Snail Spirals

I'm taking a couple-day break from the urchin shawl, because... well... the rounds are just so long. I made the mistake of doing up a little spreadsheet on Sunday, to see how far I've actually gotten in terms of percent completed, rather than rows completed. This was not a good idea. I discovered that the body of the shawl will have 210,280 stitches and the edging 50,480--- a total of 260,760 stitches. My spreadsheet doesn't take into account all the cluster stitches, which are one stitch increased to three or five on the first row, knit plain the next, and decreased on back to one on the third. I just counted all that as one stitch, for ease of Excel-ing.

This means that right now I am 22.01% done with the body of the shawl, and 17.75% done with the whole thing. I think the time I spent creating that spreadsheet would have been better spent actually working on the shawl. Sometimes less information is better.

Instead, I have been distracted by crocheting. This is the doily I started back in August, and last showed an updated picture on Oct. 3. I haven't worked on it at all since October, since the snowflake mobile extravaganza got in the way, but I picked it up again Sunday. After struggling through a line of directions which was written COMPLETEY wrong, and ripping out that row and the three following it not once, not twice, but three times, I'm finally back on track.



Cruising along, hoping to finish next weekend sometime.

I didn't get any pictures of the Moss' Elfin butterfly yesterday, but I did come across a beautiful patch of Collinsia parviflora on the top of a rocky, mossy, outcropping in the woods.



The plants are only about an inch tall, and the flowers are about a quarter inch across. I love spring. Along with summer (at least in northern latitudes), fall, and winter, it's my favorite season.