Shawls

This is the green shawl finished, except for blocking.  It's become a favourite of the cats, who seem to enjoy sleeping on it.   I like it too because of the more muted colours.  The pale green, not one of my favourite colours at all, looks rather nice with rest of the greens and the grey.  They work well together. The amazing part of this shawl is that I thought it knit fairly quickly and was quite fun.  Of course after the fact, it may have taken my longer to knit than I recollect.   Its size was limited by the amount of yarn that I had.  I have leftover pale green and grey, but the last section of dark green used the last of all 3 different shades.  I was just a few rows short with the lightest shade of dark green, so worked though the bits and pieces, cut ends, short balls of the other greens, working from the lightest dark green to the darker shade.   It looks just fine, and I only had a few little ends left.  It has a grey garter stitch border so that it would hang straight after casting off and wouldn't curl.

I'm not sure about blocking it though.  It is large and drapey.  I don't think I have a large enough space to block it properly.  I may just wait until the spring and block it outside on the deck.  

Currently I have another shawl on the needles.   I found several balls of this beige/grey colour in the bin of my handspun odds and ends.  I'm not sure if it's handspun because it's been in hand wound balls rather than skeins for who knows how long.   It's a bit flattened in places. Rather than re-skein it, wash it gently and let it dry before I used it, I jumped right in and started another shawl. My first try was a garter stitch shawl, a simple, plain every day garment.  However I got bored of the knitting fairly quickly.   I ripped it out, a whole evenings work, which was a bit irritating, and restarted.  This is almost as simple as the original start, but has a bit more interest in having to count the stockinette stitch rows, and the garter stitch stripes.  

 I had knit too far to rip it out when I realised that I had grabbed the wrong knitting needles and am using a slightly smaller size than I'd normally use for this weight of yarn in a shawl.   I'm blaming that on the fact that my interchangeable needles in my favourite size had one break.  They are stupidly expensive and I haven't wanted to spend the extra money on a new set of that size needles.  The cord is fine of course, although I have to figure out how to wiggle the broken end off it.   Still, the needles are wooden and feel really nice to use.  The one on this shawl is aluminium and has a stiff cord, which just isn't quite so friendly.

Also, I lost one of the needle point protectors, which I use to keep the stitches on the needles while I'm not actively knitting.  It fell off as I was moving it to photograph it and it seems to have just vanished.  I moved it barely 2 metres.  How can it disappear in that space?  There was a cat lurking, sooo.....

I'm pretty sure I don't have quite enough of the main yarn to finish the shawl in the size I was aiming for.   I do have some darker brown which is of a similar grist which looks like it might have enough yardage to do a final repeat or at least a bottom border.  Maybe I'll go for a seed stitch border this time.

I have 2 more shawls in the planning stages, possibly 3 if I weave the one.   I'm spinning up my birthday merino right now.  It's going to be a 2 ply yarn.  I have 454 g of the commercial roving, so it' spinning up fairly quickly.  With that much roving, I should be able to spin enough yarn for a decent sized shawl.  Right now the plan is to dye the yarn in shades of blue or blue grey.   Sometimes plans change though :)