Much news on the knitting front!

Hello again - look, look - this is my second post in the month of October! Amazing! Say hello to Mr (or Ms) Sheepie up the top of the page there!

I have lots of knitting goings on to report back on. I decided it was time for a good shake up of projects planned and projects languishing half finished and a metaphorical (and literal in some cases) spring clean of my knitting cupboard seems to have done me the power of good. I can tell because I have in fact got a finished object to show you!

Let's hear it for my latest socks:

(As Kath noted in her last comment I have gone crazy for making photo mosaics in Flickr - they do make everything look great!)

So these beauties are knitted from the Hourglass pattern in autumn Knitty, the yarn is Regia Kaffe Fassett in the Mirage Fire colourway knitted on my favourite 2.5mm bamboo DPNs. If you'd like to have a look at the Ravelry version of this info you can find it here.

I do think this pattern deserves its Knitty rating of extra spicy - it is certainly the trickiest sock pattern I've managed to complete so far. This makes me wonder whether I might have another try at Pomatomus some time as they are rated at the easier piquant level - maybe my knitting has reached a suitable level now to be able to manage them.

That's not to say that I didn't make any booboos on these socks - the first one had to be frogged twice whilst I was knitting the leg but I found that once I stopped trying to second guess the pattern and 'make sense of it' in my head but instead just put my faith in the pattern and followed the instructions everything turned out fine. A valuable lesson to learn indeed. Needless to say I am really pleased with these socks and I love the colours in the yarn too (they are slightly more subdued in real life than in the pictures) - an all round success I think!

The day after I finished the socks I cast on for my next project - one that I am very excited about:

The Adamas Shawl! Free pattern here; Ravelry pattern page here. I decided I really wanted to knit something lacy and warm and cosy that I would be able to get a decent amount of wear out of - Muir wasn't cutting it, I should have known when the yarn didn't turn out to be the colour I expected of it that the project was doomed to failure. So this is a plain brown shawl - no flowery bits (to suit my conservative tastes) - it's been really fun to knit so far. I'm using a very lightweight 100% merino wool from Adriafil for this project - I started off using it single stranded but it was just too flimsy for my liking when it was knit up and so I've started again holding the yarn double. So far so good - I like the way it is looking so far, it's going quite quickly and I am so enthusiastic about the project at the moment that I am hoping for rapid results - I'm not sure how I'll feel once the rows are lo-o-ong - but hopefully it won't put me off too much. Watch this space...

Lastly, a few other bits and bobs that seem worth mentioning... the yarn that I salvaged from Muir will be repurposed and become Firestarter socks; Thermal is no more - the yarn ended up in the bin too, it was already on its third incarnation and once I'd unravelled it again it was so pilled and tangled I decided to put it out of its misery - Thermal is still a favourite pattern of mine though so it make a comeback in a different yarn one of these days; I'm tinkering with knitting a Brea bag at the moment but might start again in a colour other than black so that the cabling shows up better; my Ravelry queue is sort of manageable at the moment - let's hope I can tick off some of those projects to make way for some new ones before the winter is out.

I'll try and keep the updates coming as well...