Leaf Edge Shawl

I spent a very pleasant hour winding my beautiful Wild Flower Merino wool from RingaRosie Yarns on Friday. First I spread out the skeins for a closer look to see if the colours were the same across both of them but I could see that one had more cream than the other - can you see what I mean in the bottom skein? That's not a problem at all, it just means I'll make sure I use both skeins at the same time and swap from one to the other every couple of rows.
I had great fun mixing it about like coloured spaghetti - it was almost a shame to have to wind it into balls!

I knitted a couple of tiny test pieces to see what it was like, first in moss stitch and it looked amazing! In fact, it looked so amazing I was very tempted to completely change what I had planned on making.

But luckily the stocking stitch piece also looked good!

I got started on my Leaf Edge Shawl almost straight away - after a little photo shoot!!

(I must admit, I'm really enjoying my little photo shoots!! Silly I know but very satisfying.)

This is part of the leaf edging. The pattern calls for 41 leaves, then you pick up 260 stitches along the top edge and work in short rows to form the crescent shaped shawl. I decided to actually make it on 4.5 mm needles, rather than 4 mm but I'm wondering know whether I should have stuck with the 4 mm??.... I've only made a dozen leaves so far, so I could unpick them and start again. They only take 10 minutes each so it wouldn't be a huge job.

If you want to keep up with its progress I'll be posting regular updates on Instagram and Ravelry. And if you'd like to make your own, then you'll need to download the free pattern from Ravelry.

I was also very naughty during the week and bought this -

I've been wanting to start a big blanket for a few weeks now and have decided to make my Tooty Stripey again but this time in an "adult" size and have opted top go with Lucy of Attic24's original colour pack of Stylecraft colours. There are 17 in total and she's currently using them to make a blanket with lots of multi coloured squares. The pattern is her "summer harmony blanket" .

I decided to trust her colour judgement and popped down to my local store to see if by chance they had all of them, before I ordered online. It took a bit of hunting on the part of the lovely assistant but she did indeed manage to find me all 17 colours!!

Some of them I have used before but a lot are new to me. Some I would never have chosen myself. But I trust Lucy's colour sense. Here they are, all laid out for a little photo shoot of their own - 

Naturally, I needed to try them out, so used the "random selection" method of grabbing colours and just using whatever came to hand first and produced these -

I don't think I'll be using that method of colour selection for my blanket!! I'll be following Lucy's carefully worked out colour recipe.

My working name for this blanket will be Tooty Harmony (what else??...) although I probably won't start it immediately as I think I'm going to get quite engrossed with my shawl!

That's all for today - it's going to be HOT again and I want ot get the shopping done while it's still bearable. I was up at 6.30am to colour my hair would you believe??! I had visions of streaks of sweaty dye running down my face if I did it later and I'd end up looking like a zebra!

Oh, and my P*a*t*t*3*r*n is just about ready, I just need to scan and upload it. I think I will put it on Ravelry rather than here, so I can see how often it's downloaded. I'll be adding a page of notes to the blog very soon with all the extra instructions you'll need, so keep an eye on the tabs at the top of the page.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend! T  xXx