Alpaca Love…

How about some knitting in progress?



This is the Pacific Northwest shawl I started on the way up (out?) (over?) to Salt Lake City. Thanks to the huge head start I got on the train and the fact that this is a garter-stitch pattern (I am a slow purler), I’m making extremely quick progress! I’m on the final few scallops of border, and then it’s just a zip of i-cord across the top and I’m done!!

…I figure it should be complete well before my 68th birthday…

I’m using KnitPicks Alpaca Cloud for the project. Let’s see…things that bug me. Well, it does split a lot more than the Claudia Silk did. And I suspect I will have to be verrrrrry careful about felting on this one - it practically felts on the needle, so I have a feeling any rough handling on this baby is going to turn it into a Salvation Army blanket. It also has a touch more "fuzz" than I'm used to in a lace-weight yarn. It ain't mohair, mind, but it does have a little extra hair leaping about.

But it is soft as a dream and super-warm. This is going to be one of those ultra-light, ultra-warm wraps. I’m on the second hank now and I won’t be needing a third, so the total cash-cost for the shawl is only eleven bucks, compared to $45 for the Claudia silk.

Which makes a little splitting and some fuzz entirely overlook-able.



Here’s a close-up of the border. What you do is, you knit the main body of the shawl and leave it on the needles. Technically, you then use a DPN to knit the scallops, attaching every odd row to the shawl by knitting two together. Because I am a Rebel Without A Pause, I just kept the stitches on the circular.

The first time I tried this shawl, I used the designer’s method. At first. But then the 4,276th time I lost control of the DPN and it went skittering under the couch, I asked myself grumpily why I couldn’t just use the @*^&@ing circular.

And then I thought, Wait…why CAN’T I just use the circular…?

Having no good answer spring to mind, I tried it. And I liked it. And for bonus points, I remembered that this time around without having to go crawling around on my hands and knees searching for the lost DPN a few times first. Yay, me!!



This is Boo Bug. She likes to take pictures. She really, really, REALLY likes to take pictures. In this picture right here, she is asking me if she can use the camera. Please, can she use the camera? Now? Could she use the camera right now? {pause} How about now?

She can spend a whole entire day taking pictures. Digital cameras with rechargeable batteries are awesome, because they let me say ‘yes’ sometimes to that question. When I was six and asked my mom if I could borrow her camera to take some pictures, she said, “NO!!!” and then asked me a bunch of technical questions about the economic situations in several countries before demanding to know if I knew how much film costs these days.

Oh. Wait. No.

That part came after I swiped her camera anyway and took a bunch of pictures of the dog sleeping and stuff.

ANYWAY. Dharma is extremely excited about the shawl-in-progress. She is so excited, in fact, that she had to collapse on my bed for a nap.



Everybody else is at school right now, so these are the only two Denizens available to give their opinions of their mother’s knitterly skill. Tune in next week when I post a picture of Danger Mouse giving me a huge yawn, Eldest turning her patented, I so don’t ‘get’ this expression on the shawl, and of course Captain Adventure’s backside as he runs giggling down the hall with a skein of something expensive and hand-dyed clutched in his grimy little paws…