On and Off the Needles

I've been knitting!

Back in November, I started a shawl, and threw up a teaser photo, but then I don't think I ever followed up on that (2021, aka The Year of Not Following Up On That). So here we are now!

The pattern is Roam, by Dawn Barker (Ravelry), and it is part of her group of assigned pooling patterns: you take a yarn that is dyed in one color for three quarters of the skein, and in a contrasting color or multiple colors for the rest, and then you knit plain on the main color and do the patterny bit when you get to that second part.

The yarn I used is from Yarn Snob (Ravelry link), 100% Merino wool, and the colorway is Times Square: the main color is a deep, almost blue, purple, and the contrast is multi-colored and highlighter bright. I love it!

The pattern starts at a point and widens. A decent-sized shawl could be made with two skeins, but this yarn was sold in a three-pack, which meant I could make mine as large as I want without worrying about running out. 

Every once in a while, I put it on a longer needle so I could stretch it out, and each time until last week, I've kept on going. This time, though, I decided it was big enough that I could move on to the edge/border, which is in linen stitch. 

(The end of the second skein came several rows into the linen stitch.)

I love how the yarn is showing in the linen stitch! I bound it off last night, and am eager to see how blocking smooths it out.

Now, as the end of this drew near, and also as my trip draws near, I wanted to be sure to have a good social knitting project ready to go. I liked the look of the Wheelwright Shawl, a free pattern from Purl Soho. It's a simple, circle-plus shawl design using short rows to make wedges, and it uses DK yarn, which I happened to have enough of already in my stash (Three Irish Girls Springvale DK, in the colorway Pride in the Name of Love). I had been planning to make a little blanket with it, but that hadn't happened, and hey, here we go!

Funnily enough, I wound a skein of it at the same time as I was winding the third skein of the Yarn Snob, and my, don't they have a lot in common?

Anyway, I cast on and knit one wedge, just to be sure it would work as social knitting, and the answer was yes! I lightly wet it and pinned it out to photograph, since it wanted to roll a bit.

I like what the colors are doing, and though I enjoyed the assigned pooling project, it's also kind of nice to just knit! (And purl, but you know what I mean.)

So that's ready. I pushed myself to finish the Roam, mostly because I want to wear it on the trip. I'll also bring a sock project with me, and though I have one in progress, it isn't really grabbing me for some reason. Nothing wrong with, it just... isn't grabbing me. I might cast on another one (in fact I may have done some stash-diving already; I might have pulled out the swift; some casting on may have happened). Because there are no knitting police and I can do what I want (in this, if in no other aspect of life).