A fortnight of knitting - 3

Six weeks of the year over and I finally have one finished project! This is the second Mystery Shawl, previously referred to as my penance knitting. I am so glad this is finished, the border took forever. As I got toward the end I started to get butterflies in my stomach and sweaty palms and I knitted faster and faster way into the early hours to get it finished. I'm such a knitting nerd - does everybody get stupidly excited when you get near the end of a project, or is it because it is such a rare occurrence for me?

Unfortunately I'm not so keen on it, I don't like the way the border is curved at the bottom, and the line where the border is joined to the body of the shawl is too distinct - and it is tiny. Although I did knit it on very small needles (2.25mm), so I expected it to be smaller. It was a mystery and it was free, so complaining about the pattern is both ungrateful and pointless.




And here is the progress on the bear claw blanket. I totally cheated and joined two squares together before the second one was even finished. I just couldn't wait to see whether the picked up edges would be straight when joined to the second block. Then I had to do kitchener stitch to join the two peices together.

Check out the hideous kitchener edge. Maybe I shall call it my wabisabi edge - there is beauty in its imperfection (nice try sunshine). I must have done kitchener stitch maybe ten times in my life. I have to open the book and do it step at a time. I still have no clue how it works and as a result it never comes out right. Anyway, I didn't frog it because I hope it will wash out a bit smoother, and in any case there's about a million of these joins in the whole blanket - two rows of it are 230 stitches long. Even I should have mastered it by then.

It's so soft and going to be so warm. It's going to be a long knit but I'm going to love it so much.



And what's that I hear you say? Is the lace cardigan imploding or am I knitting backwards? I got up to the armpits of this cardigan and realised that I am particularly spatially challenged. I couldn't 'see' how a cardigan knitted in the round with raglan shaping was going to work. So, when I changed needle sizes and got it from a straight to a a circular I could see my raglan lines were not straight. Off to the frog pond. But I've not been dismayed by this stumble, and got right back on that horse. It's actually quite a bit bigger than this pic now - and I hope to finish it to wear to the craft fair I'm going to next weekend.

It appears that I am only working on two projects right now. The lace cardigan has gone from a ring-in project to need it now. That happens to me quite a lot, I'm a fickle knitter.

Finally, another shot of the shawl. Just because it's done.