Perfect for Gnomes

I made a lovely Estonian lace shawl during my first few months here in Glasgow.  It knit up amazingly quickly -- largely because I knew a total of zero people in town and had no internet at home, so spent all my free time knitting -- and I was epically pleased with it.  Unfortunately, I finished it up to and including knitting and attaching the border before I could no longer delude myself that it was in no way possible it would block out to an appropriate size for an adult, unless that adult desired a knitted neckerchief:

Those are a tape measure and a copy of Charlotte Brontë's Villette, a trade-paperback sized book which incidentally is fantastic, shown for size.  As well as my toes, shown because I couldn't be arsed to crop the photo before I posted this.

The tragic irony is that I actually DID knit a gauge swatch for it, which I often don't do for lace projects like shawls, where blocking can cover a multitude of ills and the specific size isn't all that important.  Too bad there was a misprint in the swatch instructions, as far as I can tell, because there's essentially no correlation between the stitches and size as printed for the swatch and for the finished project.

The good news is that it provided another several evenings' worth of entertainment to rip the whole thing out, then steam and re-wind the yarn.  Now I'm working on a different variation of the pattern.  I enjoy Sisyphean make-work.

Babies: "That High-Contrast Shit is Giving Us Headaches"

So, I recently found this awesome baby blanket pattern at Knitty that I would like to make, although I'm not sure for whom, since my fantastic nephew is over a year old now and my only friend with a new baby is an amazing knitter herself:

I especially like that it isn't annoyingly twee, and that it can be really high-contrast, since babies are supposed to like that. Which makes me wonder: how exactly do we know that babies love contrast? What if they don't, and only stare fixedly at it (or whatever makes us think they like it) because they're wondering how something so eye-poppingly fugly came to be? Or they're really gaping in horror? That would be kind of funny.