Last Thursday, I got a text from a friend: “Everything alright?”
“Yup,” I texted back. “How about you?”
“I was a bit worried when no WIP Wednesday appeared on your blog,” she responded.
Oops. I kinda forgot. Mostly because there wasn’t much to tell, as you already know if you read my June 2014 Wrap Up. This week, there’s a little progress to report!
Spinning
I finally finished the pin-drafted wool and spun a bit more than 4 of the 8 ounces of the Psalm 23 Farm fiber that will be plied with the pin-drafted wool.
I’m happy with my spinning progress, and my improving ability to get consistent singles. The Psalm 23 Farm fiber is taking longer to spin than I expected because it has small bits of dry, leafy vegetable matter in it and I keep stopping to pick it out so it does not get incorporated into the yarn. My goal is to finish spinning and plying this yarn before next week’s WIP Wednesday!
MAPLE LEAF the Third
I am really, really not enjoying knitting this project. I decided to knit this one exactly as written, the first time I’m doing that with this pattern. I’m leaving the ends to weave in at the end. And totally hating the way there’s ends everywhere that keep getting tangled with my working yarn.
I will not be doing that again. I think I’m going to do a hybrid approach, not the full rearranging that I did with MAPLE LEAF the Second, and not the blind following of the pattern that I’m doing now. I haven’t exactly figured out what my plan is, but I’ll work it out while I’m doing MAPLE LEAF the Fourth. I only have the three central corners left on MAPLE LEAF the Third. I plan to have it off the needles before the next WIP Wednesday, but I probably won’t have all the ends woven in or have it blocked before then.
Begonia Swirl Shawl
I had not worked on this shawl since I got it to 50% completion during the first week of June. I need to finish it before July 13 to meet the deadline for the HPKCHC OOTP. In order to do that, I need to knit at least 5% of the shawl per day, starting on July 1. So far, I’m meeting that goal.
I’m at the point in this type of shawl construction where you knit and knit and knit and knit, but feel like you are getting nowhere. There’s more than 800 stitches on the needles. 5% of the overall shawl is about 3 rows of knitting. I have less than 20 rows left, but they just go on and on and on. It is relatively easy knitting even though I’m on the lace edging. The wrong side rows are purl all the way across; the right side rows consist of 20 pattern repeats. Since the pattern is only written, with no charts, and the pattern repeats are 40+ stitches, I expected to be totally cross-eyed trying to read this part of the pattern. The first two or three times through the pattern repeat on each row are pretty slow, but after that I can remember the pattern and it goes along more quickly. Still, each right-side row takes nearly an hour to knit, just because there’s so many stitches!
