Bonus Shawl

I made another one of these Flourish shawls for a coworker because they are so fast and easy.  I also broke my long standing goal of using yarn only from my stash when I purchased 2 skeins of Mirasol Yarns Nuna for the job.  I wanted to do it in purple and I just didn't have enough to make this happen.  It was fun to go to the yarn store instead of just back and forth between my apartment, work, and the grocery. 

Unfortunately, I may have to switch yarn store allegiances.  It would appear that the one by my house has decided to stop carrying good, dependable, nice yarns in sensible weights.  They no longer carry any Brown Sheep and all of the Malabrigo was this funky bulky/roving mess they had to hang up on the wall.  When I enter a yarn shop I should have voices screaming in my head advocating for the purchase of every bright and fluffy skein.  This time I took almost 30 minutes to find one I was merely "OK" with. 

Christmas List - 3/3

I win!  I finished my absolute Christmas knitting goal; 3 lace shawls!  I guess I underestimated myself and lowballed my speed estimates.  This shawl was knitted from the monter skein of October third and the pattern is called Flourish (on Ravelry).  It calls for worsted or aran weight yarn instead of weensy lace or sock yarn, which doesn't hurt my new land speed record.  Until December I'll be randomly adding other projects to my mental fiber queue.   I need to make at least one dalek for somebody at work and there are a few other ideas bumping around in my head.

Christmas List - 2/3

Chugging along...

Christmas List - 1/3

I plan to knit three shawls for Christmas presents.  One down, two to go.

Monster Skein

I have recently discovered a cool place to get reused and recycled craft and art supplies in Houston, the Texas Art Asylum.  It's kind of a cross between a thrift store, an antique shop, and a craft supply depot.  On my visit I picked up a variety of picture frames to use for an upcoming project and two skeins of undyed worsted wool from the 70's.  (um, yeah... and a bunch of other stuff, but you don't really need to know about the grocery bag full of severed doll limbs.) 

This monster skein (hammer for scale) are those wee skeins dyed together.  I went with a tonal cornflower blue assemblage with a relatively long color repeat.  The lessons of this dye session have led to two new proclamations.

1. There shall be no more super long color repeats that require looping the yarn around the length of my apartment.  It's simply too difficult to keep the yarn from snarling into one giant entanglement, both while in the dyebath and later when trying to make a monster skein.

2. There shall be no more large scale dyeing until I have facilities like a yard and a hose.  I was responsibly doing the dyeing in a large rubbermaid type bin, but had no choice other than dumping it out in the bathtub for disposal due to the mass and density of water.  This resulted in a navy blue bathtub and panicked trip out for bleach.  (Which incidentally did the trick and the landlord will never know, but I could do without the extra stress.)