Small Victories

After finishing so much in May, I feel a bit like I've been a knitting slacker this month. Thus far, all that's been finished has been small things, like this sock:

I am nearly halfway done with the second sock of the pair as well and hope to have both wrapped up by the end of the week.

Last night I also finished a dishcloth, which is something that's small enough that it hardly merits a real FO post.

This is the Chinese Waves Dishcloth in Lily Sugar'n Cream Ombres in Moondance. I used a size 6 (4.0 mm) needle and cast on 51 stitches, and I ended up using all but a few inches of the entire skein of yarn (I'll admit I did an extra-long weaving in of the end after I bound off to use up as much of the tail as I could). I didn't have time to start it last night, but I already pulled out another ball of kitchen cotton to start another one -- ideally, I'd like to get a stack of these knit up before SSK, as they count toward an SSK knitalong because the designer is a teacher this year.

The other project that's still on the needles (though I hope not for long) is the handspun shawl. It had been seeing a lot of attention during the Stanley Cup Finals, as long rows of garter stitch proved to be perfect for nervous hockey watching, but now that the season is over, I'm anxious to get it wrapped up. I only have a handful of rows left to work before I'm ready to bind off, and I have to say that I'm really pleased with how it's turning out. Here's a peek at it (though once again it's hard to get the full effect when it's all bunched up on the needles):

It will be fun to bind this off and block it if only to get a sense for how large it actually is. To be perfectly honest, I've been kind of designing this as I go, so I really haven't planned for it to be a particular size -- it is what it is. Given that my stitch count is approaching 500, I imagine that it's going to be pretty sizable -- and that's rather impressive considering that I'll have yarn leftover!