Thursday, June 11, 2015

Motorcycle Life Shawl

Huh, what's this? Oh, that's right! I have a blog, I should actually write to it once in awhile huh? Oops. Time sort of slipped away again.
I've actually been thinking a lot about my blog and how I want to write more but I'm finding as my interests grow and change that there's less to say about knitting and more to say about other subjects so I'm thinking of adding some new content. I'll talk more about that later but let's start with the knitting since that's why my current readers come to the blog (I think).
As I've mentioned several times, I'm in the Harry Potter Knit and Crochet House Cup and I've really been enjoying it. This term is May, June, July so I started out strong in May turning in two classes and a Detention. For the uninitiated; at the beginning of the month they post prompts for different classes. You can choose to craft to fit a prompt or do your crafting and later find ways to fit it into a prompt. The Detention is a project started before the beginning of the term month that you finish during the month.
I was wanting to knit a new shawl and I had a sort of idea of how I wanted it to look so I looked for patterns a bit but I didn't find anything easily that was the shape I wanted. I wanted it to be very simple too so I didn't really want to buy a pattern. Since I had an idea of the shape I wanted and it was fairly simple, I came up with a plan to see if it would work and cast on. You could call this a swatch since I knit, following my plan for awhile to see if it worked but when I saw that it was, I just kept going. I was also dying to knit something with one of the skeins of yarn I had been getting from the Sparktickes Dyes Gilmore Girls club.

I chose a skein that was a little unusual for me and started knitting. I wanted it to be a nice, drapey gauge so I used a size 6 needle. As I said, I saw I was getting the shape I wanted so I just kept knitting.
Then, I got close to the end of the yarn (20% left by weight, which is pretty common for patterns to tell you to start the edging) and chose a very simple edge.

Just nice, neat triangles. I blocked the shawl and now it's ready to go and I'm very happy with it!

I'm not sure exactly what shape you would call it. Clearly, it's not a triangle, more of an elongated half circle. I tend to call it a swoop, because it's easier to say. Overall I'm super happy with it, although it's still not really my colors so I may have cast on a new one in colors I love so I can give this one away. I may try to gift it to a cousin this weekend at the family reunion I'm attending.
I made up this pattern as I said so there aren't a lot of details about it but I am considering writing it up so others can benefit from my experience. If you'd like to see this written into a pattern, let me know in the comments. Since I made it up and it's so simple, I've just been calling it the Motorcycle Life Shawl after the name of the yarn but if I write it up, I will have to come up with a better name.
Now, on to the not-knitting thing. One of the things that has been taking up a good bit of my time is my planner. If you know me in real life, you know that I don't go anywhere without it. Literally, it is always with me. (Although I don't usually take it to the bathroom.) As I said, it takes up some of my time and interests and I've been thinking about making some notes about planners here since I do get lots of questions about it and why I use it and what I use it for. I know some of my knitter friends won't be interested in planners so I'm thinking of making it a feature on a certain day of the week so you can skip reading that day if you aren't interested. I was thinking Filofax Fridays, although I will talk about more than the filofax brand. To keep them separate, I will probably start using labels on my posts.
I hope this will encourage me to blog more and to have more to say in general and I may even add other features over time.