The beginning

Happiness is - starting a new shawl.  Love the yarn, love the pattern.  Looking forward to watching it grow into the beautiful piece I know it will be!

5 of 12: Color Affection

Back in February, I underwent a small shoulder surgery.  Faced with a week of recovery, but the prospect of low dexterity and reduced mental prowess, I queued up Color Affection by Veera Välimäki (ravelry).  While I am normally not a fan of garter stitch, this pattern offered a very cool effect for very little mental effort.  Just keep knitting, just keep knitting...

Now, you many notice the colors.  I'm not the best at matching, so one evening I called the Boy into the yarn lair.  I had picked out a deep cranberry, heather slate, and a bright white.  "What do you think of this combo?  I think it looks classy," says I.  Deadpan look.  "Liz....that's scarlet and gray."  And so, I knit up an accidental tribute to my alma mater. 

The wingspan on this is huge - I can wrap it around myself three times with room to spare.  A project like this would have normally have taken me at least 4-6 weeks...but being couch-bound I breezed through it in 8 days!

I would be remiss not to mention that I received support on this project from my dedicated assistant, Dot.

4 of 12: mystery project

As shawl #4 is going to be a gift, it has to stay hidden for a little while.  However, here's a little teaser:

This project was my first foray into beaded knitting.  I love the effect and can't wait to use beads on another one of my 2012 shawls.

Measuring up

I love recycling yarn.  I could spend hours combing the thrift store shelves in search of a great find.  As most of my yarn comes from pulling apart sweaters these days, I usually don't know how much I have of any given yarn - other than the generic a lot!

So much yarn...but how much?

This hadn't bothered me before, but joining the 12 shawls in 2012 challenge, one of the posting requirements is yardage. Now, I could estimate based on the pattern or the weight, but as soon as the idea snuck* into my mind, I knew I would have to figure out a way to actually measure the yarn.

 
Enter....the internets!  After looking at the expensive tools, I ran across this excellent summary of options, which pointed me to the brilliantly simple solution of using a bike computer.  After all, a swift is basically a wheel, and all you need to do is count rotations!

After a bit of fiddling with the circumference, I'm fairly certain that I'm getting a good reading.  Since I have so much yarn to ball, I do cheat a bit.  I'll unwind a few balls to the swift, measure those, average the yardage/weight ratio.  Then for the remaining sweater bits I can unwind straight onto the ball winder, saving a step, and just calculate the length from the weight.  It's not the most accurate method, but the estimate is certainly good enough for my purposes.

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*Apparently the proper form of this word is "sneaked"...but that just sounds odd.  I'm going with the informal conjugation.