I found some pinkness

This poor old bit of a shawl was sitting in a corner, just waiting for me to return to it. I now have the perfect idea of what to do with it when it's done, so I dug it out and am once again having a ball with it!

It doesn't look very pink here, but it will, it will!

The bottom point, adding the 3rd row of scallops

Top left-hand corner, with pink!

The whole thing, thus far

I hope nothing terrible happens, like running out of yarn. Certainly I could add another kind of Noro sock yarn, but I'd rather not!

It's a bit of a scrumpled mess, but it will block out divinely, I am sure. 

 A bit of a pink leaf

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.

Progress on the witchy shawl

We all know that I am just going to jump right in to my next teeny-needle, follow-a-pattern sweater any day now, but I somehow picked this project out of the basket a few days ago and have been amusing myself with it a great deal.

It's quite easy to knit up a ball of yarn if you say, "Just one more row" a few times, and the rows are over 200 stitches long! I finished the main body of this crazy thing, and I know it is finished because I have no more of that yarn.

I started to put an edging along the top, knitting sideways onto the live stitches. I was using some 4-ply alpaca I got at a yarn swap, but it was too thin on its own, so I went and found some green 4-ply cashmere/wool that I got long ago on sale at Lettuce Knit. Now I am making a simple eyelet zigzag border... only about 220 more stitches to pick up. Argh!

Starting at the bottom we have the beads -- I had a wee bit of this thread-with-beads-on, and I just held it with the black for as long as I could.

sunny day, take a picture

Then we have the grey sock yarn thrown in, and a stitch pattern that went a bit wonky, but who cares?

At the end I used a pattern called Apple Leaves from my old stitch dictionary. It is not the same as other Apple Leaf patterns, so I cannot give you a link right now. Nonetheless, it is a fine pattern and as I was working it, I thought I should have made the whole dang shawl in this pattern!

I'm not sure it'll be so 3-D after I block it. I love this!

And here we have the beginning of the edge. My gawd, alpaca held together with cashmere and wool makes for the softest, squooshiest fabric ever! The main shawl is made with a wool/silk blend, and it is perfectly soft, but the edge is divine, I must say!

Soft, yet garish

I mean to make big, fancy edgings down the sides, and I would like to have strips dangling here and there, but am not sure they would dangle nicely without weighing things down and pulling the edges out of shape. I shall have to see how things go. I have a few bits and bobs of yarn left, some grey and some black Patons Classic Wool, and a ton of grey Cascade 220.

Back to our regular programming

Ah, the furnace is new and shiny and working! There might be a water-heater issue, and there's sure to be an air-conditioning issue, but I think that mainly we are done with that business.

old furnace. Ick.

new furnace. Nice!

The day I spent at my friend's house, I knit on the witchy shawl. I now have about 150 stitches across the top, and I have 3 more balls of the basic black yarn, so I should end up with a pretty nice big triangle!

I'm not sure why that grey pattern bit went so wonky.

I'm pretty sure I followed the pattern for the stitch, except for making it gartery instead of stockingy. But it definitely wants to slant. Huh.

Yesterday was cotton blanket day, and I didn't get much more than one corner done. But I only need to do a tiny bit more before all the squares are done and it just needs to be sewn together and edged somehow. La de da, just a wee bit of finishing, shouldn't take long(er than a month or three).

Today is Noro cardigan day, but it is also grocery day and teach-Arthur's-class-to-knit day, so I'm not hopeful that much will get done. The weekend is a free-for-all, knitting-wise, so I might finish knitting the blanket, or I might do more on the shawl, or on the Waving Lace socks.

Oh, socks!

For some obscure historical reason, I am on a mailing list for the Textile Museum, and the latest newsletter had a wee mention of a sock workshop (scroll down) with Lucy Neatby! I have looked at her shawls and scarves, but never paid attention to her socks... and they are not your standard socks. Of course, I have e-mailed for registration info!

I hope to have both the Waving Lace and some Embossed Leaves done by the end of February. (This sounded so reasonable at the beginning of January, but now seems absurd.)

I mean to learn to do toe-up socks, and thought I would try that out before going to this workshop. Yeah, and I also thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to wear a scarf designed by her; I have a pattern!" Oh, Mary, get a grip!

A new idea

Sometimes I am so clever. Really.
The other day when I was at the place where one renews one's driver's license, I sat for some time knitting happily on my new sock-in-bag, but also took some time to write the odd list. (I had kind of a lot of time.)

One of my lists was really more of a table: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And under each day I put a knitting project: cardigan, sock, February square, witchy shawl, cotton blanket.

So far, I have kept to that pseudo-schedule. I knit on something for a day, and then move on.

On Thursday, instead of walking past the bag with the witchy shawl in it and cursing, I got the knitting out, found a stitch pattern and a bit of sock yarn, and made some progress!

It is supposed to be crazy, you may recall.

I am now on my third ball of this lovely soft blue-black wool/silk yarn. Soft and lustrous.

Of course, today I am supposed to make progress on something else, so I'm a bit disappointed about that! And I have no plan for the weekend! But we shall see if I make another list for the future, or if I just slip into my old habits of working on whatever I please at the moment. I might just give this idea a bit of a chance.

It's all her fault, she started it

You may have heard of the recent outbreak of Startitis in Toronto. When I read this article, I boldly declared that, although I had knitting all over the house, and although I have unrealistic ideas about how fast I can knit, I might possibly be "immune" to this malady.

Not so! I think that even by reading that blog, I may have picked up some fatal microbes.

I was looking through my favourite shawls on Ravelry, just for fun, you know, and discovered that one I showed you last time: the Fan Shawl. And once upon a time I found an on-sale ball of a different colourway of Noro Kureyon Sock yarn, which would look so lovely knitted up in this way. Annnnd, the shawl is made in those little bits, so easy and quick, not really time-consuming knitting at all!

Oh yeah, and it snowed! A lot! One needs a new shawl (or cardigan or socks) in this weather!