Soap Sweater and an Update

While at the Woodstock Fleece festival in October, I purchased three Honey and Lavendar (sic) All Natural Handmade Soaps from the Pioneer Brand Honey people. They smell wonderful! I've been storing them in my linen closet since then with plans to give them as Christmas gifts.

Recently, I was browsing on Ravelry and came upon Cynthia Hall's Soap Sweaters and thought they'd be perfect for the fragrant soaps. I hauled out some Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool from my stash and in about an hour, I finished the project.

I really liked the feel of this yarn and there is excellent yardage in the 227g (8 oz.) skein - 425m (465 yd.) I'm not sure why I haven't knit more stuff with this yarn. I think it's the label that has scared me as it states it's "Perfect For Felting" and most of the items I knit aren't for felting. It would be great for an afghan that isn't likely to be mistreated or need washing very much as it definitely calls for hand-washing.

In capybara scarf news, I finally have photos of the second half of the scarf. You may remember that I knit the first half from a graph I did using regular graph paper with squares. The resulting design looked squashed. So I re-did the design on graph paper that reflected my gauge (5 sts/8 rows = 1") and knit the design of the second half.

Ta da!

They look much better now. I have about another foot of stocking stitch to knit before finishing the 2nd half. Then I'll go back to the first half and cut out the squashed capybara, pick up the stitches above the 'faux fringe' and re-knit using the revised graph, then graft it to the stocking stitch part.

When I switched to two circular needles for the stocking stitch (red sts on one and black sts on the other) I should have gone up one needle size. When I finish the knitting and grafting, I'm going to wet block the scarf and pull the sides out to the correct dimension. That should take care of the gauge issue.