The Alpaca Is Thrilled...

...and so am I! The Alpaca Arrowhead Stole is finally finished. Moose's giant Pooh was gracious enough to model the finished object for us.

Once upon a time in May, I stepped into my LYS intending to find some yarn for my first attempt at a sweater. I fell in love with this lovely violet-blue alpaca worsted. At first, I tried to force it to be a tunic sweater much like the one I just completed. It did not want to be a sweater; it wanted to be an Aran shawl. After a few days, the yarn changed its mind yet again, and it no longer wanted to be an Aran shawl. This time it wanted to be an Arrowhead Lace Stole, and I allowed the yarn to have its way. After several false starts--the width had to be just right--the stole was finally underway. The alpaca has been patient through my many cheating moments as I stole time away to work on other projects--especially the lilac sweater. It had grouchy moments too, and I could hear it calling me from where I stashed it. Now, we are living in harmony as the alpaca has been converted to my lovely shawl, and I will have something warm and toasty this winter.

Since the alpaca is off the needles, I've decided to ignore those pesky socks and slippers and dedicate some time to knitting a mini-Clapotis for LNO, the daughter of my friend. Her birthday is in November, and I want to have her present stashed away well before the big day and to give myself enough time to finish it since school is starting soon. Sometimes teaching really interferes with my knitting time. (It's really just a test run for my own Clapotis while I wait for my Lisa Souza Max yarn to arrive. I want to be in the groove and knitting smoothly for the real thing!) Here's my problem:

I am not too keen on how the pink is "pooling" in the middle of the scarf at the moment. (For some bizarre reason, it looks much better in the picture than in person.) I tried to stop the pooling by doing another repeat of increase rows, but that made the mini-Clap too wide. Ripping it back to one fewer set of increases makes it too narrow. The Clapotis pattern doesn't seem amenable to easily switching skeins of yarns, so I guess I'm stuck with it. I'm glad it's not mine, because it would make me crazy. I'm hoping that opening up the dropped stitches may lessen the pooling effect. I am also trusting that a pre-teen just won't care about small things like color pooling in her scarf.