Inspiration and Startitis

On Sunday, I took an all-day class with the amazing Sivia Harding, who was in town this past weekend to teach several classes through my LYS. The class was a side-to-side lace shawl design class, and it was a blast. If you ever get a chance to take a class with Sivia, do it. She's a wonderfully patient teacher and very giving of her knowledge and talents.

We discussed things like the elements of a shawl of this type, different styles of edgings, rates of increases/decreases, and bead placement (if you know Sivia's designs, you know she's a big fan of beads). We sketched and we swatched, and while I didn't come up with a finished design or even necessarily the beginning of one, I have a lot of ideas. Here is my swatch, though it's not necessarily the color/bead combination I would have chosen (I went with yarn and beads that would be easy to see while I worked) and it hasn't been blocked:

I will be playing around with this construction a lot more in the coming months, I suspect.

Meanwhile, I've been fighting with a bout of startitis -- quite simply, I want to cast on a million things. I wound three skeins of handspun over the weekend that were intended for new projects. The first was the skein of BFL handspun that's already becoming a shawl for Rainbow, as you saw in my last post. The second was spun several years ago and is destined to become a baby gift. The third was also spun two or three years ago and has been cast on for the Through the Loops 2014 Mystery Shawl, which I started yesterday.

The yarn is Targhee from Mountain Colors that I spun as a fractal, so the colors are going to slowly fade into one another as they change. The recommended yarn for the shawl was a gradient set, so I figured this was a close approximation. Using this yarn is reminding me how much I enjoy knitting with handspun. I've done it recently with socks, but sock yarn tends to be rather dense in order to be longer lasting; this stuff is fluffy and sproingy and delightful. It's a bit lighter than fingering, so my fabric is likely not going to be as dense as those being knit in commercial yarn, but I love how it's turning out. I am nearly done with the first clue, so I'll have to wait for the weekend for the next installment.