A shameless plug for a friend’s new business: totally knitting related.

Hi there. I am shamelessly going to plug my friend’s new business venture in this post. Please don’t hang up; and don’t worry, this call is not being monitored for quality control.

My daughter has a friend who has become my friend, a professional graphic artist whose real love is the fibre arts. Her name is Joanna and she is happily married to another nerdy artist and they have between them a toddler who is, for the most part, cheerful and affectionate. Joanna started out sewing mostly, and her first website reflects that: The Happy Seamstress. She has since branched out to her other love, yarn, and everything that yarn entails: spinning, dyeing, knitting and designing knitted things. I, personally, have made at least a half-dozen of her knitted beards. They make great gifts.

The above was made for an acquaintance who took part in a Santa Shuffle to raise money. It was my contribution in lieu of a monetary donation.

Joanna has recently started a subscription box service. The deal is you give her your credit card number and every month, or other month—your choice—she sends you a box filled with goodies. I have signed up for the every-other-month service myself because I’m not usually at a loss for projects, but this would be perfect for the knitter who doesn’t know what to make next. She has been in touch with a number of yarn companies to try to get discounts on their products so that her boxes will be reasonably priced. She’s also finagled the best price she can on shipping, which was not easy.

August’s box, the introductory one, is discounted and the shipping is free. It contains this lovely beaded shawl pattern, plus all the yarn and beads you need to make it (and a bonus surprise or two).

I know that it’s beautiful because that’s my arm underneath that lovely drapey fabric. The yarn is Sweet Georgia Merino-Silk lace. The colour above is one of the possibilities, but there are also skeins in purple and a yellow-green. You don’t get a choice, as distribution is random, but I’m sure they’re all lovely. I can’t wait to get my box so I can start knitting that shawl.

If you are interested, and I hope you are, you can get all the information you need at Yarn Crush. Please support my friend. She’s worth it!

A tale of three shawls

I have completed three shawl test knits already this summer, which is pretty crazy, even for me. The first is Mad Blood by Mary-Anne Mace. I adore Mary-Anne’s lace shawls. This one is no exception. My version took one skein of Sweet Paprika Messa di Voce in Georgian Bay, a 3-ply yarn of 100% merino wool. I am exceedingly pleased with the results.

The second shawl is Heather Anderson’s The Turtles’ Journey, a crescent shawl that tells a tale. Hers calls for a 4-ply sock yarn and I was all set to dive into my stash but couldn’t find a colour suitable to baby turtles making their way across the sand to the sea. So I went to my local yarn store and bought a couple of skeins of Julie Asselin Piccolo, 80% merino, 20% nylon, in Ooak, a colourway that doesn’t seem to have any consistency. Mine was variations on brown. It reminded me of how a beach looks after a rain. Also, I messed up one turtle’s shell and didn’t want to rip back to just reverse a couple of knits and purls; so I decided to give it red beads for eyes to show that it was different (and possible evil). While looking for my red beads, I came across the leftover coppery ones I’d used in my Serendipity and realized they were the perfect colour for the other turtles’ eyes! The result:

Heather is hosting a KAL in September as part of her group on Ravelry for this shawl and I have received over 600 views because she linked to my page for people who are interested in adding in the beads for eyes.

The third test-knitted shawl was a “gift” from my friend Bonnie who had just finished a test for a designer and pointed out that she had another to be tested right away. I loved the shawl Bonnie had worked on and had asked for an earburn when it was ready, so I jumped at the chance to try out the new one. The designer, Yellow Mleczyk, wanted a very open knit with big holes which she created with a series of double yarn overs. Her result is the Double Bubble Shawl.

I found this to be a very challenging knit. English is not the designer’s first language, so there was a bit of a hurdle getting past her quaint terminology. There were errors in both the written out directions and the charts, which we caught as we went along. After all, that’s what test knitting is all about. She has allowance for a stockinette section before the lace begins, but I just jumped right into the lace to knit it as she had done, with five iterations of the first chart before beginning the next. I used a single, 100 gm. ball of Saki Bamboo by Wisdom Yarns with about three grams left over.

The first chart, eight RS rows of lace (WS rows are all purled), does not look difficult. However, the rows are all very similar and it is easy to think you’ve knitted the second one when you haven’t. That’s what happened to me in the first iteration. I left out a row. I did not realize this until I got to the second chart (with over 250 stitches on the needles already) and my stitch count was wrong. You see, it’s a crescent shawl that increases by six stitches every two rows. By missing out that one pattern row, I was short six stitches and the pattern in the second chart was in multiples of 12. Not good at all, and nothing I could just fudge by adding stitches. So I ripped back to almost the set-up row and started again. This time I kept track of every single row, with stitch counts, and it all worked out perfectly. But this error of mine showed up a serious problem in the draft pattern: for the stockinette section, the designer had said that one could start the first pattern chart on any RS row. If there were not a multiple of 12 stitches between the edge stitches, then the knitter would run into the same issue I had when she reached Chart B. So I alerted the designer to this and she was thoroughly mortified. Hopefully it will be corrected when the pattern hits the stands. Here’s my Double Bubble, Toil and Trouble: