Pow!

When these gorgeous new colours of Rico Soft Merino Aran came into A Good Yarn - well I may have got slightly obsessed. It’s not the first time I’ve used this yarn, nor the last. There’s a beautiful array of colours, it’s supersoft, pure merino, good yardage and a decent price too.

I’ve got tons of knitting to do but they were beautiful and squishy and warm and well….

Last week, we had a lot of driving to do (he had a very nice birthday at Alton Towers Water Park) and Mr was happy to drive so over a few days I managed to get this lovely, squishy and colourful shawl finished. Can you tell I like it?

The pattern is the Betsey Shawl by Amy Miller. Here's my Ravelry project page.

It’s a very simple shawl and in my infinite wisdom, I thought I didn’t need stitch markers. Well, turns out I did.

I was fine until I started the stripes and just assumed the double decreases lined up on the middle stitch. They don’t. This meant I had an extra stitch on one edge and one less on the other. Once I realised what I had done (took awhile to figure that out), I just kept it as it was and did one less increase on one side and one less decrease on the other. You can’t tell.

Anyway, 4 days later, I’ve got a lovely shawl for winter. I love how the stripes lie when it’s on. The colours really sing.

I was playing about editing the photos and just love the effect of the one below. It looks like it’s been drawn with coloured pencils.

 

Fine Donegal

This lovely shawl has just come off my needles. The yarn is a new one from Debbie Bliss – Fine Donegal. The colour is Heather 10. I am absolutely in love with this yarn – I enjoyed knitting every bit of it. Ravelry Project Page

I was in too much of a rush to start the shawl to take a photograph of the balls but they are lovely and big. I want to use the word dumpling to describe them for some reason. Fine Donegal is a 4ply weight yarn and it comes in 100g “dumplings”. It’s a single ply yarn and very reminiscent of Rowan Fine Tweed; however, it has 5% cashmere content which seems to have increased the strength of the yarn. The rest of the yarn is 95% wool. It feels soft and with nice body to it.

The little flecks of tweed in the yarn are really beautiful. The shade I used was a heathery purple but with flecks of bright pink, green, blue etc. They are a similar tone to the main colour so they give the yarn a lovely depth of colour.

The pattern is from the book that goes with the yarn – Fine Donegal. The pattern is rather uninspiringly called “Shawl with lace edging” but it’s a lovely pattern. The edging is worked separately from the main body (which was great TV knitting), then sewn on. The sewing was really easy as there is the same number of rows for the edging and the shawl, so I didn’t even need to pin.

It blocked nicely too. It has an even softer handle now it’s blocked.

It is quite a large shawl, which I imagine will make it lovely in cold weather.