February

With February all but done, what have I done?

As detailed in my last post I finished shawl 2 for this year's Boo Knits Challenge, Spirit of Friendship. I've still barely taken that thing off, we are experiencing some extremely cold weather right now and it's been marvellous. I finished that on 13th February so I was feeling in a valentinesy sort of mood and I cast on a red silk Forever Yours using Knit Picks Luminance.

I only bought 50g of yarn and this pattern is designed for a smaller skein so it seemed like the perfect project. The pattern had repeatable sections to help you make the most of your yardage and I've been making use of the super helpful shawl calculator to help me plan out how many repeats of each section I can do. I'm now on the final chart before I cast off so hopefully I should have another shawl to show off very soon.

I have however put that project on a short hiatus on Monday because, as I mentioned, it's a bit nippy here and was set to get colder during the week. With the promise of temps of -5 degrees C and below I decided that I needed another hat more than I needed another lace shawl so I cast on Holm using DROPS Puna and put Forever Yours aside until that's done. I had intended to start this hat a couple of weeks ago but I'd started reading through the pattern and decided that it hurt my brain too much and put it off for a bit! I'll talk more about the pattern once the hat is done, but I'll say that it's actually been really simple so far, it's just that the pattern looks a bit intimidating at first glance.

As in January I have done no sewing whatsoever, the dining room is still full of stuff and despite my good intentions I haven't got round to finding homes for it all yet. Honestly though, I'm a total Winter Olympics addict and I can't sew in front of the TV so I was always going to be knitting mostly this month anyway. We've all been ill at various times over the last few weeks too so the sofas have been getting lots of love! Hopefully February went ok for everyone, roll on March!

FO: Spirit of Friendship

A couple of weeks ago my Facebook 'On This Day' thingy popped up and reminded me that this time last year I had already completed 4 shawls for my Boo Knits challenge. At that points I was just finishing up on my second one for this year and I felt momentarily demoralised until I thought about and realised that all 4 of those shawls were pretty small. They are all beautiful and I do wear them with joy but I do prefer a much larger shawl and those take much longer to knit. Today I present you my largest shawl so far, Spirit of Friendship by Boo Knits

Not only is this thing pretty big but it is really soft and drapey and warm, a real hug of a shawl. While I do love my 100% silk shawls, they block out so nicely and the lace stays looking tip top for ages but every now and again it's nice to knit something that I can throw on when it's chilly in the house or to keep me really toast during a particularly wintery school run. So for this shawl I chose to use DROPS Baby Alpaca Silk, partly because it is warm and soft with some strength added by 30% silk content, but also because it was really inexpensive during the DROPS Alpaca Party in December! I went for black because I don't actually have a black shawl yet and I wanted it to go with anything.

Knitting this shawl was super simple and the pattern was very intuitive. The simple lace panel keeps things interesting with the stockinette sections keeping things moving along quickly. Beading only happens once you hey to the lace border but there are quite a lot of beads in that section so those border rows do take much longer to complete. I chose to use size 6/0 Miyuki black lined crystal AB cube beads. The have a lovely rainbow sparkle to them and I thin they look really special.

All in all I'm really happy with this one and honestly I've barely taken it off since I blocked it. The only real problem I have with it is that it's making all my other shawls look tiny!