Oh, the Knits You Can Knit

You guys. I'm having so much fun. Romi's 5th Small Shawl, Taygete, is out and it's a blast. You remember, I got this yarn last year in anticipation of the shawl release. It took a little longer than we expected for the release because Romi wanted to make sure she got the sizing instructions right, and we finally got the pattern on Valentine's Day. Despite the fact that I already have way too much going on, I started. I can't stand to be left out.



That's a crappy iPhone pic, I know. Colors are truer in this pic:



So just kind of use your imagination to merge the two.

I love this pattern. I normally hate stripes, but that's usually because I hate weaving in ends. No ends here! This is a two row stripe pattern so you actually carry the yarn up the sides of the shawl. Romi uses yarnovers at one end of the rows to increase and make the triangle. Those yarnover loops will be picked up later to knit the lace border. I HATE picking up stitches and I love that Romi has included this detail to make the picking up part absolutely painless.

And, here's the best part, to my mind - this thing is never more than 70 or 80 stitches wide. No huge long rows (at least, not until you get to the lace part)!! I'm so excited about this I can't stand it. I hardly ever knit anything twice but unless something goes horribly, horribly wrong, I think Taygete may be my go-to pattern when I need a quick gift for somebody.

I was thinking, too, that it would be awesome to get a skein of black sock yarn and a skein of Noro sock yarn and stripe those - wouldn't that just look fab?? Oh! Oh! I think I have some mini-mochi in my stash!! Oh, the possibilities!!

I love getting jazzed about a new project - even though I have a bajillion things on the needles. In fact, I started a new shawl last night for my charity knitting group. Somewhere I have a simple shawl that's almost finished, but I couldn't find it yesterday, so I just grabbed a bag of charity yarn, printed out a free shawl pattern (rav link), and threw my needle binder in my bag. But, I have so many things on the needles that I didn't have any needle tips in the right size available! I needed 9's and all I had was 8's and 10.5's. I cringed a little but went with the 8's, figuring the 10.5's would be overkill. Anyway, it's a cute, fun knit in worsted weight and I vow I will finish it by the next meeting in March. I go, I knit, but I never actually finish anything, because I am a selfish, selfish little knitter. Maybe I can make a few dozen Taygetes to donate!!

Check check

It was a good weekend for the knitting to-do list.

I finished off Sevillano.



And Avira, the shawlette from the Light and Dark club.


This is the first shawl I've knit from the bottom up, and it was awfully nice to have the rows getting shorter as you knit rather than longer!! I was thinking it was going to be awfully small, but now that it's finished I can see that it's going to be a good size when blocked. The colorway is "Pussywillow" dyed by Pennyworth Yarns. The next installment of the club should go on sale soon. It will be a dark month dyed by Zen Yarn Garden. I can't wait to see the colorway choices.

I've been working on the swatch for my design class.




I just pinned it out a bit so you could see the patterns. The top pattern is meant to evoke the pattern on the back of the mother turtle's shell, and the lower section is meant to represent the baby sea turtles headed for the water. Can you see them?




I'm wishing I had used a slightly heavier lace yarn. The cashwool is super affordable with great yardage but I had forgotten that it was so very fine. I'm thinking if I went down a needle size and tightened up the fabric more, maybe my baby sea turtles would show better. I'm not sure but I also think I may have messed up the first repeat, and there are only two here. Anyway, since it's so tough to see I made you a cheat.



See them now?

I still have a third stitch pattern to swatch, and a couple of problems to solve. But, I feel pretty good about my overbooked February so far. (Famous last words, right?)

Changing Direction

Well, my bloggy friends, I'm afraid I have lied to you once again. I didn't bind off Sevillano after all. I started on Monday, but the bind-off was coming off way too tight and I thought, I need to rethink this. So I set it aside, and I have no photos. I'm afraid I have been a little under the weather the past couple of days and the knitting has suffered a bit.

Yesterday, faced with the prospect of picking out the amount of the bind-off I had already done, I decided I had better get off my rear and get moving on my homework for my shawl design class. Some people are better at 'work at your own pace' than others, and I am definitely an other. The more structured the better, for me, when it comes to learning. But I digress. I'm going to try to describe my process without making it totally unnecessary for my readers to take Stefanie's class. Know that much more knowledge and many more tips are offered than I am presenting here.

The first step was, not terribly surprising, to conceptualize the shawl. Stefanie recommended sketching. I did it, although I felt silly, because I had already made some of the decisions she was asking us about. I knew I wanted to make a triangular (half-square) shawl and not a full square, and I knew I wanted to use laceweight yarn (completely disregarding Stefanie's advice, as it happens, but I already bought laceweight, so laceweight I shall use - besides, I much prefer the look of lace done in laceweight as a personal preference). I even had decided on a theme (which, incidentally, has since completely gone out of the window, but I'll get to that).

Anyway, I sketched. Badly. I'm not sure it got me anywhere, but I could see how it might be a useful process if you were just trying to figure out what you like. I attempted a stick figure on one of my drawings for scale - I generally prefer pretty good sized shawls that fall a little below my waist. I realize you can't tell that from my stick figure at all.





The next step was to pick out the stitch patterns that we wanted to use and start swatching. I thought this would be the fun, easy part of the whole thing, but it was actually quite frustrating. I went through making notes of stitch patterns that fit my 'theme' and found - none of them worked together. The stitch counts were wildly different, and nothing was coming together. In our class chat, one of the questions I asked was how Stefanie goes about choosing patterns. She said she usually starts with one stitch pattern that she really loved and then she looked for things that went with it. That made sense to me, although I didn't really get how anyone could design a themed shawl like all the ones I loved so much in this manner. But, I decided to toss my theme and try it that way.

So I got out my stitch dictionaries and picked one of the patterns that I had really liked when I was looking before, and I went through both books and then marked every single stitch pattern with a similar stitch count (the one I was looking at was 8+1, so I marked all the 8+1's and all the 16+1's, etc). I really didn't look at anything besides the stitch count at that point. Then, I flipped back through all the marked pages more slowly, looking at the stitch patterns themselves. And, gradually, a new theme came to me, based on the patterns that I was looking at, and I started to get really excited about the design process again.

I started a swatch but the Harmony Guide has no charts, only written directions, and they are written in what is, in my opinion, the most annoying way possible. So I wasn't even through the first row when I got impatient and went to KnitChart, where I charted out the pattern.

The other two patterns were in my Vogue Knitting stitch dictionary, which does have charts, but since I would need to chart them all out for my pattern anyway, I just went ahead and charted all of them. Besides being free, the program is very easy to use, and I just screen captured my charts and put them in a Word document, cropped, resized, and printed, and they are clear as day. I think I will have to redo the stitch legend, though, as I prefer different stitches from the default. It also lets you save the java code for a chart in a text file so when I'm ready to put my full pattern together, I can just load up my existing charts and copy and paste the symbols over.

All this took up so much time that I didn't even get through one repeat of my stitch pattern, so I didn't bother to photograph the swatch (I was sleepy), but I will leave you with a few images that are meant to be represented by the three stitches I intend to use. (Sadly none of these pictures, or the video, were taken by me, so click on the images to head over to flickr if you want to see more from the photographers themselves.)

Totally Under Control

I haven't much to show on the blog today, but come back tomorrow and I promise to have something worth seeing. I had no time at all to take pictures yesterday since I got home so late, but I'll have some tomorrow.

I have been working pretty religiously on Sevillano, determined to finish SOMETHING before the madness of February did me in. Last night I completed the last set of chart E repeats and tonight I will bind off. I probably won't have the time to block but I can at least show you the unblocked finished project. I can't wait to see it when it's not all scrunched up on the needles.

After that's done I intend to catch up on the knitting for the Dark and Light lace club. I have about a third of the first clue remaining and the second clue, and then I will be caught up. I figure that may take me the rest of the week, and if so, I'll start In Dreams this weekend. Somewhere in between there, I hope to catch up on my design class and start swatching.

In order to meet my 11 in 2011 goals I have to finish a shawl a month. Sadly, Sevillano doesn't count because it was started in 2010, so I still have to finish a shawl in February!! I'm hoping Avira (the light and dark club project, which I can't link you to because, well, it's a mystery) will be it, but if not, the new Pins and Lace pattern, Spanish Moss, is a pretty good candidate. It's a rectangular stole so it should be a nice thing to have as 'break' knitting while I work on all these giant projects.

I feel a little bad neglecting Fiori so - but I knew my February was going to be nuts so I'm okay with sort of laying it aside for the moment. It's still there, and I'll still be working on it off and on, and it's going to be a stunning finished product. If I can wear it in April or May I think that would be perfect, so that's my goal for that one.

See, I'm not going totally crazy. I can definitely handle all this. It's all totally under control. You know. For now.

My Stephanie Japel online shawl design class starts tomorrow. I am ~excited~!!

I am happy to report that my mail was finally liberated from the box.



The flat rate box is this:



Which now looks like this:



That's the first few rows of Clue 1 for the Light and Dark lace club. The cast on was over 300 stitches. It's bizarre to me to start a project with long rows instead of short ones, but I bet it will be fun when the rows start to get shorter towards the end. If they do. I'm not really sure, to be honest. It's a mystery, after all. Anyway, there's no real hard release schedule for these clues and Ruth and Roxanne have said they want it to be a nice, relaxed knitalong, so I haven't put in any real time on this one just yet. Just a taste, so I don't feel left out. I'll come back to it later.

One of the packages was from Beadwrangler containing the seed bead mix I thought I would try for In Dreams, but after looking at it I decided to stick with my original choice. The mix is gorgeous though and I'm going to save it for something in the future.

The small white package is the pin from Romi's pins and lace club, which is a really neat little design that I -- completely forgot to photograph.

The last package was from ArtBeads, and it did have some beads in it, but it also had these:



Romi recommended them and said they work on nickel as well as silver. As far as I was concerned this was excellent news, since I have been looking for a solution to this problem for some time:



Those are two of my KnitPicks Options nickel tips, and they are not exactly bright and shiny anymore. The tarnish makes my hands smell funny and the yarn doesn't slide nicely along the needles anymore, so I've been looking for cleaning methods. Googling for 'nickel polish' got me nowhere, however, and further searching got all kinds of suggestions that were variously plausible. At least one or two sites suggested oven cleaner. The polishing cloths cost only a few dollars and are neatly contained and easily cleaned up after, so I was really hoping they would work.

I used the pair of needles shown as my test pair since they were in the worst condition of all, and then I cleaned a second pair of the same size, and when it was done I had forgotten which pair I photographed so I included all four in the results photo.



Not perfect, but vastly improved. I immediately started cleaning the sizes I use more commonly (I had started with US6's because I don't use them that often, and if they melted in my hand or something I wouldn't be totally out of commission), including the pair of US4's I had in Sevillano. I am a much happier knitter. (K, I bought an extra for you but I forgot to drop it off this weekend).

Despite the little fits and starts I've made on other things, I've spent most of my time working on Sevillano.







I've completed 8 repeats (the pattern calls for 7) and I plan to do at least one more. I'm debating on whether I should do two more - that will take me just slightly past the 50% mark on my yarn consumption. I'm trying to stay as dedicated to this project as possible because I am so close to being finished. I do have rather a lot of things on the needles at the moment, and although I have enjoyed knitting Sevillano, it'll feel good to finish it. Plus, it's gorgeous and I want to wear it at the end of February when I ~meet Romi~!!

I also worked another half repeat on Fiori Friday night when I needed something a little less intensive than Sevillano. I feel like I'm suffering a terrible case of startitis right now and it's going to drive me batty if I'm not careful. I acknowledge this, and yet, I started a new project.



This is the beginning of Umaro by Jared Flood and I cannot stop giggling while I work it. I work with fine yarns, small needles. I use a 4 most often than anything else, and I rarely even get as large as an 8 or a 9. So this project, knit with Cascade Lana Grande on US15 needles, is downright comical to me. Right now this sits in a basket next to my bed and I am knitting one or two rows before bed. I'm surprised at how soft the wool is, my experience with Peruvian wool has been that it is, ahem, 'hearty,' but this is quite soft and I think the finished blanket will be wooly and cozy. It's not a project I would normally have picked for myself, but I think I'm going to get a lot of joy out of it. If I can figure out the weird cable thingy. I do wish designers would phrase their cabling instructions in such a way that those of us who prefer not to use a cable needle can figure out what we're supposed to do more easily. But, que sera. When I write patterns, I will do them my way. Mwa ha ha ha ha.

Finally, I decided to take K's advice on a scarf pattern from last week's blog comments and the scarf is working out much better now. It's about six inches long, so I have quite a ways to go. The pattern is sufficiently easy and mindless that the scarf might actually get done some time this century. It turns out that it is ridiculously easy to screw up a simple seed stitch rib, but I catch my mistakes pretty quickly.

Let Down

I'm afraid after the flood of finishes and pictures in the last couple of weeks, today's blog post is going to be a little bare. I could show you the yarn for the Light and Dark Lace Club:

What? You can't see that? How about the beads I ordered for the In Dreams Mystery shawl?

Nothing, huh? Okay, how about a spoiler pic for the first shipment of Romi's Pins and Lace club?

Zip, right? Would you like to know why this is? It's because I CAN'T GET INTO MY MAILBOX. I don't know which of these packages is in there, if any, but there is definitely SOMETHING in there because my key will not turn the lock. The locks on our mailboxes are not exactly sophisticated. On the inside of the box there is a small metal lever that prevents the box from opening when the lock is engaged. When you turn the key, that lever simply lowers out of the way and allows the door to open. Whatever is currently in my mailbox is beneath the lever, preventing it from moving. I tried shaking the box, banging on it, everything I could think of to shift the stuff inside enough to let me turn the lock. All I accomplished was bending my mail key. SIGH.

I called USPS on Friday when I noticed the problem and they said they would 'initiate documentation' with my local post office, but whatever documentation they initiated didn't make it in time for the problem to be fixed on Saturday. This is a little inconceivable to me since it seems to me like the only documentation required is an e-mail to my postman asking them to either shift the stuff in the box or drop it off at my door, but what do I know? I thought about taping a note to the mailbox but I decided to wait and see if it gets fixed today. If it was warmer out I would have camped by the mailbox on Saturday until the mail carrier came.

Fortunately, I am not totally devoid of stuff to show. I have spent most of this week working on Sevillano.



I've completed 5 repeats of chart D and I'm well into the 6th. I'm trying to decide if I want to do additional repeats, and if so, how many. The version shown in the pattern took up about 600 yards, and I have 1000, and I don't really know what I would do with 400 yards of silk. My plan is to figure out how many yards I've used when I get through 7 repeats, subtract that from the 600, and estimate how many additional repeats I can do. It's taking me roughly three hours per repeat, and I wish I didn't know that, haha. It's much more daunting to think about in terms of hours instead of number of repeats. And once I knew I probably wasn't going to finish the sixth repeat last night, I...well.



I started Galadriel's Mirror. The yarn is Handmaiden Silk Twist and you can see how the little silk plies take the light differently.



It's a subtle effect in this colorway, at least, but I hope the effect in the overall shawl will be lovely.

I also wound my yarn for the In Dreams mystery shawl.



I'm really glad I did, because my feelings have been very up and down on this colorway. I like my work to be an artistic statement as much as a wearable garment, and I struggle sometimes to maintain a balance between the two. I keep swinging from feeling like I made the right choice, to maybe I could have done better. Winding the yarn did wonders for me, though. I always find that caked yarn gives a much better idea of what the knit-up yarn will look like than skeined yarn does. And as I was winding, I could see that the light skein had notes of emerald green in it that I didn't see in the skein, and it was just lovely and enchanting and much more in line with what I like.

This weekend I went to Star's Beads and looked at a bunch of different bead options, including several that I had almost ordered online but thankfully didn't, since they didn't really work in person. I brought home three options, but I think, unless the mix that I did order from Beadwrangler changes my mind, I'm going with the ones shown, Toho gold-lustered green tea. I really had my heart set on something gold for this shawl, since the inspiration is Galadriel's crown and I very much associate Galadriel with gold rather than green, but I wasn't sure gold was going to work, especially with the dark end of the gradience, which has enough grey in it that it seems like it really ought to be matched with a silver bead. I tried several different gold-lined beads against the yarn and just really didn't like them, so the gold-lustered green tea is a compromise. These beads really are both gold and green, so they were my pick.



I'm waiting to order all 5000 until I can get into my stupid mailbox, just in case I like the bead mix I ordered from Beadwrangler more, but I'm 90% sure these will be the pick.

I do have one finished object to show today. Piece 1 of 3 of the matched set for ma honey is complete.





Ain't he handsome?



I started the scarf for him last night using Jarod Flood's Pavement pattern, but something wasn't working for me. The pattern didn't look right and the cabling was hurting my hands, so I think I need to either try it again earlier in the day and/or with different needles, or select a different scarf pattern. I cannot seem to reconcile myself with giving the man I love a garter stitch scarf. What would other knitters think?

On A Misssion

I don't know where to start today. I put off blogging yesterday because I had the day off, and I figured I could make some good progress, so if I took photos it would all be out of date as soon as I showed it. Lots of good stuff to blog today though! I have been a woman on a mission - really, on several missions.

Okay, we'll do WIP report first, new projects (mostly projects-to-be, really) second, and FO last. This week I really set about working on my two lace shawls. When last we left Fiori, she was simply a ball of beautiful silk yarn. As of yesterday I am halfway through the first repeat of chart E, which means I have finished the beautiful spreading petals/leaves motif at the top of the shawl, and am ready to get going on the main body.





The stitches are already a bit crowded on the needle so a good photo is a bit difficult. I planned to work on this shawl all day tomorrow, to get through as many of the repeats as I could. Just to get a realistic expectation for how much I could get accomplished to the day (my brain knits much faster than my hands), I timed the first couple of rows of Chart E...and determined that I could do about 1 repeat every 3 hours. This did not at all fit my vision of getting through the majority of the repeats. I kept going for a while, and about halfway through Chart E I decided that 3 hours was realistic and I...switched projects.



Because I thought I could get a lot more done on Sevillano in that time, since this is knit from the tip up, so despite the fact that I was probably farther along on this one than I was on Fiori, I had fewer stitches on the needles.



I love this design. It's so stunning, and I just think it's ingenious. It's also, and you know how much I hate the h-word...it's hard. It's really intense. I work on this and I'm exhausted when I'm done. However, when I got to Chart D, I felt like it was getting quite a bit easier. Chart D repeats 7 times. I had to work Chart C first so I only got through one and a half repeats of D, but I definitely felt like I was having less of a difficult time with D than I did with the previous charts. By the time you get to D, you've worked the majority of the stitch sequences several times already, and that - is it ring lace? That yarnover section in the middle is a fairly mindless repeat (not totally, but comparatively, it's a peace of cake) so there's a bit of a breather there.

I found that, with the last tip-up triangle I did, I had the same issues - the charts that I had to get through in order to set up the point were far more difficult for me than the repeated charts containing the middle and the edging. So, if you are thinking of knitting this pattern and my use of the h-word has intimidated you, take heart. If you can get through Chart C, you're in clover.

Interestingly, I'm knitting both Fiori and Sevillano with 100% silk yarn, and it's really quite striking the difference between the yarns. The Sundara silk lace is very soft and smooth and almost kind of flat feeling. The stitch definition is more clear than it would be with say, 100% merino, but it's still fairly - I can't think of a good word. Indistinct? Perhaps it would be better to say it makes a very cohesive fabric. The Schaefer Andrea I'm using for Sevillano is much more tightly spun, much more rounded, and I can feel the texture of the plies as it moves through my hands. The stitch definition is very crisp, you can easily identify the individual stitches even in the stockinette portions. I noticed a similar difference in the silk lace I used for the Evenstar shawl versus the silk I used for the Aspen Shawl. One was very loose, soft, and drapey, and the other very crisp, rounded, and firm.

Because I am me and therefore very rough on everything around me, I kind of like the tighter spun silk better, because it's less easy to snag or stab through a ply, but in this case I certainly think both are quite suited to the project at hand. I like the softer silk for Fiori, which I envision as very light and airy, and I like the sturdier, stronger silk for Sevillano, with its beautiful patterns and textures and the olive-tree theme. Plus it's uncanny how well the colors fit the theme of each shawl. But I digress.

I've also been working on the big giant hat for my honey. I left it in the car and wasn't minded to go out in the cold last night and get it, so we'll have to make do with an iPhone pic for this one.



That's what it looks like with the brim folded up. I think I have about two and a half, maybe 3 inches to go before I start the decreases. I have to check my pattern to be sure.

The influx of yarn continued this week as the results of my mad early January ordering spree continued to trickle in.

Sanguine Gryphon Bugga in Arachne


I was planning on this for Alcyone, but I'm really having second thoughts. I have a skein of yarn with lots of blues and greens in it that would go really well with the wave motif in Alcyone. I'm just a little concerned about the difference in weight, though, Bugga is a comparatively heavy yarn, listed as a sport weight instead of a fingering. If I use a true fingering weight, will my shawl be too small? Since this is several shawl releases away, I'm not worrying about it too much for now.

Lane Borgesia Cashwool in Sand


This is my yarn for the design class I'm taking in February.

Zen Yarn Garden Serenity Silk in Black Plum


A friend gave me a Zen Yarn Garden gift certificate for Christmas and I immediately knew I wanted to get a kit to make the Astilbe Feathers Shawl. I actually ordered a different color (also purple, but lighter) and then Roxanne posted a whole bunch of new colors, and was kind enough to switch my order for me when I fell in love with the Black Plum kit. I think this kit is super cool because Roxanne actually got the beads first, and then used the bead color to inspire her yarn dying. How awesome is that? You can get your own kit here (enable, enable, enable). If you want just the yarn and beads without the pattern, and the colorway you want isn't listed on the yarn/beads only page, you can e-mail Roxanne. She is very accommodating and not at all scary. Although she is, herself, a shameless enabler. One can forgive her for being so, as a purveyor of yarn, but she is a pattern temptress as well, so beware. Just the other day she posted in her Ravelry group about Silk Road Socks, on the flimsy excuse that her yarn is used in the book. Now the only thing stopping me from ordering the book is trying to decide whether I want the digital/print bundle or whether I want to try knitting from my Kindle. I'm leaning towards the bundle - I have the older Kindle that doesn't let you switch the orientation, and I like to write on my patterns. Normally I avoid complicated socks - socks are my relaxation knitting and I get mad at socks that make me think too much - but these are just too beautiful to pass up. (I am dooming myself by posting this since as soon as a certain someone I know sees these socks she will be shamelessly campaigning for a pair.)

I will still be dancing attendance on the mailbox all week, though, because the first shipment of Romi's 2011 Pins and Lace club is shipping this week, and the yarn for Roxanne's Light and Dark lace club will also be shipping in the very near future. I also got an e-mail from the Unique Sheep saying that my gradience yarn for the In Dreams mystery KAL has shipped. A picture of it popped up on their flickr stream.



I am super excited, although I am having to occasionally fight off a case of yarn envy as everyone on the Ravelry group is sharing pictures of the gorgeous colorways they got. I have a bit of a delimma, though. The designer has published the swatch and bead count and this shawl will have 5000 beads. Some dizzyness as you read that is normal. Now, I love beads, I love bling, and I love beaded designs, BUT...I am really unsure about this. That is a lot of beads and I do believe there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. So, I am debating. To bead, or not to bead, to partially bead even though I know I won't see the whole picture until the thing is finished, so I will be flying a bit blind when deciding where to bead and where not to.

I'm also really undecided about which beads to use. This colorway is very similar to the colors I used in my Maia shawl so I had been thinking I would use the same beads. But, as I have done more thinking on the theme, I have really gotten attached to the idea of having some gold in the shawl. I love the idea of having little gold flecks here and there - but 5000 beads is not here and there. It is pretty much everywhere. I had almost totally decided not to bead it until people started posting pics of their swatches on Ravelry.

Now, the shape of this shawl is a half circle, and I used 3000 beads for Evenstar which was a full circular shawl. Those beads were only on the edging, so if you cut that in half we're talking 1500 beads for the edging - assuming the edging is beaded similarly, which is a big assumption. That leaves 3500 beads to cover a much larger area than the edging of Evenstar, right? So...maybe it won't be so bad. The swatch is heavily beaded and that's kind of scary, but she can't possibly keep up that kind of density for the whole shawl or it would use way more than 5000 beads. Right?

I have a feeling I will end up deciding to bead as written, but this still leaves me the problem of what beads to use. I've been considering using a mix, maybe Magic Forest from Beadwrangler (you can see her other mixes here. I'm also considering using the beads from Maia for the top portion of the shawl, the darker area, and then mixing in some gold beads and ending up with entirely gold on the bottom. I love this idea, but pulling it off may be a challenge. Not so much if I were to mix things up randomly, but I think I would rather make decisions about where to use which color. And, I still have to pick some gold beads. I am so clueless on this bead issue, that I have been on at least four different bead websites, loaded up my carts with all the possibilities I wanted to look at, and then ended up not ordering anything because the total cost was so rediculous by the time I was done. I have told myself repeatedly that I will wait until my yarn gets here and then I will go to my local bead store to at least try to narrow down the possibilities and categories. Although I do think I may order that magic forest mix and try out a swatch with it, see what I think.

Underlying all of this is absolute panic about how much stuff is coming down to be done in February. We're talking a year's worth of knitting all in one month. I keep ticking down the list, trying to decide what I will NOT knit, and it's not going so well. It's all I can do to keep my hands off Galadriel's Mirror even though I know the insanity that awaits me.

But! I did finish the first shawl of 2011, and it has been blocked.









Zen Yarn Garden Cashmere Sock, colorway Rouge. Limestone One Skein Triangle Shawl from FickleKnitter. I did one extra repeat of the body before doing the edging, and I ended up having to fudge the short rows around the point. If you're going to add (or subtract) repeats, do it in multiples of 3 and you should be able to work the directions as written. I should've checked before I just started whacking extra repeats on there, but I was too lazy.