Slow knitting month

Yeah, so I'm not great about posting... Sigh.

I've been working on a bat shawl for a friend from high school.  I've been wanting to make this thing for about a year, and a couple months ago she mentioned that she likes bats. Ha! An excuse to knit the shawl!

This is it about two weeks ago:

I'm working on the border now and am having a hard time.  See, the yarn I bought for this shawl is actually sock yarn, so it's really thick.  It's a pretty substantial shawl.  So I started the border, which involved picking up more than 300 stitches (and if you know me, you know picking up stitches is the bane of my existence).  It then calls for six rows of stockinette (3 rows knit, 3 rows purled, ugh, purling 900 stitches...).  Now that I've knit those six rows, and the next four rows of border pattern... the six rows are way too wide.  The border is just going to be insanely huge.  I want to rip them out.

But I don't want to knit all those stitches again!  And I don't want to risk having to rip everything out and pick them up again!  Gah. I might just finish the border and look the other way and hope no one else is bothered by the wide stockinette portion.

I might try to post pictures of the problem later, but the shawl is all scrunched up on a circ and it's hard to see what's really going on.

In other news, over Christmas I learned, against my will, to knit socks.  I'm now addicted.  But I still only have one picture to show off (and, really, only one sock done).

First sock:

At the beginning of January I picked up my Random Stripe Blanket and worked on it for a while.  It's about twice this size now:

So, almost big enough for my absurd personal blanket requirements!  One of my Harmony needles came apart and I had to order new ones from Knitpicks before I could continue (I tried working with one size 10 and one very small needle and switching them back and forth at the end of every row, but that was tedious and not very much fun).  They finally got here and I knit ONE ROW.  Then I decided I wanted to finish this for the Ravelympics on Ravelry, which means I'm not allowed to knit on it at all from Jan 12th to Feb 12th.  So I set it aside.

Then, the other night, I was cold at the computer, so I pulled the blanket up around me and huddled in it (yep, aaaaalmost the right size to be done. Just another foot or two or three...).  I even put point protectors on the needles so the stitches wouldn't fall off while I was huddling.  The next night, I leaned across the chair to the desk for some reason, and put my foot on said chair... and heard a snap.  Knitpicks Zephyr needles will snap if you step on them, folks!  Now, aren't you glad I did that research for you?

I think if I can find the other needle (the mate to the one that broke the first time), then I will just carry on and not worry about replacing the broken Zephyr.  One Harmony plus one Zephyr is still a pair, yeah?