Hallelujah, I finished all the blasted seed bags last night. I still have to cut them apart but I plan on doing that while my student starts counting and sorting.

And then - when the going gets stressful, the stressed start new projects. My order from joann.com FINALLY came (never again will I order from them; it took them over a week just to process my order and tell me that one thing was out of stock, then it took a week for the order to reach me.). I ordered a bunch of "Imagine" - none of the stores around me sell it and I had heard bad things about the Lion Brand online merchant (Armadillo handworks), so I went with JoAnn.

I guess lots of other people wanted the "Maize" Imagine to make the crocheted cat out of Piecework; I ordered two balls (to be 'safe') even though the pattern calls for one, and I apparently got the single last ball of Maize Imagine that they had. (I hope the pattern is correct, that it only takes one ball).

I also ordered some black, in case I wanted to do a second cat.

And some cerise, for the moebius scarf that was in the first Knit-It.

And, some in "Moody Blues" for the crocheted scarf in the fall 2003 "Family Circle Easy Knits". (I ordered three balls because the Moody Blues is a print, and Lion Brand makes the print balls shorter because they are more expensive to make. It's an important thing to remember). I cast on (is that the right word in crocheting?) for the scarf, crocheted a couple of rows, thought "this doesn't look right". Turns out the pattern calls for too few stitches to be chained initially, if I am reading the pattern right, to get the same number of "boxes" as the scarf in the picture.

Also, it looked too loose and "sleazy." So I ripped back and started over with 34 chains rather than the 28 called for. And I used a hook 1 mm smaller (ummm...an H rather than a J?). It looks better now, and I'm finding it kind of fun for a change, to crochet. And the variegated looks nice, nicer, I think, than the plain green. This will be a scarf-to-look-cute-in rather than a scarf-to-keep-your-neck-warm (to paraphraze EZ), because it is so hole-y.

Aha. There is a correction on this pattern here. D'oh. My fix is almost identical to theirs - I just chained fewer sts initially.

I feel proud of myself for figuring out a decent fix from the picture.

< soapbox >
It does irritate me - as I posted on Socknitters yesterday - how sorry the state of proofreading of EVERYTHING that is published has become. It's not like there aren't still people around smart and alert enough to catch these errors, so it must be the megacorp publishers figuring they can cut costs. Grr. If I ever write a book or publish knitting patterns, I will pay out of my own pocket for people to beta-test them - because I think the ill-will generated by having an errorful pattern is worse than the extra expense of hiring someone to check it over.

< /soapbox >