shawl

My shawl love is not showing any signs of dying, and that's just fine. As long as I like making them and find people who want to wear them (although I do keep most myself...) I'll keep making them. They're so quick! They're so pretty! There's interesting lace! They're made out of sock yarn but aren't tiny gauge! What's not to love. This is my latest FO, the Clothilde (Rav pattern link) shawl.

I can't seem to get enough of shawls! I love knitting them, love wearing them, and I love how I can use sock yarn to make them and don't have to knit the yarn with tiny 2mm needles!

This is my newest shawl FO - the Twilight Gloaming shawl (Rav link), already shortly shown at my KYH posting a few days back. As I've mentioned earlier, I am sort of a Twilight fan, or at least I really enjoyed the books and have also knit Twilight fanwear previously (like Bella's Mittens), so it's no wonder this shawl pattern insipred by Twilight immediately caught my eye. After being so lucky and have the pattern gifted to me this spring I wanted to start knitting right away. Well...

Ok, I've cast on 26 things in June, all because I'm participating in the Finnish KAL I mentioned a few weeks ago, where you - starting from the 1st oh June - cast on something new every day until Midsummer, and you finish everything my the end of July. It's a challenge, but so much fun! Here's what I have ready (or almost done) by now (& since the last posting)

From up left clockwards: a shawl from the top of my head (it's the better version of my Tierheim bamboo shawl) with self-dyed yarn; the Twilight Gloaming (Rav link) shawl made with a Zauberball (I'll post more on these shawls later); seven mice that just need to be felted, filled and sewn close to finish these cat toys from Kitty Knits.

You might remember I volunteer for my local animal shelter by knitting things for sale and helping during open doors days, working at the sales booth. The shelter just had their big summer open doors day a few days ago, and to try out something new I decided to knit two little triangular shawlettes for sale.

That worked amazingly well! They were up for about an hour before a lady came and bought them both. Not for very much money, but still way more we usually get from socks or other knits that use the same amount of yarn! I was very happy about that and and plan to knit more simple shawls for the shelter in the future.

I'm not sure what to say about this shawl. Take a look at the pictures. You can see it's rather long. Like, three meters long! I never intented to it to be that long (according the pattern the shawl should have been ca. 160 cm / 65 inches long, and I followed the pattern)

What do you think of it? Would you wear it? If you would, where and with what? I like the drape and the feel, it feels luxurious but I'm not sure if it's practical to wear - anywhere! Here are the specs:

Oh, the Travelling Woman! Remember how I blogged about it a few weeks ago, saying "I'm certain I'm reading the pattern right"? Yeah, right. See, the pattern says "The charts do not contain the garter stitch border or the yo at the beginning and end of each row. Instructions are provided in the lace charts section. In the stocking stitch portion on right side rows, you increase four stitches. On wrong side rows, you increase two stitches." Guess who didn't make ANY yarn overs on the wrong side? Throughout the whole shawl (OK, except the last maybe 10 rows when I finally understood what the problem was)

I notice again and again that I hardly ever show WIPs on my blog. Is it because I find WIPs so difficult to photograph in a pretty way, or that I usually finish my small knits so quickly that I don't have the time to blog them while they're still WIPs, I don't know. But I do know I probably won't be finishing these in the next few days, so why not show them to you already.

My April small item from stash is/are the Froot Loop socks. I've just started them and seem to be making god progress. It's so weird to knit socks after a long pause. These small, fiddly needles! The thin yarn! But I'm getting the hang of it again. Also the soy sock yarn feels really good, even though I'm not so crazy about how the striping is coming out.

Like promised in my first post about this shawl, here are some better pictures of it, and some stats.

Pattern: Tulppaani shawl (link to English pattern here) from Ullaneule
Yarn: one (100g)Schoppel Zauberball in Brombeere. What a lovely, beautiful, soft sock yarn perfect for shawls!
Needles: 4 mm long circular
Modifications: I left out the last two rows, otherwise I would have run out of yarn. I don't think this modification makes any difference in the shawl.

Don't you just love the stitch pattern and the colour changes!

I'm so excited! My Ravelympics shawl is done! In case you're not familiar with the term, it's basically a knitalong where you do a challenging project during the Olympic games. Mine was the Tulppaani shawl (this pattern is originally in Finnish, but can be found in English at Villapallo's blog)

I'll post more about it once it's been blocked and my darling husband is back from his conference Drupaletics and available to take some photos of me modeling the gorgeous shawl! Sorry for the quality of these - I tried my best standing on the bed, but it just didn't seem to work better than this!

So, I'm feeling better so I can finelly get back to blogging! This is what I have to show you first - the Damson shawl.

First the stats:
Pattern: Damson by Ysolda Teague
Needles: 4mm circular
Yarn: 1 skein of Zitron undyed sock yarn, self-dyed with Kool aid - and ca. 20 grams of Zitron bamboo sock yarn, also self dyed. More about this later..!
Modifications: I did the lace bit in garter stitch instead of stockinette. It looks good!