Ready to Block

Sometimes the days just get away from me - it's been an entire week since I've posted, but to tell the truth I haven't gotten a lot of knitting in. The world intrudes.

My shawl, despite a few setbacks, is finally done. There it sits in all its unblocked glory. As you know, I ran out of yarn about five rows from the end. When the new shipment of Kersti came I decided there was enough to add those five rows plus an entire pattern repeat. I know, I know... despite dedicating an entire post to never learning, ever the optimist am I. There was enough for the extra pattern repeat, but not for the five rows of garter + bind-off. Tink. Tink. tinktinktinktinktink.



I finally ended up with two rows of garter and bound off using the Russian bind-off you see above. It's accomplished like this: *p2tog, slip the st back onto the left needle, repeat from * to end.



In other knitterly happenings, I was over at Knitting in La Jolla picking up some Cascade superwash for a little somethin-somethin for Snoop, and got distracted by a couple of books - Lace Style, which I promptly added to my "Style" library, and No Sheep for You Actually, Suzanne showed me No Sheep because it has a sweater pattern that is basically the World's Biggest Shedir -



yes, even bigger than my own gigantic one - that has three pages of charts and looks like it might take my natural lifetime to knit!.

Anyway, I've been paging through them all week for inspiration, and yesterday I cast on six stitches: the start of the Tuscany shawl (scroll down for a photo) from No Sheep.

Mary's playhouse continues to progress, but the weird fog we've had (See? La Jolla has weather problems too. And I was going to link to a picture of the fog, but the first hit on google images that really showed it also linked to a naked guy holding some kind of crustacean at Black's Beach, which frankly sounds like a bad idea and wasn't very attractive to view, either. So no photo for you.) has not been conducive to painting. And - horrors - rain is predicted on Wednesday. Maybe later in the week I'll get a shot of the playhouse if the sun cooperates.

And - looky here! Snoop's ears have stood up, making him look like a cross between a fruit bat and a holstein.