okay, i admit it. i might have been a wee bit perturbed that my fancy pants expensive camera stopped functioning less than a year into ownership (not to mention whilst in my final days of law school). indeed, i may have been even more concerned when the solution was to ship it off to some seemingly sketchy place in the Midwest, without any indication of when i might see my precious camera again. in fairness, the instructions were: put it in a reasonable sized box, use packing material, include your receipt and this case number and ship it to IL; it seemed sketchy. (i insured the crap out of the package and got delivery confirmation)

but i'll tell ya what: i shipped that package exactly one week ago yesterday. from the delivery confirmation, i know that it arrived in IL on Saturday. Today, my now fully functional camera arrived back on my doorstep. glory, hallelujah, i'm a believer!

here's the type of "quality" pictures my camera was taking before (this is my living room, in case you couldn't tell... ):

and here, my friends, are pictures taken today... and some actual knitting content!

(p.s. check out the chair that is modeling the scarf. yes, i own it. it came from my grandmother's living room, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die. my sister has the matching one. when my grandma moved into her condo, we claimed them immediately and have been basking in the awesomeness ever since.)

i finished the entrelac scarf yesterday (and have already worn it once... stupid unseasonably cold weather is good for something, i suppose). i love it. it's warm and swishy, and generally wonderful. it took more yarn than i ever would have guessed (although, it is a pretty wide scarf). I used about 5 and a half skeins of Artyarns supermerino handpainted. i'm not going to block it because i prefer the textured look of entrelac unblocked in a scarf (oh, and also i'm lazy).

this scarf went much faster than the last entrelac i tried... obviously size 7 needles and 3 squares across are faster than size 4 needles and 4 squares across... but also i'm waaaay faster at picking up stitches than i used to be (hurray for progress!) also, knitting in a handpainted yarn for color variance and weaving in 10 ends rather than knitting two colors and having to weave in 130 ends (oh, how i wish that was an exaggeration) was a big step in the right direction, sanity-wise.

immediately after i finished the entrelac, i did some bandwagon-jumping. i kept looking at the chevron scarf flickr group and salivating. then i saw this pattern, which is similar, but "pointy-er" and it was all over. besides, i left my newly purchased sock needle set at my parents house in PA, not to mention the fact that i had decided that i didn't want penis socks. so, that left the STR sock club yarn (and frankly, the colorway didn't excite me that much. it's lovely, really, just not very "me") with no intended purpose. i also had some cherry tree hill solid red sock yarn laying around (don't ask me why. i swear to you, i have as yet never knit a sock in my life).

anyway, i totally love the result. it's quite different than anything i saw on the flickr group (which makes me proud. i tend to see something i like and then copy it EXACTLY).

also, this is the progress after less than 1 day of sporadic knitting on size 4 needles. i realize it's a skinny scarf, but, man, either i'm getting faster or this baby just really flies off the needles!