Shawl

I finished knitting a shawl. It is not as interesting as the purple and gold scarf, and there is not much of a story behind this project other than I needed some things to work on while away from home on the snowbirding trip. Knitters usually bring materials for several projects on a trip because heaven forbid if you were sitting in the car or on a plane for hours without a project.

One thing I like about knitting and weaving and spinning is that there are infinitely many fibers and yarns and colors and patterns so that there is always something new and different to make. Sometimes that makes it overwhelming to decide what to do next or which yarn or fiber to use.

The main criteria for picking out the yarn in this case was to not buy anything. Many of you know that in October of 2018 I bought the entire inventory of a small yarn shop that was going out of business. At the time I did not have a plan for what to do with it, but I figured that once in your life you get to do something crazy. I will write more about the yarn shop purchase in a separate post.

My yarn shop inventory is for sale at Tangles to Treasures in Fergus Falls, and also available for me to use. Even though I own thousands of dollars worth of yarn, sometimes I still cannot find the right thing for a particular project. In this case it was not hard.

Torri had knit a beautiful shawl with a pattern I liked called “Among the Shadows Shawl”, so I purchased the pattern on Ravelry. The nice thing about a Shawl is you can make it work with many different types of yarn, and I had no trouble picking something out from my yarn shop inventory. It was thicker than what the pattern called for, so that if I followed the pattern exactly the Shawl would come out larger. Instead I did some math to figure out the number of stitches and rows and pattern adjustments that would result in about the same size as the original. But it doesn’t matter exactly what size it comes out to be. Which is good because often my knitting projects do not come out the way I am expecting.

Another thing about fiber art that keeps me interested is that there is always something new to learn. This shawl pattern had a different kind of bind off that I had never seen before. I liked it and will probably use it again.

My next knitting project is a pair of socks with thin yarn, instead of the bulky yarn used for the shawl. Socks are nice for a trip because the project does not take up much room and is very portable.