Deep Knit

I don't know what happened to me. I'm knitting all the time. I'm knitting like I need to knit in order to keep my house from falling down. Actually, it would probably help my house if I stopped knitting and paid a little bit more attention to that water damage next to the dormer. I have officially overcome my knitters block and am completely in love with wool again. I'm so crazy for the sheepy stuff that I managed to churn out a sweater for my son only days after receiving the yarn for Christmas. I finished a sunflower tam with only minimal complaining due to a bad reading of the instructions. I finished a hat for my brother in two days, and promptly cast on for a sock. I knit so much, and so hard, that I ran out of materials for my vacation knitting.
Now that I've settled in at home, I'm attempting the knitters equivalent of walking the high wire. I'm knitting this. This, for those of you who are not on Ravelry, is what looks like a very, very complicated lace stole named "Swan Lake". There are 45 pages of charts and instructions.....Fourty five. Spelling it out seems more impressive. I'm swatching with a lace weight superwash merino that I bought while in Italy, but I might just take an hour to dig out a paleozoic era ball of cream colored lace weight alpaca. I know it's in the stash somewhere, but it's pre-Ravelry, so I've got no idea what it is, or how many yards there are. All I can remember about it is that the lady at the yarn store said I'd never run out. She better be right about that.
I've knit lace before, but never something on this scale. I'm more than a little intimidated by the charts, but I'm ignorant enough to have enough confidence to go ahead with it.
I'm also more than half way through knitting "Owls". I've gotten all the way to the yoke, and am in need of 10 minutes of relative calm for connecting the sleeves to the body. I haven't got enough yarn for a full length version, so I chopped the sleeves off. I moved the shaping to the sides, as there have been some complaints about the original shaping. The yarn I'm using is Cocoon from Rowan. It's wonderfully soft, and I think it has enough mohair in it to keep it from pilling like mad.
Thankfully, the weather has been cooperating with my knitting obsession. We've had lots of fluffy snow. I don't have any photos of all of this frantic knitting. Maybe that's because I'm spending all of my time knitting. I'll leave you with a few parting shots of our snowy wonderland.