Sunday, September 11, 2011

A birthday shawl

It's only been since July.... Well, posting in the summer is hard. Your taking trips, going to events, trying to stay as cool as you can in your house, and no the afghan is not the perfect project.

In any case, this past month, I joined my first ever mystery knit a long (KAL). There was a Stephen West KAL coming up on Ravelry (and I already had one finished Stephen West pattern, and two more on the way), so I decided to join in.

The way it works, for those in the audience wondering, you sign up, and then you get clues a week apart. These clues are successive sections of the pattern to knit, in this case a shawl. You only know what came before, not what comes next. There were guidelines.

We were told to pick three colors (yardages were recommended for different shawls sizes). I went to sock summit and had fun in the "Verb for Keeping Warm" booth. I got several colors to choose from for my shawl. I ended up using the yellow on the left, the color in the middle, and a skein of pico accuardi in the color "Gwendolyn," not pictured.
Then the first clue came out (I waited until the third one before I started really, as I wasn't thrilled with how the first and second looked). For those interested, I modified the pattern and did a bi-color garter tab for the cast on, rather than in color A. I didn't like the look of the little nugget at the top of a different color.
The next week, clue two came out.
And then three (which basically repeated, so pretty easy to do)
And by then, I was basically done. Mom and Angharad helped me get some good photos for the next part of the KAL, which was to post your photos of your completed object for a prize drawing (and it was on my birthday too). So here it is: my Indigo Garden, pattern Earth and Sky, by Stephen West.
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Happily enough, my shawl one a random drawing. Sometime soon, I am going to get a skein of beautiful yarn in the mail. I can't wait! Well, I guess I can, but it will be a wonderful late b-day present when it comes.