A Rather Large Shawl

I used a bit more than 1000 yards of fingering weight yarn for this shawl. The pattern is called Shaelyn, and is available on Ravelry.com. The yarn is Studio June’s Eight Bells, in the “Here Comes Trouble” colourway. It is mostly a clear red, with some darker cherry red streaks. I knit this as one of my submissions for Camp Loopy, a summer knitting contest at theloopyewe.com. Great fun to knit!

Oh, and I see that I never posted a photo of my completed “Les Abeilles”, so here it is. I wore this almost every day last winter and it still looks like new!

 

Paper Bag Roses

I have completed a couple of rosettes for the Paper Bag Roses quilt. This will be slow going for awhile. Not because it’s hand sewing, but because I have managed to injure my shoulder! My sewing and knitting have to be substantially curtailed until I recover. These rosettes were finished before the injury became painful.

I won’t join the rosettes to each other until I have made enough for the whole quilt. The blue fabrics are for rosette #3, and haven’t been sewn together yet. I’m using lots of different fabrics, combining rose prints with geometric and tone-on-tone designs. All of the fabric in the photo is from Japan (Lecien). I may add other florals to the Japanese fabrics, but I’m hoping to have enough fabric to make the whole quilt from Lecien’s florals.

Why am I calling it “Paper Bag Roses”? The name comes from the method I use to choose the fabric combination for each rosette. I don’t want to choose too carefully, because I want the quilt to look very scrappy–I think I have more than 30 different prints to use, and I don’t want to blend them too deliberately. To make the choices more random, I put the fabrics in a paper bag. I reach into the bag, without looking inside, and pull out one piece. This is the piece I use for the center of the rosette. For the petals of the rosette, I make another “blind” choice from the bag. Because I am using 2 fabrics for the petals, I then look in the bag and pull out a coordinating fabric for half of the petals. These fabrics don’t go back into the bag until every fabric has been used once. Then they all go back in, and so on until the quilt is done.

I was doing a little tidying the other day, and found a little project that I crocheted a couple of years ago. Clearly, I have a bit of a thing for hexagons.