Orange Blossom

My Mystery Lace Shawl is finished, and probably the loveliest thing I’ve ever knitted:

If I’d seen the pattern when I signed up for the knitalong I’m not sure I’d have dared to try; I was envisaging something like Ishbel, mainly stocking stitch with a lace border, and would have said my knitting skills weren’t up to an all-over lace shawl with several different pattern sections. Which, it turns out, wasn’t true at all. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy I found it to read my knitting and keep myself on track with the pattern as I went along, and by the end I was even knitting it happily in front of the TV (although the other night when I was knitting and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD I should probably not have picked the episode ‘Hush’). I may well be making more lace shawls in the not-too-distant future, which would probably be good for my sock-yarn stash!

Meanwhile, I’m left without a serious project on the needles (I do have some simple socks for myself on the go). What I want to do is to turn the Cotton Glace left over from my lilac cardigan, plus a couple of extra balls in toning colours, into a striped sleeveless pullover with a scoop neck, but I’m having difficulty finding a pattern with everything I want at the right kind of gauge. I think I’m going to have to more or less design my own, which shouldn’t be too difficult but does mean there’s quite a bit of work to do before I can think about casting on.

In progress

I have been too busy knitting to blog much over the last few weeks. Mostly, I have been working on this:

Hey, Teach! from last summer’s Knitty, in RYC Cotton Jeans, of which I bought ten balls for £20 in the sale at House of Fraser in Worcester when I took T to the cricket for his birthday. I cast on two weeks ago, and finished the second sleeve this afternoon. Partly this astonishingly speedy knitting is due to spending five hours last Sunday watching Torchwood: Children of Earth, which got me through the last couple of inches of the back, the left front and the start of the right front and then having a crafting afternoon with friends today, but I also think the cardigan is a pretty quick knit, and the pattern is fairly easy to follow. The only tricky bit is keeping the lace pattern straight through the armhole and neck decreases, but after a while I got very good at reading the knitting and seeing how it should work.

Now I just have to weave in the ends (fortunately there aren’t too many as I used Russian joins for new balls of yarn in the middle of each piece), sew it together and add button bands. Suddenly I remember why I’m such a fan of top-down raglans! I’m planning on wearing this cardigan for my nephew’s christening next month, so at least I have an incentive to get round to it before then!

I was trying to get the knitting for Hey, Teach! finished this weekend, as I want my 5mm Harmony tips back for my next project:

This is my swatch for Socktopus’s Mystery Lace Shawl knitalong, which she’s running via Twitter, in the semi-solid copper BFL 4-ply I bought from the Knitting Goddess at Ravelry Day. The next clue (cast-on, presumably!) will be up tomorrow at 10pm, and I wanted to be able to use the Harmonies – my Denises are OK but because the yarn’s so fine it did catch on the joins a bit when I was swatching.