The state of the knitting pile

It seems like a long time since I posted anything much here, and certainly whatever I was knitting last time has been brushed aside.

Here are a pair of socks I finished for Elaine a while back. Fraternal twins, indeed. The yarn, as I recall, was sort of wimpy and splitty, and I don't expect them to wear especially well, but they are fun and warm for now.

This is my living room coffee table. The gold is a hat; the white is a shawl and the purple is some nice wool DK yarn someone gave me. (My friend had been trying to knit a hat for her ex-husband's new baby, but didn't get very far, and in the intervening couple of years, the moths or carpet beetles got at it, so as I unravelled the few rows she had knit, I found 2 or 3 weak spots!)

This you may recognize as the yarn I made my beautiful mitts out of. One day I went in to the corner store, carrying my mittens, and I came out with a few groceries but no mitts! I went back in, looked everywhere, and they had simply vanished. Into someone's pocket, I suspect, but there's no way to know. Big sigh.

So now I am using the leftovers to make a hat. Sticking a red stripe in, with the "hot" yarn from my Temperature scarf.

The hat gets taken with me wherever I go, because you can't really screw up "knit 2, purl 2." This shawl, however, stays put. It's a pattern out of an old Paton's book, called Shawls, but they are all shown as baby blankets.

The yarn is the California Cotton I got a year or two ago. I'm thinking of the summer, but we'll just see how fast I knit, and how much I get distracted. 

I really like the leaves, and I like the old-fashioned instructions. At the beginning of each row you "increase." No more information than that. And all the decreases to shape the leaves are k2tog: no matched, reflected, mirrored decreases here. 

The shaping of the leaves continues into what we might think of as the border, so there are sloping lines of decreases up the outer stitches. The final instruction is to crochet a picot edge around the whole thing; we'll see how that turns out. 

And now you are kind of up to date on what is happening in my knitting pile!