Hetalia Town Square

Knitting:

• Finished: Aeolian Shawl. This was technically a destash project, and for that it served its purpose well. I used up most of the 3-ply cashmere from my mom's stash and the clearance beads I got from my LYS. Now I'm down to 6g of cashmere and ~30 beads, which is good, because after having to put on some three hundred beads while knitting, I'm never beading again. (The pattern's beading suggestion goes up to 1000+ beads — why.) The cashmere yarn is such a dream to work with. Unlike a lot of other animal fibers, it feels soft and drapes so well even without the superwash treatment. Unlike plant fibers, it actually has elasticity and grabs onto itself when knitted up. Truly the best of both worlds. If only cashmere were cheaper!
• Current WIPs:
  • Keisarin Morsian socks. I'm about a sock and a quarter in. Knitting at >= 36 sts/10 cm produces a fabric that is tidy and dense, but weaving in that blue-black yarn under poor lighting destroyed my eyesight :D In progress photos on my Ravelry project page here.
  • Humle Top by Lene Tøsti, free pattern published by Järbo. People say Nordic patterns are too tersely written. Clearly not true in this case, as the designer gave really valuable tips for neater sleeve bind off and underarm cast on. Plus, I'm mostly taking the lace chart and the concept of the garment to do my own thing. It's kind of two steps forward one step back with my progress, since I'm making extensive modifications on the flu, but it's actually great fun. This one is also a destash project, btw — I bought 3 skeins of Sandnes Garn Sunday in a discontinued colorway a few months back. The yardage should be just enough, but we'll see.
• On hold:
  • Cobbs Beret: frogged the election anxiety hat I made last year (fit was weird, tubular bind off for k2p2 ribbing was a terrible idea, never knitting a top-down hat again, my anxiety was too justified) to make this pattern. The pattern is really beautiful, with travelling cables and a little bit of lace. I'm just not in a mood for cables right now! It's just been sitting in my project bag.
  • Celestial Hand Warmers by Kajsa Vuorela, published by Purl Soho. I'm 99% done with the knitting. The issue is that I made one hand warmer, didn't like how long it went over my fingers, made the other hand with shorter cuffs and liked those, so now I need to snip the bind off on the first one and frog back the cuff to match. It shouldn't feel daunting, but I am daunted. Otherwise I'm pretty happy with how the project turned out. I liked my color combination and the stranded colorwork turned out nice enough, considering I've never done it before. I also have enough yarn left that I could make another pair with the reversed color scheme, just not in the summer.

I'm doing three summer courses this summer! Two of them are math: linear algebra and probability. Linear algebra is fine, so far. Prob is much worse than linear algebra, because it requires real world common sense that I do not have. We'll see how that goes!