Okay, so the title of this post is a half lie. It's not the first shawl I've ever made, but it is the first shawl that I made for myself. Yup, this one is going to stay in my wardrobe, and not get given to someone as a gift.
It's the Swallowtail Shawl from the Fall 2006 issue of Interweave. I made a bunch of changes to it though. First of all, instead of using a lace weight yarn, I used a sport weight cotton. In fact, it's Shine Sport from Knit Picks in Turquoise. Secondly, because I ran out of yarn just a touch too early, my shawl has a straight edge instead of a wavy one. I actually wasn't a big fan of the finger-like edging, so I'm not really heartbroken.
Here's a close up of the lace.
You can't really see the little bobbles all that well, but they're there. It's supposed to be like little lily-of-the-valley buds.
All in all, a pretty fun knit.
Hey, I knit some socks! I can't even remember when I started these, maybe near the beginning of the year? Anyway, they are finally finished!
The yarn is Sunshine Yarns, in the Wildflowers colourway. I love love LOVE these colours. My gauge was a bit tighter with this yarn than with other sock yarns I've used, so they are a bit snug, but wool is stretchy, right?
I was really planning to finish Tulip today, but things just didn't turn out that way. Here's as far as I got to.
First of all, I want to apologize for the horrible quality of the photo. The flash totally bleached out some of the colours. And the reason why I couldn't finish? Well, you see the partially finished sleeve on the right side of the photo? Well, it turned out that I didn't have enough of the light blue yarn in my kit to finish the stripe on that sleeve. So, I have to make a trek to the yarn store to get some more. I'm gonna see if they have any scraps left of it because I really don't want to buy a whole skein of that stuff just to knit 3 more rounds on the sleeve. But I suppose it wouldn't be terrible to have some of that stuff kicking around in my stash.
The border/edging is puckering a little bit strangely at the bottom, but I'm hoping that a little bit of blocking and maybe some ironing will help solve that. I-cord edging is fun!!
All knitters know that one of the Very Important things to consider when contemplating moving to a new area is the number and proximity of yarn stores. So when I was in Montana recently, I made a bit of time to drop by a LYS before flying back to Boston. I visited Joseph's Coat, a cute little yarn store in downtown Missoula. They are a small shop, but they have a good selection of yarns as well as rovings and some handpainted yarn. I needed some "souvenir yarn", so I bought 4 ounces of handpainted mohair:
And some Mountain Colors yarn. That's a skein of Bearfoot in the colour "Teal", and some pretty mill ends, I can't even remember what the yarn is, wool of some kind at least. Mountain Colors is based in Corvallis, which is literally 10 minutes away from Hamilton (where I was visiting), but sadly I didn't have enough time to visit their dye workshop:
I made a little muppet-like scarf with the mohair boucle. Held together with some Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride worsted, in the colour periwinkle. The scarf is actually not really my style, but it was a nice mindless knit, which is precisely what I was looking for. =)
Now that the Canadian dollar is pretty close the US one, I thought it was time for me to get a few goodies that I've had my eye on for a while at KnitPicks.
This rounds out my collection of dpns quite nicely, and since I've never had any good pins to do my lace blocking with, I figured I'd try those ones out to see how they were. They were only $2 for the box, so I figured it wouldn't be a big deal.
The real fun is this next little item. Like every good engineer, I love gadgets. Like any pack rat, I keep all the left over yarn from projects that I've finished, even if it's just a little bit. Of course it gets difficult to use up those niggling bits of yarn, right? Well, I got this following object to help me with that.
Yup. It's a yarn measuring device. Now I'll know just how much I have left of that superwash merino that made a great baby sweater, but was a bit more than I needed. I'm probably going to wind up knitting a hat or scarf from all the leftover bits of yarn that I have (I will match them by yarn weight though), so that's bound to be interesting. But hey, at least I'll have used up that leftover yarn!
Lastly, a pictorial update on the Tulip baby sweater that I'm working on.
Body's done; time to add the border and sleeves. So far, this has been a really fun knit.
So, I went through the pattern for that placket-neck pullover, and I'm pretty screwed. First of all, the number of stitches to cast on is wrong. That wasn't the biggest problem though since it's only off by one. The sleeves are the same, so no biggie there. The real problem starts when you get to the yoke. All the decreasing is written incorrectly. I'm going to have to pretty much rip everything from right after you add the sleeves. I'm also going to try and figure out where I can introduce the missing stitch. I might have to rip past the sleeves to get that part right.
bleh...
Well, looking at the placket neck sweater pattern hasn't started off well. I noticed that right off the bat, the number of cast on stitches is wrong. Doh! That's not enough to make me rip yet though - I think I might be able to fix that part. I'm still analyzing the rest of the pattern to figure out where things went wrong for me.
But, I was knitting some baby booties from a pattern I got in one of those 'Pattern-a-day' calendars that a co-worker gave me last Christmas. And the pattern burned me again! This time, my knitter's intuition told me that things might be a bit weird. But, some other part of me said, "Well, maybe the construction isn't what I think it is, and the pattern is right after all." And so, I knitted along following the pattern.
Lesson? I should listen to my intuition more. Bleh.
So, I've been knitting my own version of that baby sweater out of Last Minute Knitted Gifts, and I think I've screwed something up. I'm at the part where you're supposed to make the neck placket, and I think I've somehow messed up the decreases at the shoulder. For one of the sleeves, I'm getting dangerously close to the actual seed stitch section as I continue to decrease. I'm going to re-read the pattern again. I sure hope I don't have to rip away too much of my work.
In other news, I've started knitting some socks. They're toe up socks made from that blue/aqua worsted weight Dream in Colour stuff that I bought when I got the peach yarn. I'll take some pictures soon. I know worsted weight isn't usually what you use to make socks with, but it's been a nice fun and quick knit. And remember the beautiful blue, sock weight Koigu Adrienne gave me once upon a time? Well, I've started some socks with them too. I'm trying an experiment - making both socks (toe up) on a single circular needle. It's a little hairy sometimes because I've realized that the needle isn't quite long enough to do the magic loop comfortably, but other than that it's working pretty well.
Pictures of everything to follow!!
