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With my other projects taking so long, I wanted something quick to finish – so I made a Triagonal shawlette! This is a nice quick mini-shawl ( Ravelry Link ) designed by Ambah O’Brien. It can be made with either a skein of sock yarn or 5 mini-skeins. I used a set my Mom got me for Christmas from Candy Shoppe yarn , and I am very happy with how it turned out. It works great as a little neck scarf and is a nice pop of color. I highly recommend both this pattern and the yarn!

I’m chugging along with my same two projects, but at least I’m making progress! This is the front and back of my Melville ( Ravelry link ). I’m about 1/3 of the way through the colorwork and enjoying it quite a bit! I love watching the pattern emerge My DH’s socks are coming along as well. I still have a fair amount of yarn left, and he has requested longer socks this time, so I’m going to just keep going until the yarn runs out. At what point in a project do you start thinking about what to cast on next? Asking for a friend!

One of my favorite things about knitting is that there’s always something new to learn. Someone’s always inventing something new or refining an existing technique or rediscovering an old technique or something. So if you want to, you can always be learning and growing. I don’t want to do that every day – sometimes you just need something simple to do – but I’m glad the opportunities are always there! Anyway, last Saturday I took 2 classes during the latest Rowan Connect – embroidering on dropped stitches, and smocking on knitting. Embroidering on dropped stitches was taught by Fiona Ellis, who is a really good teacher, and also very friendly and soothing. So if you want a relaxing class, she is a good bet! For this technique, you add dropped stitches to your work, and then do pulled thread embroidery stitches on them. It is a very nifty, lacy effect! The top swatch is what we did in class, and the bottom swatch was me playing around with the technique after class. I tried a differen...

I’ve got two projects currently active, my Melville and DH’s socks. DH’s socks are coming right along! I have turned the heels, so now it’s just straight up the legs until I run out of yarn. Melville too is coming along! I’m about 25 rows into the colorwork, and I am happy with how it looks so far. The colorwork section is 90 rows long, so I will be working on this for a bit. But I’m enjoying it! It’s a good pattern and the yarn (Knit Picks Gloss fingering) is pleasant to work with. A wild helper appears! I was ably assisted in today’s photoshoot by our girl Punky In totally other news, for anyone interested, there is a Rowan Connect (online classes and so on) happening this weekend. Details and schedule here . I am taking 2 classes on Saturday and attending as many of the complementary sessions as I can

For years, I have wanted a yarn winding station. Somewhere I could set up my swift and winder and just leave them up. But it just hasn’t been practical for one reason or another. But finally, my yarn winding dreams have come true! Ta Da!! Recently I was thinking about maybe getting a sawhorse of some kind and using that for the winding station. So I was poking around on Pinterest looking for ideas, as one does, and saw someone else had something similar to this. They said they had used a trestle from Ikea. I searched Ikea’s website and found this model, which is the Mittback. However, just the trestle does not work. The top piece is not long enough to have the components separated so they don’t whack into each other during winding, and also the clamps don’t work correctly due to the spacing. So my DH did some measurements, got the longer board you see here, screwed it fast to the top, and voila!! It works perfectly! It’s fairly lightweight so I can carry it to other rooms easily if...

Carol Christiansen’s Shetland Fine Lace Knitting is a thorough and engaging book. It was produced as a result of the Shetland Museum’s efforts to catalog and fully assess their collection of Shetland lace knitted items. Although the book does include pictures of quite a few full shawls and garments, the focus is on motifs and motif combinations. The motifs are gathered into sections, different variants of each motif shown. For each motif, there is a picture of the original and one of a modern sample. Then each pattern is charted and written out. So whatever type of pattern you like to work with, this book has you covered. In addition to the many, many motif patterns, there is also quite a bit about Shetland’s knitting traditions, history, and economy. Come for the patterns and stay for the textile history! I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Shetland lace knitting. Whether you want to just use some of the motifs in a project or create a full-blown Shet...

Other than DH’s socks, I’ve got two active projects going – Melville and a new little shawlette. Melville ( Ravelry link ) is moving along! I have just started the colorwork, which was quite a thrill. I don’t think this project will move along particularly quickly, but I’m enjoying seeing the pattern develop. I like the contrast between the main and pattern color, so I think the colorwork will stand out nicely. The other project is a little shawlette designed by Ambah O’Brien called the Triagonal Shawlette ( Ravelry link ). I didn’t have this project on my schedule, but I have all these miniskein sets, and Ambah just started her annual mini-munch knit along (KAL), so… This is a quick project, designed to use either a regular skein of fingering-weight yarn or a set of 5 minis. With all of the bigger projects I have going on, sometimes its nice to be able to just whip something out! I just started this Sunday and have already finished 2 of my 5 miniskeins! I can probably be done wit...

DH’s new black socks are coming right along! I’m about half an inch or so from turning the heels, then just the leg and cuff. These socks have been getting a lot of attention lately, because they are my go-to for calls and meetings and so on. I’m not using a pattern, just my regular recipe. If you knit socks, what is your favorite method and/or pattern?

Last weekend, DH and I went on a mini-adventure to the nearby-ish towns of Wausau and Stevens Point. The main objectives of the trip was to visit bookstores in each town, which we did do. However, each town also had a yarn shop, so we needed to stop at those too. The first stop was the Black Purl in Wausau. Despite the name, they are not pirate themed and also not amused by the question. In any case, Black Purl is an excellent local yarn shop, stuffed with a great variety of yarns, notions, and Atenti bags. They have a nice work table/area in front of the shop that seemed very cozy. I would be pretty thrilled to have this as my LYS, except it is 2 hours from my house. One very fun thing they had all over the store are Barbie and Barbie-compatible dolls all dressed in knitted outfits. The owner told me this was a result of a contest they had among their customers. The second stop in Stevens Point was the Wisconsin Wool Exchange. Their focus was more on local yarns, and in addi...

Book Report After hearing so many good things about Storygraph, I finally joined. Not sure yet if there’s a way to friend or follow people there, but if so, I am marileerd in case anyone wants to connect I finished 4 books last month! Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex ( Amazon link ) is an account of the incident that inspired Moby Dick, written by Owen Chase, who was one of the survivors. It is an interesting story and if you like Moby Dick, it’s worth reading just to get the background. The writing is of the time, so if you aren’t used to 1800s phrasing, it may take a minute to get used to it. I read the illustrated version, which features a lot of art and also selections from similar books. The excerpts from other books are just kind of stuck in there with no warning or visual signals that you are suddenly reading something else, so that also takes some getting used to. However, they do illustrate that sailing wrecks and sometimes whale attacks on ships are not isolated to this one...

The last two knitting projects I finished in February are the last two Laura Nelkin jewelry knitting kits I got for my birthday – the Cuentas collar and the Chillow cuff. The Chillow cuff is knitted with perle cotton and beads and is pretty straightforward. I enjoyed making this one, and have gotten supplies to make more. Another thing this kit introduced me to is the beautiful miracle of magnetic clasps. They are amazing, and now I’m thinking of retrofitting these to all my clasp bracelets. So much easier. The Cuentas collar has multiple knitted strands, 3 with beads and 2 without. The toughest part of making this was trying to keep the strands to the correct lengths, especially because the beaded strands are a bit heavier, so the stretch a bit more. The yarn is linen and cotton (I think) so it isn’t too stretchy. However, I like it fine even with the strands not lying the way they are technically supposed to. I am enjoying making these so much I got two more different kits, ...