Adventure #2: Inside the First Brown Bag

Remember these?

On April 4th, I reached in and chose a bag.

Inside the bag I found this:

Two weeks later, while on vacation in California, I cast on.  Here is my progress to date:

The yarn is Wollmeise Pure, and the pattern is Lintilla, designed by Martina Behm. I am hoping to work on this a bit each day, and I'm targeting finishing around June 1st. 

More to come...

Productive!

During the first three months of this year, I felt like I was plodding through my knitting, but not getting much done. I did finish a few small projects, and one larger one that had been hanging around since 2014, but for the most part, everything else was in progress.

Once I turned the calendar to April, all of a sudden I was finishing projects! That is such a great feeling, and it re-energized my knitting mojo, too. Below is a photo showing almost all of my April finishes. Missing is a cowl that was mostly knit in March and a charity project that had already been donated when I took this photo.

The dark blue item you see underneath is Sally Melville's design, L'Enveloppe, which I call "That Thing". On the left are my Hydrangea Monkeys, which are the no-purl version of the classic Monkey socks. In the upper right is a Click for Babies hat (look for more on Click for Babies and other charity projects in an upcoming post). Finally, the shawl is my Traveling Zoo, Stephen West's Zoolandia shawl. (All links are to my Ravelry project pages.)

I know you can't tell much about L'Enveloppe when it is serving as display background for other projects, so here is a photo of me wearing it. As you can see, it's sort of a poncho. I cast it on right before the Big Road Trip of 2015 last September, and actually knit most of it on the road. Once I was home, it sat for a few months until I was ready to finish it. Now, of course, it's a bit too warm to wear it, but it will be perfect next fall.

There is a tale to tell about the Zoolandia shawl. This is the project that I mentioned in my annual goals post back in January. I cast it on to take with me to the Knitajourney retreat, since I had purchased the yarn at Yarn Harbor in Duluth the first time I attended that retreat, back in 2012. The pattern calls for 438 yards of fingering weight yarn, and I had 430 yards, which I figured would be close enough. After all, what's 8 yards? Big mistake! I hadn't even got to the final pattern retreat and I knew I wasn't going to have enough yarn to finish. So I left out some rows in that final repeat and there was still not enough yarn. Then I decided to look through my stash of partial balls of yarn to see if I could find something that would match one of the colors in the shawl yarn. I came up with about 80 yards of Hazel Knits Artisan Sock in the Violeta colorway, an almost perfect match for the purple bits in the yarn.

So guess what? About halfway through the picot bind off, I started to get nervous—what if I don't have enough yarn to finish? Thankfully, I did, but you can see how much was left in the photo below: that little purple blob of yarn measured less than a yard!

Despite this harrowing finish, the shawl blocked beautifully, and the purple edging looks like a planned design feature, so it ended up a win-win.

There is a lesson in this tale: always read project notes from other knitters. I didn't, but if I had, I would have known that the yardage amount in the pattern was way off. Of course, then I might not have knitted this pattern and I would have missed out on having this pretty shawl.

So Many Shawls

I love shawls. I love knitting shawls.  I love knitting shawls almost as much as I love knitting socks. So, as all of these statements are true, why haven't I shared very many shawl projects here on the blog? I don't really know the answer (except that I have been focusing more on hiking lately), but I am going to rectify that situation by telling you about some of the shawls I have recently knit. (All project links are to Ravelry.)

I'm going to start with my favorite shawl of 2012: Deep Green Waves. The pattern is Ebbtide by Elizabeth Doherty. You might remember my earlier post where I talked about meeting Elizabeth at Sock Summit and Madrona and seeing this shawl in person, not once, but twice. Shortly after I saw her at Madrona, Elizabeth gave me the pattern as a gift, and I immediately cast on. I loved knitting it; the directions were clear and the charts easy to follow. The finished shawl is just spectacular, and I find myself plotting my outfits based on having excuses to wear it. I've included two photos here so you can see me wearing it and so you can also get a sense of the true color of the Skinny Bugga yarn. (The one of me shows the shawl as being teal/almost turquoise rather than green.) The second photo also provides a closer view of the beautiful sand-dollar edging and the unique center spine—wonderful embellishments that were both fun to knit.

Up next is my Blue Crescent Moon. The pattern is the Silk Moon Crescent Shawlette, designed by Jaala Spiro. This shawl couldn't be more different than Ebbtide, and it isn't a coincidence that I cast it on the day after I finished my Ebbtide. The pattern is mostly garter stitch, punctuated periodically with yarnovers. It's knit in Noro Silk Garden on size 9 (5.5 mm) needles. This is probably the fastest shawl I've ever knit—cast-on to bind-off in less than two weeks. I wasn't sure when I finished it how much I would actually wear it, but it turns out that I wear it a lot. It has a permanent spot hanging over the back of the loveseat in our basement family room, and since the weather has turned cold, I grab it to put around my shoulders to wear around the house almost daily. (I'm wearing it as I write this!) It also coordinates so well with many of my casual long-sleeved tees that I can see knitting another one in different coordinating colors in the near future.

The next shawl that I cast on, the day after finishing the Silk Moon Crescent Shawlette, was Wholehearted, designed by Erika Flory. The pattern was given to me as a giveaway prize by Andi, one of my favorite bloggers.  (Be sure to check out her blog, My Sister's Knitter.) My Happy Heart was knit in two gorgeous shades of madelinetosh Merino Light. The pattern was easy, and should have been another quick knit, except for the fact that I had two gift knits that took precedence during much of the summer. When I finally picked this up again in late September, it flew off the needles. It is going to become a Christmas gift for a friend who has had a rough year.

 

My most recent finished shawl is Summer Soul Food, the Balm to the Soul Shawlette, designed by Jaala Spiro. This project was originally part of a knitalong, but, due to the aforementioned gift knitting, I didn't finish this until long after the KAL was over. The yarn I used is Jo Sharp Silk Road DK Tweed in a lovely dusty rose colorway called Paper Rose. I finished knitting this in early October, right after I found out that a dear friend had suffered a freak accident and had broken her pelvis in two places. It was a perfect gift to send off to her with some chocolate to provide a little balm to her soul while she recovers.

So, is that the end of shawls on the blog? Not hardly! Sixteen of the twenty-nine items in my queue are shawls, and there does happen to be one on the needles right now. Here's a sneak peek; I'll come back to tell you more about it when it's finished.