Katydid Knits

That’s right – my Icarus shawl is done!

Pre-blocking, laid out on the kitchen table.  Already big.

Taking a little bath. Sadly, this will be the last time I soak anything in this salad spinner. I’ve been using it for 4 years to soak my knits and handspun, and it developed a crack across the bottom. It leaks. Looks like I need to pick up a new one.

A little dye bleed from the yarn. Wasn’t expecting it, because I didn’t get any on my hands working with it, but it rinsed out quickly.

Pinned out on the guest bed.  It just barely fit on the queen sized mattress.  Think I can convince Kris that we need to get ourselves a king sized bed so I have more blocking space? 

Unpinned.  Yeah, it’s bigger than my wingspan.  It’s more than 6 feet across the top edge, possibly 7 feet or slightly over.  (No, I haven’t measured.  I’m lazy.)

I’m pretty damn happy with it.  Can you tell? 

Pattern: Icarus by Miriam Felton from Interweave Knits Summer 2006.
Yarn: Ellen’s Half Pint Baby Alpaca and Silk (80/20). I bought two skeins at Stitches East in October 2007 for this pattern. Unfortunately, when I got home, I double checked, and I didn’t have enough yardage. Luckily, I saw Ellen at Rhinebeck the next week and lamented my mistake. She still had another skein of the yarn in the same dye lot. Yay for small independent dyers! It’s lovely stuff – I really enjoyed knitting with it.
Mods: Since I had the third skein, I now had a fair chunk more yardage than needed, so I added two repeats of chart 1 before beginning the lace at the edge.  That took it from a nice big shawl to a HUUUUUGE one, which makes me so happy.

I started Icarus on July 4.  It wouldn’t normally have taken me two months to finish it, but I took a few weeks to work on a sample for a friend, which I (obviously) couldn’t blog about.  It’s a neat pattern, though, so I’ll be sure to mention it when she publishes it.  Overall, I really liked knitting this shawl, although I whined from time to time about how boring the center section was.  It actually got to be pretty good mindless knitting, and I worked on it quite a bit during rehearsals.

Now, on to the next project – it’s the Milkweed shawl in Spud and Chloe Sweater in “Toast” I’ve seen a few examples of the shawl around, and I decided it would be nice to have something solid and neutral.  How unlike me, I know, but I like to shake it up every so often. (Oh, and yes, those are Ravelry links.  Apologies to any non-knitters who were curious about them.) I started it yesterday, and those of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook know that I made some decent progress before goofing up and having to rip back everything I knit at last night’s rehearsal. Happily, while ripping all of my new Beatles cd’s today, I caught back up and have now progressed beyond where I had been.

September 9th, 2009 | Tags: FOs, Knitting, Planned Projects | Category: Misc. | Subscribe to comments | Both comments and pings are currently closed