At least during November I had an excuse for not posting. Once again I competed in NaNoWriMo and just barely dragged my sorry carcass across the 50,000-word mark.
Now though?
Just plain lazy ^.^;
To make up for the long silence, I have two completed shawls for you.
The first one is a simple stockinette shawl knitted from some unidentified handspun acquired at Seriously Twisted down in Port Chalmers.
The yarn knitted up fairly chunky, despite being rather variable in thickness. Rather a pain to block when you're using polystyrene and sewing pins! It still smells clean-sheepy good.
The second is the Dia De Sol pattern from Ravelry, executed with John Q Sands' "Impressionista" sock/lace yarn in the Garden Path colourway.
I don't like the John Q Sands yarns in general, but I will admit that they do make a nice 4ply. Both the Impressionista and the Jewel lines are very smooth to knit with and the colours are an absolute delight.
Really, my camera doesn't do it justice.
There wasn't quite enough yarn in the first skein of Impressionista to finish the shawl, so I had to go back and acquire a second skein just to do the final chart of the pattern. It is pretty expensive, so I wasn't very happy about that.
I'm going to have to find something to do with the last bit of that skein when I can find it. I'm STILL not sorted out from moving flats! It will have to be something with a fairly simple stitch pattern, though. I feel like the wonderful colours I saw on the skein got rather lost in the final product.
What do you reckon?
~Topaz
