WIPW v.27 - and a Giveaway Winner!

First things first:  Thanks SO much to everyone who entered last Wednesday's pattern giveaway, and especially to everyone who wandered over to Eskimimi's blog to offer cheering thoughts and snag some amazing deals on patterns.  14 folks entered the giveaway for my extra Snowbaby Hat pattern, and here's what Random.org's number generator well... generated:

Lucky #7 is bbatting!  The Snowbaby Hat pattern has been zapped off to you this evening.  Enjoy!

And now for those pesky works in progress...  The Burbery Inspired Cowl is all done, save for grafting the ends together, so we'll save the pictures for Friday.  Suffice to say, this was a super quick knit, and I'm excited to wear it.

In other news, the cable lace vest situation isn't as dire as previously thought.  Phew!  Turns out I was supposed to measure from the side, not from the front (where there were loads of short rows put in), and the length isn't too far from where it should be.

I have to say, I'm not loving this pattern.  It has complicated instructions that look like this:

BO 5 sts at beg of nxt row, work 1 row even, then BO 5 at beg of next row. Then dec 1 st at armhole edge on every row 5 times, then every other row 3 times.  AT THE SAME TIME: dec 1 st at neck edge on nxt row, then every 6th row 3 times,then every 8th row once.

And that's just too much for my wee little head to track all at once.  So I've resorted to this:

High tech, no?  Writing it by hand helps me to process, but I can't quite see how I'm going to squeeze all of these 1 jillion rows into the next 4" of knitting.  There's also at least one  error in the pattern which left me confused for a while.  Bleh.  I'll pick it up again soon, as I'm determined to get it done.  I'm just worried it's not going to fit at all, but we'll see...

My other WIP this week is my stash.  I got all excited to post new pics to the 2011 Flash Your Stash thread on Ravelry, and so took a new stash picture:

I was dismayed to find that the current stash is actually smaller *gasp* than last year's...

How can that be?

But, if you look closely, you'll see that there's been quite a bit of turnover from one year to the next, which made me feel a little bit better.  This also made me feel a little bit better...

I had no choice, really.  The scrawny stash needed feeding!  And two skeins isn't all that much.  And I'm in LOVE with the colors.  And I'll be casting on new socks tomorrow.  Stay tuned!

And now, if you've made it through all of that babbling, go check out everyone else's WIPW entries for this week.  They're probably less wordy.