What to do in May

I don't think I ever made knitting goals for April. In fact, April just whipped by a bit fast and here we are in May! Arthur has only 6 weeks of school left! The garden has sprung into being without me digging out that wretched patch of grass properly! Aaaack!

Okay, so let's settle down with some knitting.

1. Felted Tweed Botticelli
2. May square
3. grey socks -- or perhaps start another plain pair of socks??
4. sew together that dang blanket. Actually, if I finish it soon, I might even have a baby to give it to! 

It is the start of a new Project Spectrum. I have not really participated in the last couple of years, but now we are back to a colour family a month, and I am keen. I took some pictures of my red/orange/brown Botticelli, but it is dreary outside and the flash pictures I took inside look awful. Never fear: I have some others for you.

The rusty orange yarn, mmm.

A shiny red apple, mmm.

Ick! Pretty colour, but do I really have to interact with them?

I have joined a group on Flickr to participate in MacroMay. It just means one takes pictures through the macro lens... So I took a few red ones, and a green one, too!

We're ready for Project Spectrum

My fingers are itching to get going on the next big thing. I have knit all I'm going to knit on the big black shawl for now, though I still have enough black to do a big swag of some kind across the top.

As you can see, it is huge. It's drying on three beach towels on the study floor.

Here's the bottom bit, with zigzaggy trim on the left and leaves on the right. Beads in the very bottom of the triangle. A dark grey dangly bit on the left.

The top. I love that leaf pattern! And look how it opened out so marvellously.

One of the unattached bits. I'm not sure if they will get tacked up onto the body of the shawl or left to dangle leprously. In any case, I am not obsessing about that anymore, but will let it dry and trim my ends and wrap it around my shoulders and see if I need to do more at some point. But, it's time to move on!

So, I could {mumble mumble finish mumble socks blanket mumble} or I could start my Felted Tweed Botticelli!

I have a great excuse now: Project Spectrum starts with red, and my sweater starts with red, too! 

If I ignore everything else, I could get this baby done in the red, green, blue and pink/purple months. Yeah, we know how that will work, but I will surely get started.

I figure the back will be something like 150 rows long, which means I can do two-row stripes, changing contrast colours every 16 or 20 rows, and go from red and orange, through my various greens, to blue and purple. I'll sort out the sleeves when I need to! I'm trying not to worry about matching two-row stripes through a set-in sleeve just yet...

I would like to do the whole thing in one piece to the armholes, but there is side shaping and front shaping and I think it will work better if I actually follow the pattern.

Who knows what a tweedy rainbow on a tweedy brown background will look like, but we shall soon find out.

I think it'll be Botticelli

I have finished the knitting bit of the Noro cardigan, and just have to sew a few seams and make a teeny tiny buttonband.

So I have got the Felted Tweed out and spread it around the house.

My crazy ideas seem to have merged into the lovely Botticelli pattern (rav link, or someone's WIP on Flickr) with some sort of multicoloured fabric. I have lots of brown (not quite enough to make the whole thing in the one colour), a few balls of grey, and a rainbow of contrasting colours.

The Barbara Walker mosaic pages got well looked-over this weekend. (See a selection here.) I also stopped and stared at a pattern I'd put into the denim cardigan I made last year. Where did I stumble across that? Do I need a pattern or could I just sit down and try to remember/figure out what I'd done? Argh.

Or, should I just keep the plain stocking stitch of the Botticelli, but do two rows of brown, two of something else, in a rainbow progression up the whole sweater? I think I could get all the colours in if I changed the contrast colour every 18 or 20 rows.

Hmm. Pretty; should work; I haven't made a plain stocking stitch thing for a long while, it seems; and I'll have plenty left over to make a mosaic-patterned wrap!

Oh, yeah, but first I should sew a seam or two. And paint the bathroom, buy Arthur a raincoat, find some groceries somehow...