Busy Week for New Projects

I signed up for the Mystic Light Shawl, a mystery KAL that is now closed, and I've actually started on it in the first week of the KAL. Since I'm doing this one with the recommended fingering weight, it's moving right along, though I frogged the start twice last night. Once was a beginning screw-up, the other was to add a border stitch on each side, so I can do a slip-stitch edging. The top edge of this shawl is a 4-st cable, and I didn't like the large loops I was getting with that first stitch. I can tweak the slipped stitch to get it tighter, and it seems to be folding under the cable nicely. This is through Row 13 of the charts. The yarn is Elann's Baby Cashmere, in Starlight Blue, which name seemed appropriate to the shawl name.

I'm also 75% done with a scarf for my seniors' group; I started this on Saturday. This is from 2 skeins (190yds) of lovely alpaca that was donated to us. The pattern is Smariek's easy Georgiana pattern.

And I finished the scarf I made to go with the Binary Hat for A4A. This took about 1.5 skeins of the darker yarn and a bit of leftover in the lighter shade. This is Nashua's Creative Focus Worsted, and I really like knitting with it - soft, a bit fuzzy but not at all splitty. The spin of the yarn gives this mistake rib pattern some nice variation in the knit stitches - subtle but not boring.



I finally scored a skein of Posh Yarn!! I 'met' Dee via Ravelry, when I was looking at yarns used for the Wool Peddler's Shawl. She's quite nice, and is a wonderful knitter; see her lovely projects at Ravelry, where she's known as PoshDee. The new yarn is offered on Sundays and the sales fly, so you've got to be quick on the 'buy' button, at 10am sharp Pacific Time - which is 6pm Greenwich Time. This is Lucia, 70% merino/30% cashmere, with 430yds in the 100g skein. The colorway is Royalty, but Posh doesn't repeat colors exactly, so you can't get quite this same yummy color. The deep reddish-purple is wonderfully saturated. I expect this will become a shawl of some sort.

I had a bad case of start-itis this week, so I did some playing around with ideas. I've settled on some Crystal Palace Waikiki in bright tropical colors for the Montego Bay scarf; I picked up 3 skeins of this at Marie's garage sale last fall. And I fiddled around with variations on the Chevron Scarf, finally choosing a Peacock Plume pattern that's part of a bolero pattern at Elann, since the simple feather and fan pattern as written in the Last-Minute Knitted Gifts book is boring. But neither of these are further than a row or two, and I found my start-itis was satisfied with the setup work.