My plans for last weekend were scuppered.
I idnd't finish Amulet, the second of The Shawl Society patterns. Blame the gin! I was so close to casting off and then worked a row of double decreases - one stitch out! And in tinking bck I dropped so many stitches which ran right down. I've just frogged 30%, right down to the last section and put stitches back on the needle. But there;s so many stitches which have run and are unsecured... It's in the naughty corner for a few weeks and then I'll decide if I ought to rescur it or frog the lot and forget about it.
And Big Waffle, my red DK shawl, is also frogged. I have misplaced the second ball of yarn! As I've had stash out recently it has most likely been put into rthe wrong pack, but I'm not looking! Instead, I've cast on a cowl. A dead easy pattern, Pisa by Stitchnerd. With the use of stitchmarkers so that I can zone out with the simple ribbing, instead of knitting a yarnover as a stitch, I can knit this one late at night, even with a few glasses of wine.
Shetland Trader's MKAL. Well the fourth clue is out and I'm still working ont he second lcue! I tried to take a photo this morning but it was so dark and the knitting was so scrunched up on the needles.
I'm using navy as MC and silver as CC. I'm not using antoher two CCs, so it's going to be a two colour shawl.
Clue 1 - main triangle is knit in navy with contrasting silver stripes.
Clue 2 - bottom borders of the triangle as you pick up stitches and follow a simple lace pattern (involving double decreases, yikes!) and knit using the three CCs and MC. As my CC is only silver, this part is mainly silver, with a few rows of MC thrown in.
Looking ahead to clue three it looks as if the sideways knitted border is in MC, but I think i may use the silver instead. I do like a lighter colour as a border. I don't anticipate getting there this weekend, but it's something I need to think about. A look at ravelry projects might be in order!
And my toher dilemna is the latest shawl in TSS. The shawl looks lovely, but the yarn choices and the way the pattern's written not so. It uses two sets of six skein gradients. The samples are using US Etsy stores (or if not Etsy, not readily available and not at all int he UK). A smost of the sets I've come across are only 20g x5 and not 25g x6 I have a problem. The other problem with yarn selection is that there may not be much leeway on yardage, so even if I wanted to spend £££ on two gradient sets, I'd be fretting about running out.. I've thought about using mini skeins of non gradients (of which I have plenty!) but I'd still have the issue with knowing if I had enought to finish each section, even a row on long rows. I'm not too happy with the way the colour changes are depicted in the pattern either - as a small square of colour at the beginning of each row! I can see me trying to figure out if that's the lighter colour or the one above, whilst I sit there in the evening! There's not a lot of explanation, You relabel the mini skeins A-F (not in the order of the shading, because you need to have stripes) and I'm presuming that you work with colour A for a whilse (as you break this one off at one point) and then do some striping with colours B and C )again, it mentions breaking these off) and finally some striping with the remainign three skeins. But some colours look similar (on my phone) and I just printed out a page which might look similar in evening knitting. Can I be bothered to work t his out or might I just make things up as I go? The shawls look lovely, it's a super simple pattern but for the extra work I'd need to do to convert it to 'my' yarn choice. Not the greatest for stash diving I must say, but I'm wondering if it could look fabulous in a non gradient mini skein set. I bet it would, I shall see how others choose yarns and what their shawls look like before investing time in modifying the pattern to my liking. Ah, for a pattern where you can just stash dive and cast on!
Never mind, it's not as if I'm stuck for knitting! I've also somehow ordered lots of Skein Queen, and in there are a couple of jumper's worth of woolly yarn...