Needle Cosies, Handspun Shawl

These are fast, fun and just splendid to look at when finished - needle cosies from Cat Bordhi's Second Treasury of Magical Knitting:

Do check out her free patterns, there's a great little bag sized for the Denise Needles case and a quiver to hold the cosied needles. For some of the patterns, you will need to have her book or at least know how to do her Moebius Cast-On, a wild bit of knitting technique that Yarn Harlot did a great job of being impressed with here.

I decided to make a bigger spiral cosy as a felted vessel. Here are the in-progress pictures:

Knitting finished, waiting to be sewn up.

Sewn up, waiting to be felted.

Felted, slipped onto one of those tall glass candles, then twisted to spiral the stripes. Waiting to be dry. I suspect this is a bit too tall and thin to stand on its own in a functional way when dry, so I may fold the sides in or otherwise manipulate it later.

Finally started to make a shawl of some handspun singles, something I've wanted to do since seeing Adrian's (Hello Yarn) beautiful Thick and Thin Shawl. She sells kits for this with her pattern and handspun and they seem to disappear almost the minute she updates her shop.

I'm using singles spun from hand-dyed roving from my two favorite sources. The peachy one is from Deb at Dudleyspinner and the green/blue/yellow/purple came from Winderwood Farm. I don't think I'd have purposely combined these two in a million years - but my desire to knit this shawl and not wait another minute forced me to pick up the only two significantly large balls of handspun singles I had in stash. And I was thrilled to discover they looked pretty nice snuggled up together in stitches.

The pattern is, in its essence, the ubiquitous triangular shawl shape that grows from the center neck by alternating one row with 4 yarn over increases (2 either side of a center st, 1 at each end of row), one row knit plain until the shawl is the size of your liking. It becomes unique and personal by your choice of yarn, color(s), stitch patterns. I'm just doing random numbers of rows of stockinette, reverse stockinette, garter. I may throw in a few moss stitch rows.

I do have a pattern from SpinCraft for this shawl. They have nice basic patterns that leave one those choices. The shrug I wrote about in my last past was one of their patterns.

and now....I am going to stop blogging and start knitting.
Love,
zann