Thanks everyone for your very kind comments on the Trellis cardigan! Tonight was the birthday boy's party and the parents (and all the guests) were very impressed! Dontcha love impressing people with your knitting? (Especially when you know it was pretty easy to do, ha ha).

Well, we still haven't gotten a frost here but most of the trees here have at least a quarter of their leaves changed! And the maples are pretty much completely changed already. The cold weather we've been having the last few weeks has really pushed things along.

I'm very excited to announce that I've started the ruffles on my shawl:
I was trying to figure out how many stitches are on my needles, 'cause it sure seems like a lot. If I calculated correctly, the last row before the ruffles was about 430 stitches. For the ruffles, I will be increasing 152 stitches on each of the first six rows and then knitting straight for the last six rows. Which I think means that at the end of the increases, I should have something like 1,300 stitches on the needles! Yikes...that's gonna be a fun cast-off! I've already done the first two increase rows and it's taking me over an hour to do a row now.

I also started yet another new project...convertible mittens for G. He has a store-bought pair that he frequently uses in the spring and fall for work (he has an outdoor job but he still needs to be able to write and stuff), but they are full of holes and falling apart. Here is the start of the first one:
I am basing these on the Broad Street pattern from Knitty, but with one significant difference:
If you can see here, the inside is the right side of stockinette too, because I'm double knitting them. I wanted to try to make them thicker since single-knit sport weight yarn doesn't seem all that warm to me. I'm not sure how it will come out, but they're moving along pretty quickly so I should know soon. And the fabric definitely feels really warm. The yarn I'm using is Gems Quartz merino in color "Finch" (now discontinued). It is a three-ply yarn with black, red, and gray, and I really like the way it knits up. The only annoying thing is this yarn likes to twist, but I'm dealing with it.