Logwood Shawl

I am taking part in a knit along on Ravelry at the moment.  It runs from 01 October to 31 December and is being held in the Verybusymonkey group.  The intention is to knit gifts using Verybusymonkey patterns.  Of course they don't have to be gifts but most of my items have been and since I don't like to post photos of gifts until they've been given, those won't be on the blog until after Christmas.  This one though, this is for me.  A nice warm shawl to wear with my new down coat. The coat, bought at a huge reduction in TK Maxx is duck egg blue on one side and truffle brown on the other and is completely reversible. 

The yarn is dyed with Wiltons and Kool Aid and I designed the colourway specifically to go with the coat.  Originally this skein was brown at one end and turquoise at the other with a big section of cream in between.  However, it looked awful when I actually knitted it up.  The contrast between colours was too great.  So I unpicked what I'd done and overdyed the yarn again.  I am not totally certain what I overdyed it with, but I think it was one pack of Kool Aid Ice Blue Lemonade with some Teal Wiltons mixed into it and I think I dropped the entire skein into the dye bath, squished it around a bit and then cooked it on the basis that I couldn't make it worse. In fact its knitted up just the way I wanted it to, but I've no earthly clue how to replicate it should I wish to try it again. 

I think the colour is going to work with lots of things in the wardrobe so I can see this one getting a lot of wear.  The shawl is a crescent shape and I think that's going to be very practical for staying where its put.  It blocked out to a rather decent size, and took only one skein of yarn.  The body is knit first then the edging is knitted onto the live stitches.  I've never done this before and was afraid I'd mess it up but it was actually very,very easy.  And although the edging did seem to go on forever, I think that's more to do with the fact that I was picking it up and putting it down a great deal over a longer time period as its been my cover project whilst I've been gift knitting.  So I got a lot done on the other items, not so much on this one for quite a while.  There was a choice of two edgings, a wider and a narrower one. I had 60grammes of yarn left after the body was done, and so I chose the wider edging. I had only a tiny ball of yarn left at the end so it was very efficient on yarn.  I literally only have enough left to do contrast toe and heel on a pair of baby socks.

Like all the Verybusymonkey patterns I've knit so far, it was very easy to follow, and very easy to knit.  Her patterns tend to look a lot more difficult than they actually are, and her instructions are the best I've ever come across.