Many Little Things

Somewhere along the way I lost the picture in my head of how much I have done this year already. I've been bogged by the big things which are not yet done. I was in a bit of a funk. The red socks broke through the funkmost effectively. The last couple of weeks, as the big thing, the shawl, lurches to completion, I'm planning the next big thing, but peaking in around the edges, there is a fair number of small good things.
In fact, there have been a lot of interesting little things in January and February.
No wonder the shawl has come to feel like a forever project. I have clearly not been working on it. I have been doing all these other things. As you can see, there have been socks, there have been bags, there have been scarfs and neck wraps, wrist warmers and headbands, stuck projects and new projects, old projects and blue projects.

And that is what I'm thinking of today. The blue project, or in other words, the yarn I won from Curlerchik. It took a while, but its coming together nicely now. I knew early on what I wanted to do with it. I wanted it to be a scarf, something I could wear in full public view, something that I could wear in all the seasons, something that would not suffer from hard sock type wear. I played with stitch patterns. There were attempts you do not want to know about. We won't even dignify the results with the name of attempted lace. Let's just say that unintended and uncoordinated knitting holes happened. I ended changing knitting styles to get there - its a temporary change, believe me, BUT...

Last night pure magic happened. Real honest to goodness lace knitting, from a pattern in a book, with words only, no chart, and a photo, with no mistakes, with proper left decreases and right decreases, and holes in all the right places, and yarn where it is supposed to be. People laugh when I talk about purposeful holes (they know exactly what I mean of course but they do laugh), but oh my, aren't purposeful holes nice? Look how this yarn is working up. Hints of deep rich indigo, delft blues, night sky blues. I love the subtle blue variations playing out across the stitches. Its a very auspicious beginning. I have the feeling that the next clothing I buy (or make) is going to be clothing to set this lovely off.

One of the most interesting things happening in yarn land is that more and more I see interesting nearly solid colours. Not variegated colours, but tonals, like this nice yarn, where the colour is blue, but the intensity is varied, the darks and lights plays across the strands creating waves of shades, tones and ranges within the word blue. These tones play out beautifully as the Yarn Hsrlot shows us in cables and in the lovely Ilga Leja lace designs.

I'm going to 'need' some of these kinds of yarns. Set the acquisition phase to not quite solids.