashing halt this week (snow shower on Tuesday? Really?), and culminated in the dire information that it was -4 degrees Celsius this morning when we woke up.

Now, those of you living in places with actual winter (I'm looking at you Chicago!) are saying "Minus 4 degrees? Pah! (after quick Google conversion) That's only 25 Farenheit! You're not even below zero. Suck it up cupcake!" Please grant me a bit of leeway, seeing as how I've spent the last 22 years not living in New England, and indeed almost 9 of those years living in southern Arizona and Texas. In any event, it was freaking cold. It made it very difficult to get out of bed, but getting out the door was easier because I had a new snuggly scarf to hide in.

Yet another Lacy Baktus, this time using some Finn handspun in "Shaking Leaves".

This is one of the few times I've ever spun a yarn for a specific project. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to make this scarf from these colors, so I split up the yarn so that I would get more-or-less even width stripes across the entire length of the scarf. I started off, and things were going well...

Stripes are looking good so far. I knit to the middle of the scarf (by weight) and started the decreases. As I got closer and closer to the end, I started thinking that perhaps I hadn't been spinning as evenly as I might have hoped - the yarn was thinner, and there seemed to be alot left in the ball. I got to the end and had a big chunk of yarn left - riiiiip. Back to the middle, knit up half of the leftover yarn length, then start decreases. Rinse, repeat.

Finally I ended up using up most of the yarn,

but the even stripes thing? Not so much...

Bah!

I am comforted by the fact that no one will ever notice this except me (unless I point it out), and by the incredibly warm squishy goodness around my neck. Since I'm off to go take a bunch of photos outside today, this should help!

Technical details: more details on spinning the yarn are here. I used US 8/5.0 mm needles.