fo: daybreak shawl

This shawl, like a lot of things I’ve knit this year, has been an instructive exercise in the power of blocking. You may recall how scrunched and curled this looked when it came off the needles? I blocked it, and now it looks like this.

Pattern: a very truncated version of Daybreak, which was super fun to knit – the stripes and slipped stitches are just enough to keep the stockinette interesting, and the extra increases make this a perfect shawl to wear as a scarf, with the way it curves.
Yarn: Koigu KPPPM, 2 skeins – one in grey, one in turquoise.
Needles: I used my 4mm Addi Lace circular, because I didn’t own the size called for in the pattern. It was close enough.

I modified the pattern a bit, mostly to allow for the fact that I really didn’t want to buy extra skeins of yarn, even though the yardage that I had was much less than what was called for to knit the smallest size. I worked fewer stripe repeats (nine stripes of each) and striped the garter rows at the end. I ended up having a bit of the turquoise left over, but I used up the charcoal almost entirely, and I’m a big fan of the way the finished product turned out. The other change I made was to switch the M1R and M1Ls at the very end of each row with yarnovers, to make sure that the edge was nice and stretchy.

Because I worked the whole thing on a slightly larger needle and blocked it pretty fiercely, the finished shawl actually a perfect size – just big enough to wear as a scarf, over a t-shirt with jeans, and just in time. Fall is actually starting to settle in (finally), and I can’t wait to wear everything I’ve knit this summer with my new fall wardrobe.

fo: abandoned socks (rainbow)

Finished!

It’s almost cheating to call this an accomplishment, because it’s really not. On the list of “unfinished projects to complete,” this was probably the easiest. I started these socks in October, finished them in about a month, and then they sat. For almost a year. In my defense, at least two weeks of letting them sit untouched was completely justified – I noticed that I’d dropped a stitch picking up one of the heels, and figuring out how to darn that in looked like it’d be a headache.

The other ten months, unfortunately, I have no excuses for.

But, one episode of Gossip Girl later (because Gossip Girl makes almost every unpleasant task less painful), they were totally done. They’re also the most screamingly rainbow-coloured socks in the entire world, but I think after all this time, I’ve come to terms with that.

Pattern: Generic toe-up stockinette socks, with afterthought heels.
Needles: 2.25mm dpns
Yarn: ShibuiKnits Sock, in #51301 Spectrum

finished: urban whatever/mystery hat

The second iteration of my hat is done, and I am much happier with this version than the first one. It actually fits my head! The stripes turned out the way I wanted! It’s slouchy, but not comically so!

Pattern: my own (I’ve nicknamed it Urban Whatever on Ravelry)
Yarn: almost exactly two skeins of Blue Sky Alpacas 100% Alpaca Sport
Needles: 3.0 mm dpns and a 3.25 mm circular needle

Despite the fact that this hat uses very small needles (those are US size 2 1/2 and 3), it actually went pretty quickly. I knit the hat itself in about three days (you could definitely pull it off in a weekend, if you weren’t doing much). The biggest delay was actually blocking – the hat took two full days to dry because of the summer humidity! I’m really glad that I did block this, though, because that was totally the key to getting the shape that I wanted out of this hat: I knit it a little too big and a little too short, and then blocked it taller.

I’d like to write this up as a pattern, I think, so stay tuned for that!