Knitting Chores: A Lamentation

I got my yarn - yay!

It's exactly the colour I wanted and it came packaged with receipts for me!  Which was uber professional-like considering I bought it from a lady on Ravelry.  I recommend looking at the stashes on Ravelry as a way to satisfy yarn needs - I had a really great experience.  One piece of advice is to make sure that the user you buy from is fairly prominent - my seller had over 100 projects completed and seemed fairly active in the Ravelry community.  I felt quite confident that she wasn't some scam artist and it worked out well.

Anyways, pre-cast on always feels like chores.  Balling up yarn is ick.  And Cascade Eco comes in a GIANT skein - I mean look at the size of my hand-wound center-pull ball:

I know, there's no frame of reference, but trust me it's huge.  And ugly too!

That thing probably weighs about 5lbs.  And of course near the end of winding a skein I always end up with something that looks like this:

Giant Mess of Yarn

And that was taken after I'd already spent 15 minutes untangling.  I don't know why I don't just get one of those magical ball winding dealies.

So then I made my gauge swatch.  More chores.  Honestly - getting started on a knitting project is pretty much the longest process ever.

But in the spirit of trying to do things by the book, I knew that I would need to knit my gauge swatch in the round because the pattern is in the round and everyone knows that your purl stitch is a different gauge from your knit stitch so my swatch is more like a tube.  If anyone knows how to knit a gauge swatch "in the round" without actually knitting in the round, you would save me exactly 1/2 of a tube's worth of time and yarn.

And so the casting on must wait another day!  Or two because it seems like I may not have the right size needle to do the cowl and that's the first part.