Follow Ups

Finished objects

I finished my second sock!

Incidentally, I always thought I would be a toe-up two-at-a-time person, but in practice it turns out the joy of finishing is such that I haven’t had much trouble with second sock syndrome since I switched to one-at-a-time. I guess next I’d better try a top-down to see if I like that! I also need to work on some afterthought heels for the self-striping I have in my stash.

I’d hoped to finish this for the lotsofsocks downs syndrome awareness kal, but alas it was not to be. Still, I love it, and I think I’ll be not matching my stripes on future socks either. It’s freeing and also out turns out I just like them this way.

My 2018 JBW Tosh Shawl is also finally finished!  I already did the half year post, but here’s a picture again:


So going back to my work in progress week post, here’s where I’m at:

  1. Little Box of Crochet Advent Calendar – untouched, but not hoping to complete until December-ish
  2. Rose City Yarn Crawl Mystery Knit a Long – done!
  3. Cascadial Wrap – I actually finished another colour before switching to the JBW shawl, so it’s progressing!
  4. Flickering Light Shawl – planned after the Cascadial wrap, but maybe only not around my toddler this time since he loved the drop stitches a bit too much
  5. Sock – done!
  6. JBW Tosh Shawl – done!
  7. JBW British Invasion Kit – in hibernation. aka, after looking at my queue I’ve decided I’m not excited enough about this one and I’ll save it to be a grab-and-run kit when needed

New Objects

So of course, now that I’ve finished some and have mentally put a few in hibernation, I started my two knit-a-longs!

Romi Mystery KAL 2019 (clue 1):

Oregon Sky Shawl for the Glow Up Knitted Wit CKAL

The Oregon Sky shawl helps me fill in the gaps when I run out of MKAL clue, and it gave me a nice project for Albuquerque Maker Faire on April 6-7 so I wouldn’t fall into the same pattern of starting something new and then abandoning it. I don’t know that I’ll have enough left by May 2nd when I head to PyCon, though!  But for now, I’m enjoying the Glow Up hashtags on Instagram for the knit along. People have such different rainbows!

The Queue Curation

I finished my cull, and the queue is hovering around 90 items. Not bad! Of course, now that it’s only 3 pages long, it’s much easier for me to see what was missing. For example: I have yarn for Shannon Squire’s That 70’s Shawl (I even have several options to choose from) and Composition Book Mitts but somehow never queued either pattern. And I bought a Space Cadet yarn kit for the Bubbles of Joy MKAL but somehow never queued that pattern either. Nor did I start it; I was a bit over-optimistic in my ability to finish the RCYC MKAL and missed the boat entirely on this MKAL. But it’s an absolutely beautiful pattern that I’ll definitely be knitting eventually, so I pushed it up near the top of the queue.

It’s been really fun matching stash yarns to projects. I also think I finally have a pattern for my one unassigned sweater quantity of yarn. We’ll see if it’s still my favourite when I get to casting on, but I bought the pattern so I’m pretty convinced. 

Other fun finds: I had queued a pile of sock patterns, which was kind of weird since I wasn’t really a sock knitter until I got hooked during the Socks on Vacay knit-a-long last year. But now that I actually enjoy knitting socks, there’s some great skill-improvement patterns in there, something I now want as I mentioned right back up at the beginning of this post. Thanks, past me!

Tosh Shawl Club 2018 – July to December

It took 14 months instead of 12, but I finished my Tosh Shawl Club shawl! This was how I spent some birthday money last year. Since I have an end of year birthday, it tends to get subsumed by the holidays, so this was a neat way to celebrate monthly instead.

Despite the “shawl club” name it’s honestly is more of a wrap. But it’s warm and squishy and while it’s not a kit I would have bought if I’d seen it finished in a shop, I loved the process of getting mystery yarns and clues for a full year, so I definitely got the experience I wanted. Plus, part of the fun was going outside of my usual comfort zones.

July

August

September

October

Whoops, wrong year on this one and the next…

November

December

And the full shawl:

Definitely a fun experience! Looking back, I’m sort of sad I didn’t opt to continue my subscription for this year, but they took the mystery out and the planned shawl just wasn’t floating my boat, so I’m trying something new this year to get my monthly mystery fix!