Moving along

I have pinned Wednesday's block to my kitchen corkboard and am deliberating about what to do with it. I am resolved to include it in something for the kitchen wall, but: will I make three more, sew them together, and add a border? it looks a lot like one-quarter of an urchin to me; should I paper piece some stars that look like this and this and this and assemble it into some sort of stylized sandbar scene? It feels nice to be in no rush.



The pattern for my staid grey knitting has been released into the wild. I am pleased by some of its little unobtrusive features, like short-rowed extra ease in the corners...



... and knitted-on edging with cat's paw motifs centred underneath the bottom-most row of motifs in the shawl's body...



... and a narrow edge treatment along the hypotenuse, so often neglected in top-down triangular shawls...



... and those main pattern motifs, which look pleasingly angular when assembled into a grid.



I have named it Angharad because it is much beloved by me. Seriously, I am thrilled by today's wretched chilly gloom because it means I am justified in wearing a jacket with a shawl on top. Salient features: 900 yards of laceweight yarn (that's two skeins of the Stansborough Grey 2-ply I used) produces a shawl that measures 74" along the hypotenuse and 37" down the central spine after blocking. More or fewer repeats of the main pattern will yield a shawl that is bigger or smaller, as the final, slightly-different row of motifs flows out of the previous one no matter how many times it's been worked. I used 3.5mm needles to achieve a gauge of 20 sts and 24 rows = 4" in the main stitch pattern, again after blocking. The pattern is available for $6 CAD right here (or by clicking this direct-purchase link).

The purple and yellow mittens are nearly done (one is awaiting a tip and thumb; both need their ends woven in), and I am rewarding myself for my focus by, um, picking up something else.



This is the top four inches of a new knee sock. I recently got some commercial wool over-the-knee socks and while they are perfectly fine and wearable, I am mildly scandalized by the fit and comfort that non-knitters have to sacrifice in order to be wool-clad from head to foot. There are toe seams! The cuff ribbing is fake, produced by elastic woven through the stockinette stitches on the wrong side! There's no calf shaping, let alone calf shaping exactly where you want it for your particular leg! Goodness gracious me. So I am lashing out by knitting knee socks with stretchy but non-binding sideways cuff edging and clingy twisted rib panels at either side that will narrow to nothing in an interlocking cabled pattern and totally different lace things stretching over the instep and over the centre back of the leg and heel flap. (Pictured above at left is the panel at the centre back leg that will extend to the bottom of the heel flap.)

My middle name is Overkill, in case you were wondering.