Last week, I finished two circular shawls that I have wanted to do for a while!
The Shipwreck Shawl is my absolute favorite. I knit it on Tahki's Dream, which is now a discontinued yarn. Why do they always discontinue the stuff that I really like? It took six balls. It looked really weird while I was knitting on it, but, as you can see, it blocked beautifully. It has a bounce and a flounce that compliments the stitch pattern and drape. The outermost section is a simple "yo, k2tog", but beware----if you drop a stitch, you'll have a dickens of a time trying to pick it up. I strongly recommend the use of a lifeline every 3-4 rounds! This shawl is bringing more oo's and ah's than anything else I have in the shop! You can find the pattern for this shawl in the spring '09 edition at
http://www.knitty.com/.
The second shawl is the Vortex Shawl. I have a bunch of Noro's Kureyon Sock yarn in stock, and as many of you have expressed, it's really not an ideal yarn for socks. So I've been looking for other projects that could benefit from this yarn. I tried this shawl because I thought the long color repeats could be quite interesting with this swirly stitch pattern. And I chose the gaudiest colorway that I could find, a throwback to my hippie days! This yarn also blocked wonderfully. I used a product sample of "Soak", which may be why the yarn became so soft after blocking. You can find this pattern online at
http://www.knitterontherun.vox.com/.
Master Knitter Program Level 1 Progress Report:
I have been knitting, reknitting, and reknitting swatches! I had a particularly difficult time with the horseshoe cable: my knit stitches before the purl stitches were terribly enlarged! I thought I was going crazy when I looked at other cable work I had done, and there were no problems with the stitch tension. I must have done this swatch 6 times, trying different techniques to relieve the problem. Finally, I decided it wasn't my knitting tension,. . . it was my mental tension! So after a particularly potent vodka tonic, I did swatch #7, and voila--it was perfect!
Yesterday I blocked the first 8 swatches to be submitted and wrote out the answers to the questions relating to those swatches. They are still drying, but I'll have pictures of them in the next post! I'm learning a lot, simply by looking up information for the required references.
Baby Bradley is doing well, growing, and getting to know his mom and dad. He and his parents will be spending the week of Labor Day with us, so I'll have a chance to get to know him better. Here he is, at 4 weeks of age.
Talk to you soon!
