Malini Shawl Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! We go a little snow last week, which was great! It wasn't as much as was forecast, but every bit is welcome! Because of the snow, I ended up not attending the guild sew day, but the project I prepared will keep for another time. This morning my 18-year-old cat had her semi-annual vet visit. She has the beginnings of a lot of problems -- heart murmur, renal disease, hyperthyroidism. But they are all staying steady and overall she's in incredible shape for her age. Most importantly, she is remaining active and seems happy. The old lady is tough!

This week I got my Malini Shawl, designed by Lisa Hannes, finished.

Malini Shawl

This was a fun shawl to knit. The instructions were great and the yarn felt good in my hands. I decided to add an extra row of the main color at the bottom of the shawl because I thought it made the shawl look more finished. I also used a lace bind off rather than the regular bind off called for in the pattern because I like the look of the lace bind off, it's very easy to do and it has a good amount of stretch.

I also continued to make progress on my Pluma Morada shawl designed by Joji Locatelli. 

Pluma Morada

Pluma Morada - Close Up

I'm to the point where I'm just starting the second cable section. I need to think about how to put the rest of the shawl pattern into knitCompanion, which is the software that I use to step through the pattern while I knit. The pattern basically just says to continue on with the pattern, but I like having each step written out so I can knit without having to read my knitting and figure out where I am. It just helps me to not make mistakes. It probably won't be hard to do the set up, it just will take some time since the number of rows in the cable pattern repeat are different from the number of rows that are knit between places where you add another cable section. I'll sit down and do the work one of these days!

I also started looking at another knitting project to start. I'm always thinking about the next project! While cleaning out a closet, I ran across an old scarf kit I'd purchased a long time ago. I thought about making the scarf, but decided it didn't really appeal to me so I looked for another use for the yarn instead. I came across the Cozy Slipper Socks designed by Churchmouse Yarns and Teas. This pattern appealed to me and it was designed using the yarn from the scarf kit so I decided to knit a gauge swatch.

Cozy Slipper Socks - Gauge Swatch

I don't do any swatching unless I have to, but I felt I needed to swatch for this project. This is a fitted slipper so it won't fit if you don't get gauge and I knew I'd have trouble getting the tight fabric from this yarn that I would need for a slipper. This yarn is beautiful and fluffy, but it really sticks to itself so it's hard to create tight stitches with it. My stitches were definitely too big on the suggested needle, but I also feel like I won't be able to tighten up the stitches on smaller needles with this yarn, so I've decided not to make this pattern with this yarn. I have other, smoother, bulky yarn I can use for these slippers and I can find another project for this yarn. I undid the swatch and will put this project aside for now.

Finally, when I was going through my works in progress (WIPs) last week, looking for something for sew day, I came across an applique project I'd like to work on. I have a lot of WIPs from past years because I would start on something fun, and then get busy with work and with having to work on projects with a deadline like gifts, so things would get put aside and then forgotten about. Now that I'm retired, I'm organizing these old projects and hoping to make progress on them (although it's hard since I'm also always seeing new things I want to do....). For this quilt, I was using the applique leaves from the Indian Summer quilt pattern designed by Cheryl Wittmayer (sorry, I can't find this pattern online). 

Indian Summer Pattern

I really liked the leaves, but wanted to change up the pattern a bit. So I had played with the layout in EQ8. EQ8 is a quilt design application. I had played around with it a bit and came up with this layout and these colors:

Leaves Quilt - Original Design

I didn't have the leaves applique in the application, so I just used a pinecones block that they had available. Anyway, I had completed all of the applique blocks except for sewing around the edges of the green applique shapes. Since sewing around this complicated of a shape requires some care, I decided to do that sewing at home and then this can be another project that I can take to sew days where I can easily work on sewing the rest of the alternating blocks and can sew the blocks together to make the body of the quilt.

Leaves Quilt - Finished Applique Blocks

Leaves Quilt - Partial Layout (with lower left block rotated wrong - oops)

I had printed out the layout and put it in the box with the WIP so I could see what I was doing. For some reason, I found 5 more leaf blocks in the project box that was needed in the included layout. Not sure what I was thinking, but maybe I'll decide to make the quilt a bit bigger. Otherwise, I'll just include the blocks in the quilt backing.

While this project lay in it's box, time had marched on and I had switched from a Windows laptop to a Mac and no longer had EQ8. I had checked some years ago to see if I could get EQ8 on my Mac, but at that point they had just ported the application to the Mac and were charging full price to switch, so I decided to do without it. This project caused me to check again and you can now get the Mac version for just $25 if you already own the Windows version, so I went for it. It's nice to have the application back! The only problem is that it's really easy to change things in your quilt in the application, so it can suck you in to play for hours. I don't really like the border that I had picked out for this quilt years ago, so I started playing! I came up with a couple of other borders that I like for this quilt:

Leaves Quilt - Border Option 1

Leaves Quilt - Border Option 2

I like both of these a lot, but I have plenty of time before I have to worry about the border so I'm sure I'll continue to play around with this!

Nancy