Shiny

Shiny is a great word. Shiny can mean reflective (of light), luminous. Shiny can mean glowing. To Firefly fans like myself, Shiny can also mean good, great, fantastic, wonderful, A-number-one awesome sauce.

Shiny is the work of Etsy artist Lura Jewelry.



You should check out her shop. My man did. And now, Shiny is how I feel.

The only question is how much of my wedding I can DIY without going insane...

Two weeks in a row?

Yes, another WiP post! Still Ishbel, but this time... I've started the lace!



I've got a portable project going, too - another Triangular Shawl by Doris Chan - but no pics of that yet. Yeah, I forgot to bring it out when I took the Ishbel pic at sunset, and I'm too lazy to do it now. But I have gotten people talking about crochet because they see me working on it in public. At my orthodontist, one of the technicians asked me to show her what I was doing because she crochets but can only keep track of simple stitch patterns. Now she and the receptionist want lessons!

Also, the Raven Shawl color sequence is all figured out. I'm going to wait til I'm finished with Ishbel before I start the Raven Shawl, though. There's a great story there, though. See, when I was winding off all my Raven Clan skeins, I found that some of them had more knots than I'm accustomed to seeing. A couple of them had two knots each and lots of slubs, which seemed odd, and one skein had four knots and slubs all through it. So, encouraged by Pam and Cristi, I went ahead and emailed Blue Moon. The next day, they had written me back apologizing and promising that new skeins of those three colors would be shipped to me by the end of the week! Awesome customer service. I'm very impressed. They're not even asking me to return the knotty skeins! So now I'm trying to think of little projects to use them in... :)

Well, that's all for now. Vacation this weekend, and I'll get to hit up Knitting Sisters. Woooo!

WIP: My Name is Ishbel...

Ahoy there!

Doesn't it look like a sail, there, hanging on the needles like that?

Yes, I'm working on Ishbel. It's way fun. I know, I'm only in the stockinette part, but something about it is reminding me of why I like to knit. The yarn I'm using is Blue Heron Rayon Metallic, in the Chesapeake colorway, which is making me realize that Ishbel sounds reasonably like Ishmael, which is appropriately nautical for this colorway.

The yarn choice was inspired by Pam's Ishbel and by the fact that the vine lace pattern looks to me like choppy waves. Just like on the Bay. So it was finally the perfect project for my one treasured skein of Blue Heron Rayon Metallic. I can't WAIT to finish and wear this :)

P.S. The awesome yarn bowl and lovely needles were birthday presents from the fabulous Pam. Thanks Pammi!

Independence

I hope everybody had a happy 4th of July. I spent mine with good friends, natural family, and my chosen family of retired Navy guys and wives. The best people on the planet.

In this past week, the first week of July, I also got to celebrate being done with my summer classes. I enjoyed them, but I think I'm going to enjoy my free time quite a bit, too :) After all, I've got so many projects waiting to be worked on! The ever-waiting Raven Shawl will finally get its start. And thanks to Pam I have another project in mind -- Ishbel is the perfect pattern I think for my skein of Blue Heron Rayon in "Chesapeake."

So as I declare my two-month independence from classwork, I find that I'm willingly binding myself to something else: a to-do list. Sort of a personal syllabus, just without specific deadlines. As much as I'm enjoying my grad school, I think this creative syllabus is going to be less stressful...