Two Good Things

How on earth is it already Thursday? This has been one heck of a busy week. The good news is that (a) it's almost over and (b) Rainbow is back home! So things will soon feel back to normal.

The first good thing I have to share is that I have a new pattern out! Yesterday, Knit Picks released its Radiance knit accessories collection, and I have a shawl pattern in it that I've had to keep secret for a very long time (keeping this kind of secret is the one thing I hate most about designing). This is Frenemy:

This is a top-down crescent-shaped shawl using two colors of fingering weight yarn (in this case, Knit Picks' Hawthorne). The name comes from my love/hate relationship with intarsia, which seemed a necessary technique to get stripes that only go partway across the shawl. I have done intarsia in the past and I really like the outcomes that it gets you, but I hate having to do it. There are always too many balls or bobbins of yarn to deal with, the inevitable tangles, and the ever-present tension issues. So when I got the idea for this shawl, I knew there had to be a way to achieve the intarsia look without the actual intarsia technique, and the answer is some strategically placed short rows.

As in my Mini Maximization shawl, you use two strands of yarn for this shawl, and they're connected at all times, though you're only ever knitting with one at a time. Because it's knit entirely in garter stitch, the short rows are easy to do and easy to make neat. And because there are four different lines of Hawthorne yarn, there are endless possibilities when it comes to color combinations.

For the time being, this pattern is available exclusively through Knit Picks. You can get it as part of the whole collection (which is for sale as both a beautiful print book and an ebook), or you can get the pattern individually as a PDF download.

The second good thing to share is that I have a finished sweater sleeve! What's more, I managed to finish it using only one skein of yarn, which suggests that if the same goes for the second sleeve, I might just have enough of the yarn I originally ordered to finish the sweater.

I've already started the second sleeve, as you can see, and I still have most of the last skein of yarn remaining for the button bands. I'm crossing my fingers that it's enough!