What to do next?

Many, many thanks for all your kind comments about the She Sells Sea Shells Shawl, which I am now convinced I should have called "5S" to cut down on typing time. My head is quite swollen. I am trying to work up the pattern into a form that can be understood by others, so that you too can knit one (if you should want to). This involves translating many squiggles and numbers from various bits of paper and trying to make a chart. I'm using Excel to do this and it's a jolly steep learning curve, I can tell you. 'Im indoors has proved useful in bringing home books from work to help me - the mobile library service is a marvellous thing. So all that is coming along slowly.

As ever at the end of a big project, I am casting around for something else to get on the needles. Yes, I've got the Galveston Shawl - growing bigger by the minute. I don't think I'm very keen on the colour, at least not for this project, and am thinking about overdyeing it. I have not had a great deal of experience with dyes and am wondering if using blue dye on yellow wool would result in a sort of greenish (technical term) that would be more in keeping with the sea theme of this shawl. It seems that the sea is a motif in my life at the moment. It keeps popping up everywhere.

I'm still working on the Japanese Shawl, too. It's the same but bigger.

I happened to take out Debbie New's "Unexpected Knitting" the other day, to refer to her sock pattern. It's always a dangerous thing to look at that book because it sends me off in all sorts of directions and I often spend hours messing about with odd bits of yarn, often with very little to show for it at the end. This time, however, I think I was quite successful:



Here's a yellow "Tiffany" flower. She used hers to make a "vest" (i.e. long sleeveless coat). I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with mine but as Debbie herself says if you run out of steam you can always frame it.

I also found two little swatches (rare as hen's teeth) in my rummagings. I used a crochet seam to join them into a little purse for #1 daughter:



This is Colinette "Skye" - I think it's the "Dusk" colourway. I was practising modular knitting from the Artyarns tutorials. This is probably the best use for this type of variegated yarn that I have come across. Garter stitch certainly shows up the colour changes to advantage.

In other travels in cyberspace I came across the Knitaly site (simply because I am arranging a trip to Italy for mother and me - I am not thinking about signing up for this particular trip. I think it's slightly beyond my budget.)
I searched for Jane Thornley, who will be leading the Knitting Retreat. All I can say is nice work, if you can get it. If anyone would like to employ me to lead a knitting retreat in Italy at any time, I would be more than available. Italian spoken. (Oh, and I can knit a bit.)

One of Jane's free "patterns" is for a ragbag scarf (that's my name for it - she calls it the "Free Range" scarf) which involves knitting in garter stitch with as many different yarns from the same colour family as possible. Pay no attention to gauge, she says. Sounds like my kind of pattern. I made this:



A pink ragbag. Why do the arty pictures on her website look so much better than my pathetic efforts?

Finally, I leave you with a rather different "Back Field Saturday" picture. This is my house from the back field. Thanks to #1 photographer daughter for the image.