Sunday, August 28, 2011

Wanted:

One Best Friend

For shenanigans, long rambling talks, silly stupid adventures, epic cooking afternoons, heart to wounded-heart confessions, long midnight drives to nowhere (optional).


Must enjoy: joyfully watching children's movies - without children; lazy afternoons at the beach baking in the sun, and swimming until your arms give out; singing GBS (or similar) at the top of your lungs.


Must be flexible/open-minded enough to accept chronically ill, disabled woman as friend.


Kindred Spirits only need apply.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Peacock Shawl

As a thank you for my wedding photographer, I knit her a shawl. I used the 'peacock' lace pattern from the Seraphim shawl pattern I bought, though I have seen that same pattern elsewhere on Ravelry. The lady who made the Seraphim shawl had it all nicely laid out in charts, so I followed her pattern.

I used a variated yarn that had blue, green, yellow and brown in it. I didn't like the way the yarn knitted up in stockinette, which is why I just did the lace -- it looks just lovely as lace! I knit three repeats of lace instead of the two Seraphim calls for since I was just knitting the lace. When I got to the end of the last chart I realised didn't have enough yarn to cast off!!! I had quite literally 7 inches of yarn left!!

I also wasn't sure how I wanted to start the shawl so I'd done a provisional cast on. Which meant, I needed yarn to finish that edge as well. Doh.

So, I went to Romni with the scrap of yarn I had from the first time I tried to cast on -- this shawl went through a few cycles of modification since I was winging it. I found a lovely yellow fingering weight superwash wool, that was, if you can believe it, the exact shade of yellow as in the variated wool!! Talk about luck!

So I knit one row in yellow then cast off the bottom. I decided to do three rows of seed stitch on the top (which is what I did on the sides as a boarder), and then cast off in that wonderful yellow. I'd bought two skeins as I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. But when I stretched out the lace, I realised if I made it any larger my little photographer would be swimming in it. Heck, it fit me well enough!

Anyway, now that my photographer has it, I felt I should blog it. I'm really happy with how it turned out! And she says she likes it. I really hope she does... I wasn't sure what to make her....but since she was so impressed with the shawl I made for myself I thought it would be a good bet.