Done and done

I finished both of those knitting projects that used handspun. Want to see?

Here is the one-row cowl for Judy. I used every inch of the yarn. I don’t have a photo of her wearing it yet because schedules have been a little overfull of late, but one day I’ll get that shot!

You can see by that green grass that spring has begun in earnest here. We have had our ritual struggle with starting the lawn mower (happens annually). This year it involved a spark plug change and borrowing a special tool to do the job.

The Pebble Beach Shawl is also complete! The pattern has three sizes – this is the medium. I had 1051 yards of handspun when I started. Calculating by weight, I think this used about 642 yards. I have a decent amount left over for another project (maybe a Starshower?).

The color is always way off in my blocking photos, because I set up my blocking board in a room with very little natural light. I love the mustache shape of this shawl. When you wear it over your shoulders, the ends curl down in a fun way. Not that you can see the ends in this photo below. Just trust me.

You can kind of see the curly ends here – I pinned it to the back of my couch trying to get a good shot.

Pebble Beach is quite a simple pattern, but I dropped a stitch a couple of times and found it pretty tough to get back on track. I’m a novice lace knitter. I think it might be time to seriously consider taking Laura Nelkin’s Craftsy class, Save Our Stitches: Fixing Lace Knitting Mistakes. It appears to be on sale right now so maybe I should just buy it! I’ve taken two classes from Laura in person, and she is an excellent teacher. This class screenshot reminds me of the biology dissection unit in high school:

The picot bindoff took forever, but is really cute. The shawl really looks like a wave!

I cast on a new project. I keep thinking of it as a handspun project, but it’s not. The pattern is from PLY Magazine and the version in the magazine is worked from handspun, but I’m using the Danish yarn that a colleague brought me. The gold and brown sample in the picture is one solid brown yarn and one variegated yarn that moves from gold to brown. I thought these two yarns might work well in it, since the green is included in the variegated colorway. We will see!

So I need to pop back into Ravelry and line up a couple more projects that use my handspun. (Or maybe I’ll just do another Starshower.) I used 357 yards in my first Starshower, and I have 409 left of the blue handspun. That should work, right?