I'm in a blasé mood today; my foot still hurts and I'm waiting for some inspiration to finish off some patterns I've been working on. I have, however, managed to finally take photographs of 2 shawls that I was working on, finished spinning up a hand-dyed alpaca/bfl top, and updated the shop with some new journals.

I began working on this shawl a few weeks after I won the yarn at the Knitwitches Party, and despite it's apparent complexity, I found the pattern up to the edging extremely easy and simple to follow. I whizzed through the body of the shawl in a week, but when I got to the edging chart... I put it down for a while. The pattern repeats for the edging weren't as predictable as they were for the rest of the shawl, and I found that I couldn't concentrate on it for more than a few rows at a time; it took me another week to get the edging done. Although beautiful, the edging charts gave me a hard time! I love this pattern, and it's soul-sucking edging, and will definitely make another one! You can find the Aeolian Shawl pattern by Elizabeth Freeman here.

Up next is a Swallowtail Shawl:

I knitted this shawl at the beginning of the summer (you can see me wearing it on the main photograph of my Christina glove pattern), and as you can see, it's been yanked and twisted since then!  I knitted it in a pure alpaca yarn, which proceeded to 'unblock' itself within hours of unpinning the shawl from the blocking board. I know now that I should avoid pure, springy, alpaca yarn if I want my finished project to and stay the right shape!

Pattern information: Swallowtail Shawl by Evelyn Clark, you can view and download the pattern here.

On the handspinning front, I spun up some bfl/alpaca fibres that I hand-dyed and carded into a 3ply sock weight yarn:

I was a little lazy and clumsy spinning this up, mainly because I have another cloud of fibres I want to spin up and I rushed through spinning and plying this batch to get it off the bobbins. It's not as even as my usual yarns, but I doubt the little bumps will be too apparent in the final project. This yarn is destined to become my next Swallowtail. The wool content in the yarn should make it a little more obedient when it comes to blocking. I might start it when I go to this week's knitting meetup.

Clumsy Pink : 70% BFL, 30% alpaca, 100g, 407m/445yds - 23WPI

And finally, a shop update; Sweet Dreams and Gypsy Chic...

I have a bit of spinning to get done tonight for a friend's belated birthday present... I really hope she likes PINK!