Before the next semester of uni steals away my blogging time again, here's one of the large projects I've been working on:

Henami stole by Melanie Gibbons (pattern website | ravelry)


From the pattern description:
The Henami stole is asymmetrical. One side has a beaded cast on and a basketweave lace pattern inspired by a traditional Sashiko, or Japanese quilting design. The second half of the stole is dedicated to cherry blossoms blowing in the wind. 

I'd recommend this pattern to anyone who enjoys following lace charts. Instead of the monotonous progression of many scarves, every row of this one is enjoyable in seeing what comes next.

The yarn is Schoppel-Wolle Lace Ball (ravelry) which I found at Wonderflex, Malvern. Long gentle colour repeats make this wonderful to work with. I would definitely be interested in trying some of the other colour combinations.

I thought I'd post up my wips today :)
Harumi shawl (rav link) by Emily Ross is up the back, and just needs to be properly photographed.

Amelia by Laura Chau is down the front right. It is taking a while to knit up but I've almost finished the body, then just need to do the sleeves.

Clearly I'm still obsessed with teal. I'm not super happy with the variegation in our handdyed teal yarn when knit up, but I'll still enjoy the colours while wearing the gloves and cowl that are in progress :)

This was long in the making (2 months) but totally worth it ^_^

Very inspiring pattern with great results. I would like to try this again one day with thinner yarn, as the Socks that Rock lightweight was perhaps a little heavy for this shawl and makes it quite bulky if wearing as a scarf (as I generally do).

I first became obsessed by Blue Moon's Raven Clan colourways when I saw Chrissy's amazing versions (Ravelry) of the Multnomah Shawl and knew I had to get some for myself.

I noted on my Ravlery that this was a ‘keeping me sane’ shawl. Now, a few months later, I can't quite remember what it was keeping me sane from, but I imagine part of it was having to move house yet again.

On nupps
Found the new technique of nupps pretty fun. Because of the thicker yarn, I used 5 stitch nups instead of 7 or 9. They're not super noticeable, but because I was running out of yarn I am glad I chose to do smaller ones.

Unfortunately I'm still not very good at checking how much yarn I need for a project, and it was particularly scary as I didn't notice that the edging required an even number of leaves along the centre spine - was planning to stop after 9 but had to make it 10 or rip back, so I ended up running out of yarn 5 rows short of the end and couldn't get more yarn as it was handspun :(

After favouriting far too many lace shawls on Ravlery and getting this purpley-blue lace yarn for Christmas, I knew I had to have a go ^_^ If you look closely you can see the lifelines I've been adding in every second row

I've worked my way up to completing around 4 rows on my 50min commute, with a train change or two in the middle (at the start it was taking me 50min for 2 rows while I got used to the pattern :S)