Charlotte's Web Attack

Here is a shot of the Charlotte's web shawl that I did in May, draped over my great wheel. While it doesn't show the colors very well, it does a great job of showing the stitch pattern. I didn't really select the colors, they kind of were selected by my Wednesday bookstore cafe knitting group. For the past 2 years, I've been buying a skein of Koigu PPM when I visited LYS' as I travel around, if they carry it. No rhyme or reason, just a skein in a colorway that appeals to me. Fran in the knitting group had ordered skeins from a catalogue to make a CW, and thought she was getting variations of pink. She was unhappy because what she received looked more like variations of orange, with some pink. I offered to bring my 15 varied skeins to the meeting, and she could trade anything of mine into her grouping. While she was finding a batch she liked (with NO ORANGE), some of us could see an orange/pink/peach/brown trend appearing, and the upshot was that I cast on for a CW that evening. I was hooked on lace again, and two weeks later, it was already blocked and ready to take back to show off. This is a little weird, because I am not a speed knitter, and I am generally not a finisher of projects, much more a starter. I did think that the pattern has a good repeating, easy to remember motif, which of course helped.

Anyway, here are some of the colors close-up.

And a better representation overall of the colors, though what looks dark on the last couple of repeats is really medium and dark brown, not black.Not my usual color scheme, but surprisingly I like it a lot. I do have another batch of greens that came out of that Weds. night, though, that look a lot more like me, in general.

I really love Koigu, by the way, but as with all merino, I am not wild about it's blocking properties. In my experience, merino just does not like to hold a blocking, though I have never tried the starch trick. After all, doesn't starching soft, cuddly merino yarn seem to be like making a silk purse into a sow's ear, as my grandmother would say?

So, anyway, when I saw the kit for the Koigu Magique Cloak on sale for 50% off at Patternworks, including 41 (!) skeins of Koigu-dyed beautiful softness, I went ahead and leapt for it. I can very safely say that I will never make the pattern with the yarn, it is just not at all attractive to me, but now I have a collection of 50 (!) skeins of KPPM in my stash (original 15, used 6 for CW, plus 41 new skeins), and I am a happy person about this. See, the stash has a mind of it's own, right?

Oh, and I am letting the wonderful reviews of MAFA by Jen and B say it all for me, too. We had a great time, were surrounded by fiber and like-minded people, and someone else cooked. It doesn't get much better than that.