As usual I’m still knitting away on shawls. In December I finished Marie, the first of 2 shawls knitted with the yarn my mother sent me. As I never heard back from Filcolana about the grey yarn I decided to go ahead and knit a smallish shawl that would use skein 1 and maybe a couple of the small balls from skein 2. But breakage was not the only problem with that yarn. It turned out that even though they were supposed to be from the same dye lot, they were in fact a bit different. This was not obvious in the skeins/balls but once knitted up it was noticeable. I guess I should’ve smelled a rat when I saw that the printing style for the colour/dye lot was different on the 2 bands, but I didn’t, and as I was using a short circular needle, everything was scrunched up and I didn’t realise the problem until I was about a third of the way through the sideways border. As to what came out of my mouth when I did, I’ll leave it to your imagination. So, I ripped back what I had knitted with skein 2 and pondered my options for a while. Decided to rip back a bit further to a logical place in the pattern and start the 2nd skein from there, but it still didn’t look right. Fortunately I had a little bit of the same kind of yarn in a lighter grey left over from the Inger shawl, so I ended up using that at the bottom of the main body. It distracts the eye from the fact that the grey in the body and the border is not the same. A picture would be a really good way to illustrate my point, but unfortunately my camera has decided it is in need of a new power port. Since that would cost MYR 746 (we paid a little more than MYR 800 for the camera just 2 years ago) I’m without camera until our budget allows for a new one. Anyway, a second Marie from the brown yarn was completed without any further incidents, and I’m currently knitting on Annelise in Retro, a sport weight merino wool by Gepard Garn (discontnued). It’s wonderfully soft, but quite splitty. My mother asked me to knit these shawls for 2 women who were our neighbours when I was growing up, so once I’m done with the Annelise I’ll ship them off to DK and get started on the Refined Aran for my sister. Maybe. I kinda feel like a bit of thread lace. But I also thought I’d try and write up the pattern for the Anglaise shawl to give away for free.

Tags: Anglaise, Annelise, Marie, shawl, yarn trouble