What I'm working on in January

Down here we are veeeery slow coming out of a summer holiday Christmas...we must have had the best weather ever, making these bodies and minds so lazy and full of sun and sand we didn't want to go back to school and work and life  :-D

But the new school year tends to get you from 0 to 100  in a few seconds and here we are in the second week of school and getting back to choosing extra-murals and prefect-challenge duties and what not!

I had grand plans of finishing a project or two during December, but having spent half my time at the lagoon and the other half in the waves, there was little hooking done.  I did start with a neutrals stash buster in the form of Yuli Nilssen's Moon Tide Scarf - except that it's a cowl, not a scarf,and my second take on this pattern.  

 Ever since I've seen this pattern the first time, I wanted to make an ocean-inspired scarf with it, in the colour of the sea as you take the slow turn at Die Bakke just before Mossel Bay. The water there has so many blues and greens and turquoise and silver like you can't believe...and Vinnis Serina has the colour, in Java Jade.

Except that the pattern then got lost in the colours :-(

That was then...

And two panels through a 3-panel scarf, I called it An End and frogged the lot.  

So, hence the neutrals stash buster, trying to use the basic scarf instruction and just joining into the start to create a cowl.  I'm aiming for five bands of colours, as I like an uneven number, but I'll see how it goes.

...this is now!

I am going very slow, as I'm sitting with a troubled right hand and stubborn trigger finger that might have to undergo surgery, so I'm alternating with The Dark Side and finally turned to my Voolenvine Smitten DK Outlander, of which I have One Skein, al the way from NY via Ireland, to the Garden Route!  I really want to be really sure of what I'm going to make with this, so surfed patterns for ages on Instagram, Ravelry and Pinterest.  This was narrowed down to Something Knitted, more specifically a scarf, either shallow or asymmetric triangle, in colour blocks of stripes.

Easy, eh?

Except that my top 5 choices seemed to be in Finnish with no English translation to be found On This Planet.  

But then I found the Different Lines pattern, oh yes! Except I've now also visited Linda's Treehouse just around the corner, and there are so many temptations lurking, so there's two colours more to be added to the Outlander and the cowgirlblues Airforce I planned to use with it...So now I'm on Parallelogram with five colourblocks and 724 false starts until I figured out what a yo.x is (newish knitter) and that I would actually like to do it in stocking stitch :-D

The play of these three yarns with each other!

And the Different Lines has another set of special yarns already waiting in the wings...

So I'm busy with those two, mainly.  And reading...reading off  my challenge list, of which I finished two Theme books:

1 - Antarctica - Die sneeu bly altyd wit (Morkel van Tonder) - short, but intense description of Scott's doomed race to get to the South Pole first.

2. Poetry - Katalekte (Breyten Breytenbach - not you typical beach read, as I did; a melancholic, self-depreciating collection of poems by this ex-exiled poet looking at his place in South Africa as he's ageing. 

3. A (younger) classic - That was then, this is now (S.E. Hinton) - I missed the age-rating of this move, when it was released, and because The Outsiders was always one of my favourite books, I was really happy to find this one lurking in a second hand store.

I think that's enough for January.  Together with moving furniture around and throwing things out (my equivalent of spring cleaning usually happens between Christmas and New Year!) and general decluttering/re-arranging/putting up shelving etc.

Knitting happens every second or third day and from now most likely while waiting for a school sport to finish!

And reading sometimes on the beach :-)