Knitting!

I'm back in my knitting groove once more and finally have some finished projects to show you.  Here's everything I've been working on, except for one item, which is a gift so obviously I can't post it yet.

I named these Mindfully Mindless.  The yarn is Mindless Knits, colorway is Stella.  

Soft new socks, waiting for October when it'll be cool enough to need them.

The concept behind the mindless part of these socks is that you knit them cuff down, and when you get to the turquoise blue, that's when you know that it's time to start the heel.  But I prefer knitting from the toe up, so I had to guesstimate how much yarn to pull off in order to have the heel color in the right spot.  I did a pretty good job of that.  But the stripes are so wide that I got bored slogging through them, and while the yarn was nice, I wouldn't use it again.

Let's play "can you spot the issue" with this pair:

Anything?

It's not a big deal, and it's one way to know that these are, indeed, hand knit - but I ran out of yarn doing the last few stitches of the bind off on the cuff.  The good thing is that I used every last inch of this yarn - these are the second pair of socks that I squeezed out of a skein - but I had to find another color to finish them.  I had some purple yarn on hand that worked, which is the little bit you can see on the top of each sock.  What I should have done when I realized I was going to run out of yarn was undo the bind off and start it again with the purple, so the entire top edge would look like I meant to do that.  But taking out a super stretchy bind off is hard and I didn't want to mess with that, hence the bonus color.

I named these Box of Crayons II.  Yarn is from Must Stash, colorway is Kama Sutra.  I love all of the colorways from Must Stash and if I had a million dollars I'd have them all.  Alas, I do not, so when I do get my hands on a skein, I make it go far!

I surprised myself by knitting a shawl.  I have not been the biggest fan of knitting shawls because they take so much time - you can get up to 300 stitches on your needles, doing a pattern, which takes a lot of concentration, before you begin decreasing, and you usually go down to two or three stitches.  But I saw a pattern come up on Ravelry's new patterns page, it called for a heavy weight yarn, the most stitches you got up to was 58 before decreasing, it used only one skein of yarn, and it was free.  So I figured I had nothing to lose, especially since I had some pretty yarn in my stash that I was dying to use.

Pattern is Ribbon Summer Shawl, yarn is Madtosh DK, colorway is A Clue Board From 1984.  Model is Paco the Wonder Dog.

Modeled on a human.  Some version of this is probably how I'll style it when I wear it.

OK, that was the finished shawl, but I had to show you the difference between blocking and unblocking - and for the non-knitters, unblocked is a project fresh off the needles, and blocked is after the project has had a nice bath with some wool soap, carefully wrung out, rolled in a towel and stepped on to remove even more moisture, and then stretched out to finish drying, pinned along the way with T-pins to keep it in place:

Close up, unblocked.  See how the longer loops are uneven?

 

Close up, blocked.  Stitches are much more even, forgiving any tension differences that may have occurred, depending on how exciting the TV show I was watching at the time happened to be.

Because it was nearly dry and so airy, I blocked it on the guest bed.  Plus my blocking mats were behind the suitcases in the closet and I didn't want to pull everything out to get to them.

I am really happy with how this turned out!  The variegated colors of the yarn show so beautifully, and the shawl is light and airy looking.  While it's called a summer shawl, I cannot imagine wearing it during our hot Texas summers.  That said, if I traveled somewhere that cools down in the evening, I would bring it along with me, just in case.  Either way, it'll make a fun addition to my winter wardrobe - I'd wear it more as a scarf/cowl than a shawl, as that kinda screams old lady to me, which I am not.  Or at least I don't think I am, haha.

Oh - I've already started another summer shawl.  I liked it that much!