snow

Please don't report for me for cruelty to knitted works in progress. This is the second time that my swallowtail shawl has been exposed to snow - but this time it's outside our very own door here in Seattle. Yes, it started to snow at about 6:30pm yesterday evening and now at 10:30am the temperature is still below freezing and there's a layer of white over everything outside.

The swallowtail shawl is going well, as I hope you can see from the photo. I have completed thirteen repeats now, six to go and the edging. I discovered a fabulous/dreadful calculator at Rose-Kim Knits - you enter how many rows there are in the shawl and can check your progress row by row. Seventy-eight rows complete out of 141 and I am 30.6% of the way through the shawl. I'm really pleased about that 0.6%!

In practical knitting news, I'm not having much luck. On a whim I decided that I needed a slouchy beret (and I may well still) but I made a bit of a mess of it by using a yarn that was way too heavy (five strands together of recycled yarn - I think that I ended up with bulky weight). Besides, I really don't like to knit with anything that requires needles over about 5.5mm. So anyway, that was frogged within a day of starting. I am currently considering Fern Glade from the newest Knitty which calls for dk weight. I am determined to use from the stash so that would involve 'creating' a dk weight yarn from multiple threads of recycled yarn. So far in this endeavour I haven't had much luck getting the weight right - always too heavy so maybe I'll underestimate next time around. And Fern Glade is lacy which is time consuming and with two other lacy projects underway ... blah blah blah. Might be time for some cables.