4S Saturday: glorious

My grandmother loved her shawl. My aunt loved it, too, and kept trying it on. I'm adding some additional projects to my gift knitting queue this year, so the paternal aunts will get some lace at some point.

My mother also liked my grandmother's shawl and asked for one as well, instead of a mark II of the Fernfrost scarf that the wind took away from her last year. I started working on that with the yarn that was intended for Fernfrost the Second, and I added a pattern repeat on the middle section to make it bigger. However, I misjudged the amount of yarn that I would need for the size increase and ran out, so the project went on hold until the additional yarn I ordered arrived. I finished the middle section at my knitting group session today, so there's just the edging left to do, and yet I still may be short on yarn to get it finished. Generally, I'm pretty good about making sure I have an adequate amount of yarn for a project, so I don't know why this one is different. And I can't show you any progress pictures of it because my mom reads this blog.

I can show you this, though:

This is the Two-Thirds Shawl by Wendy Johnson from her Wendy Knits Lace book. The yarn is a tight twist superwash merino wool fingering weight from Fearless Fibers. The colorway is called Glorious Green. Indeed.

I had tried two other shawl patterns with this yarn, and neither worked. Third time appears to be the charm. I like the pattern so far, and I've had no problems following the charts. I'm already through the first section and well into the second set of charts. I have just under the amount of yarn the pattern calls for, but I'm making this on a smaller needle size as well, so I think it will be okay. I may regret saying that, given my recent struggles with yarn amounts.

There are quite a few patterns in this book that I would like to make, so it may be an additional knitting goal this year to work through a bunch of them. I started the Stacy Shawl awhile back, but ran into problems with the pattern. I thought I'd worked out a fix, but it was still giving me fits, so I put it down for awhile. More people have made the pattern now, so I'm hoping I can find some help to figure out where I'm going wrong.

I also made this recently:

The pattern is Minnie by Jumper Cables Knitting. The yarn is Waverly by Bernat in the Breath of Blue colorway.

The other scarf I'd been wearing had stretched out too much and was curling on the long edges, which doesn't provide much protection from wind and cold. It was driving me nuts. I thought I'd put in enough garter stitch so it would lay flat, but apparently not.

I didn't like the idea of doing a beginner-looking garter stitch scarf, but I did want something that wouldn't curl. I poked around on ravelry and came across this pattern and had a hallelujah moment. It has the needed garter stitch, but it also has the bobbles and lace edging to make it more interesting. You start at one end with only five stitches and you gradually increase stitches on one side only until you have it as wide as you want and then start decreasing on the same side - that gives you a long, narrow triangle shape. Easy and fun to knit, and I like how it turned out. Exactly the sort of scarf I wanted.