The Big Shawl

The shawl is done, and it is large. How big is it? It's so big that I had to block it on our spare queen-sized bed, and I had to pin one end point down the side of it. It's so big that I can't fit the whole thing in the picture!

Pattern: Fountain Pen Shawl [Ravelry link] by Susan Pierce Lawrence, spring 2009 Interweave Knits
Yarn: my handspun two-ply laceweight (80% merino, 20% silk from All Spun Up)
Needles: US 6 (4.0 mm) Knit Picks Options
Started/Completed: July 5/August 12
Dimensions: approximately 83.5" across by 41.5" tall
Mods: none

Don't let the time from cast on to cast off fool you; this was a very fun knit. The only reason it took me as long as it did was because I was a bit busy spinning and knitting little things. The pattern for the body of the shawl is very intuitive, with only two rows that have any particular challenge -- the ones with the nupps.

Ah, the nupps. So much fun and yet so much trouble. They aren't too difficult provided you do the increasing row loosely, but more than once I accidentally purled the five stitches in one together with an adjacent stitch, resulting in some difficulty on the next row. Luckily, my handy tool came in quite handy, and I was able to fix the errors without too much difficulty. I think that if I knit this shawl again, I might use beads in place of the nupps for a different effect.

As always, it was a joy to knit with my own handspun. I love the subtle striping effect I got over the whole shawl. It's not so much that it obscures the lace pattern, but it does add a little interest.

At one point, I'd considered adding an extra repeat or two to the body of the shawl. In the end, I decided that it would be big enough if I followed the pattern as written. Turns out that was a very smart move on my part. Why? Here's what's left of the original almost-900-yard skein:

A whopping three grams of yarn. That was a close one!

Garter, Garter Everywhere

Needless to say, I am not at the Sock Summit this weekend. (Frankly, it's been so long since I knit a pair of adult socks that I'm not sure I'd be qualified to attend!) I am, however, knitting with a lot of sock yarn these days.

Thanks to the donations of Jess, I was able to finish the purple sock yarn blanket square ...

and I'm getting close to finishing a second:

I'm still chugging along on my Fountain Pen Shawl. I got about halfway through the ninth body repeat at Hurricane Knitting last night, but as it looks very much like it did the last time you saw it, I'll spare you another blue blob picture. Finishing it up will be my goal for the weekend -- a realistic one, too, because The Mister has promised to install my new harddrive (and then reinstall all the software I'll need) on my laptop this weekend, so my computer time will be severely limited.

Back to the Knits

Now that the Tour de Fleece is over, I thought it high time to return to my knitting. My Fountain Pen Shawl has been seeing a fair amount of action the past several nights in particular. I'm through five repeats (of ten) for the body. I've been weighing the remaining yarn after each repeat, and if the trend continues, I should have more than enough for some extra repeats should I wish to enlarge the shawl.

I also started another sweater for Rainbow -- this time a February Baby Sweater with the lace (hooray!) using some of my handspun. I've knit a little more since taking the picture, and I'm getting a nice striping effect from the color changes.

You may recall my lamenting the fact that there was a serious lack of purple in my sock yarn stash and that I had one square in Rainbow's blanket that would be unfinished as a result. Well, I should have known that knitters would never let another knitter go without yarn to complete a project -- Jess very sweetly came to my rescue an offered to send me some purple leftovers she had in her stash. I gratefully took her up on the offer, expecting just enough to finish that one square. I never expected to see this when I opened up the package waiting for me yesterday afternoon:

There's not only enough here to finish the one square, I think there's more than enough to do a second purple square. And there's an entire skein of some absolutely gorgeous Hazel Knits Artisan Sock yarn. There's generous, and then there's generous. Thank you so much, Jess!

And Another

These baby sweaters practically knit themselves. Another one came off the needles yesterday.

Pattern: Baby Sweater on Two Needles (aka February Sweater) from Knitter's Almanac by Elizabeth Zimmermann
Yarn: Brown Sheep Nature Spun Sport (100% wool), colorway Bordeaux, approximately 1.5 skeins
Needles: US 5 (3.75 mm) Addi Turbo circs
Started/Completed: July 1/July 8
Mods: widened the neck by casting on more stitches and changed lace pattern to all stockinette for a more gender-neutral garment; also picked up four additional stitches under each arm and decreased them away in the first several rounds

I fully admit that I copied what Jen did with this sweater. I think the result of changing the lace to stockinette makes this look like a cardiganized, child-size version of Cobblestone, a sweater I still love and want to knit one day.

As usual, I knit this sweater entirely in the round. I put the sleeve stitches on scrap yarn and cast on the underarm stitches before finishing the rest of the body. Then I picked up stitches for the arms and knit them using magic loop. The only finishing was weaving in the ends and sewing on the buttons.

Speaking of which, the buttons came from my grab bag and are a light faux horn -- not nearly as light as they appear in the photo.

The Tour de Fleece is continuing, and thus far it's been very successful for me. I'm on my second bobbin of the Rainbow wool top (it's amazing how fast bobbins will fill up when you're not spinning super thin!). I also managed a feat I never imagined -- I won first place in the daily voting for my most recent sock yarn! So I guess you could say I won the yellow jersey for one day of the Tour.

I've been doing so much knitting for Rainbow lately that I thought it was time I started a project for myself. As it is the middle of the Tour de Fleece, I thought it only appropriate that the project be knit from handspun. So I finally wound my merino/silk laceweight and cast on for the Fountain Pen Shawl. I've made it through the set-up chart and the first several rows of the main body chart, and so far, I'm loving it.