A Knitting Week

Hi there !

Thank you to everyone who posted comments after last week's blog. I found them very helpful and am now convinced I was beating too hard and should have checked that I had a balanced weave. I may have cured my broken edge thread problem but must now learn to stop beating everything to death !! I will have another go at Pinwheels before too long !

Last week I went to our holiday place in Crail in Fife. The idea was to have a leisurely week visiting the Pittenweem Arts Festival and playing golf. Tony was back at home playing golf for three days. 

However, our Scottish weather had other ideas and I had picked the worst possible week for my stay. The Kingdom of Fife had exceptional rain, by the 10th of the month we had had three times the average expected for the whole month and everything and everywhere was awash. I did make it to the festival on two occasions but it was no fun tramping in and out of houses with wet clothes and shoes. It was very sad for those people exhibiting, they pay a lot of money to sign up for the festival and rent rooms and, of course, put an enormous amount of work into getting everything ready. The people I spoke to had noticed a marked drop in visitor numbers and in sales.

Golf was also a washout both at Crail and back home in Lochmaben. The competitions Tony had stayed at home to play in were all cancelled. On the plus side that meant a few odd jobs got done around the house !!

So, what did I do ? Well, I knitted most of the week, only venturing out to buy food !

I had one shawl already on the needles and about half finished. It was a pattern I had had in my 'queue' for a while from Blue Button Studios, called Pteryla.  It was a very straightforward, well written pattern and I used a 4ply Merino from  Helen at Ripples Crafts Yarns.

This first picture shows a close up of the texture of the shawl.................

The second picture shows how nice and warm this can be around the shoulders. In fact is was so cold one of the days I actually wore it !! I really liked the soft lavender colour and when it was washed and blocked the pattern loosened up and the yarn softened even more.

I had five days left so what next ? I had a ball of sock yarn, not my favourite but it needed to be used up. Luckily I had another pattern with me, again, one I had been meaning to try for a while.

Once again, a pattern from Ravelry, Arabella, from Knitting Kninja Design.  Now this was a very lacey pattern and I wasn't sure how it would work out but decided to use the sock yarn as a trial.

The pattern was very well written and presented and easy to follow. having said that though, I couldn't have watched TV while doing it as missing a yarn over could have been a bit of a problem !

With nobody to disturb me I found it knitted up very quickly. It didn't look much on the needles but I'm used to that ! Once it was washed and pinned out to shape the lace pattern really showed up as you can see in this photo........................

I really prefer to do my lace knitting with finer 2 ply yarn maybe in cashmere or silk but this certainly showed me how the lace worked out and I would certainly do it again as it is very effective.

here it is from the front............................

So, all in all I had a very productive week, two shawls completed and plenty of rest !

Back home again now and already there is a warp on the loom so more weaving to talk about next time.