I feel I should probably warn you that this is not as exciting as it sounds, but it semi-solved a problem of itchy-for-knitting fingers so I'm happy.
Anyway... I was flicking through Stitch and Bitch the other day and they have a lovely flecked brown baby blanket which some how stuck in my mind. And remember, ages and ages ago, I told you about Nero and son and the lovely-but-not-really-what-I-was-hoping-for yarn that resulted from spinning their fleeces?
Well...
Stitch & Bitch + Nero and son + waking up at 4am and not being able to fall asleep again = big brown shawl
In an ideal world, this would be entirely done in moss stitch, but seeing as I want it to be probably 5 feet long, I thought my sanity might start to suffer before I even got half way. I love moss stitch, it's just so tedious to knit.
I did think that single crochet might be the way to go but after doing about 6" of it, I changed my mind. The fabric was too solid and I started to panic that I wouldn't have enough yarn (even though there's nearly a kilo and a half of the brown).
I daren't take all the skeins out and see how many there are, but it's a lot. In fact, now I'm thinking I might have some left over, but let's not count our chickens...
So I pulled out the crochet and started on a plain old garter stitch, and you know what? I like it. It has that certain mossy look to it without the tedium, and I can pretty much put my fingers on autopilot whilst watching NCIS (our current DVDs of choice).
Even the edges seem to be looking reasonably neat at the moment.
Strangely, I'm finding this knits up a lot tighter than the cream did, which is definitely helping with the pseudo-moss stitch look. And apologies for the big fat shadow in the photo, but I really wanted to try to show the proper colour of the yarn and all the other photos make it look far too pale. It's a dark bitter chocolate-y colour with a fleck of cream.
This is the start of the 4th skein and it's about a foot deep and 26" wide. It's knitting up pretty quickly and at the moment I'm really liking it, although I might get fed up with it by the end (you know how knitting seems to go really slow the longer the piece gets?). I can imagine an oh-god-isn't-this done-yet? scenario.
What I had really wanted to knit was a man-style ribbed cardigan with a zip but I need to do a swatch of my yarn and work out a pattern and... you know, a brainless shawl fills the gap whilst I'm trying to get my arse in gear. And rib... it's nearly as bad as moss stitch...
