Sunday, April 27, 2014

Small detour: Beautiful Brass & Steam Shawl

I took a small detour by signing up for a contest to fast knit a shawl using a particular colorway in the Verdant Gryphon Group. The colorway - Orchids for Miss Blandish.

The yarn looked like this -

VG Bugga Orchids for Miss Blandish Skein pic1

It's a lovely combination of blues, turquoise, and redpink / redpurple, with ranges of pastels in between - lavender, and periwinkle, light blues, and light greens. Really, a very pretty mix.

Based on this inspiration photo:



The planned project The Age of Brass and Steam Shawl with an additional section of 14 rows.
Mods: 7R, 10R, 12R, 14R, and jssbo for bind-off.


It ended up taking more like a week than a couple of hours. I guess I'm just not a fast knitter anymore..and I need to focus on other things these days..

Here's the finished pic (pre-block, as per the contest instructions). Unfortunately, my deck door was casting an odd shadow:







Friday, April 04, 2014

April

First few days of April and the weather is gorgeous today - low 50s..and very pleasant. I could have worn short sleeves. I frogged back to the first stitch marker yesterday and re-wound the yarn around itself. I determined I had only knit 3 of the 8 decreases I was going to do, hence way more fabric than intended. Hopefully, second time is a charm. On the decluttering front, I went through and recycled/shredded the contents of 3 file boxes, and 2 small boxes on Sunday..and packed 13 boxes for Kim's fundraising work. I am letting go of a lot of old baggage which is great.. It's weird the stuff I kept for so long. Next to review clothes for donation, and do some organizing. Also, more yardage out, as I've sent away some skeins to be cranked into Circular Sock Machine (CSM) socks. Postage was reasonable (!). It'll end up being about $3 out of pocket for postage for a pair of socks. I'll post later a pic of the pretties.

CSM socks detail1

CSM socks detail2

black friday

I've updated the sale page with some key sales for Black Friday. I'm not doing a lot of yarn buying these days, so these are the on...