With a Little Help from my Friend…

…. my Aestlight Shawl is done!

My little end of yarn  went farther than I thought, as you heard, with a modified knitted-on edging. But not quite far enough.

Tuesday, I received a second skein of this lovely, lovely silver-threaded yarn from Astrid’s etsy shop, so I could bind off at last.

I blocked it last night, to the accompaniment of some lovely jazz. My helper visible in the picture there

had to be shut in the bathroom at the time because she would not be dissuaded from sitting on the wet shawl, biting my wooden yardstick, and eyeing the blocking pins speculatively.

However, this morning her partner in crime was helping with the shawl blocking, just to make sure there was the proper feline assistance.

After shooing off the ‘help’, I unpinned the shawl and tried it on.

It’s everything I hoped!

I am very, very happy.

I love the pattern (Aestlight), and I love the yarn (Silver Sheep from Damselfly Yarns, in colorway Prospero’s Sea), and I love them together.

Life is good!

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Wonder of Wonders

Astrid asked yesterday about whether I was going to rip out the edging of my shawl-in-progress (again) or not, given that the yarn was running out. Well, I psychologically couldn’t stand to do it again after already doing it twice — unless I clearly had to.  Plus, I really liked this edging that I unvented, as it turned out.  (If anyone finds it in a book, by the way, I’d be fascinated to know.)  So I decided to keep knitting until I ran out of yarn, as I knew I would.  If I were lucky and got close to the end of the edging, and the new yarn was not too different despite being a hand-dyed work of art, maybe I could sneak it in without it being glaringly obvious, since the yarn is variegated and since the edging is in sections.   I could even pull out the yarn  that matched the best, from the new skein that’s coming.

Well, would you look at this?  Sometimes stubborn optimism (or denial) is rewarded!

Here’s how much yarn is left after finishing the edging: less than two yards, looks like.

Now, I still do need the yarn that is on its way to the rescue.  If you look hard, you can see that the original stitches are on waste yarn as a provisional cast-on.  The final step is to knit across and bind off the stitches, and I don’t have enough yarn for that, definitely.  However, visually the new yarn won’t clash used in that way (and I will have a whole new skein of lovely yarn, too…).  So it will all work out very well!  The yarn would have arrived today, except for the Federal holiday.  Ah, well, it’s not a work holiday for me, so I’ll be busy today and can wait a bit anyway. Very soon, though, Aestlight will be cast off, blocked and done!

Bonus view of the sparkles:

Which reminds me…

Astrid also asked about what the RockStar is singing in the pictures I posted last weekend.  Since show choir will be taking up a good part of my life, I saved some details to share with you later; but it seems somehow fitting, with the sparkles above, to share that the first song the ensemble sings is ‘City Lights’, as sung by Liza Minnelli. (YouTube link)

I love those City Lights! The color of city sights, that shine under City Lights tinting the skies…

Blue-ish Skies, Bright Lights, Blue Shawl

Today’s Saturday Sky (Skies) I actually got to see, before and after work:

Cloudy, snowy morning.

Glimmers of blue around the high clouds later.

As the flurries came and went,  chased by a north wind.

However, last weekend, I only saw the sky in the early morning.

That’s because after work, I spent the rest of the day indoors, watching this:

Yes, the show choir competition season has begun!  The RockStar is in the varsity high school show choir this year, as a sophomore.  Rehearsals started late July, believe it or not.  Competitions run through March.  Weekends are going to be a different proposition from now until then…

She loves it, though.

And, as an excellent dancer, she is in the front most of the time, and has two dance solos as well.  Brava!

I spent the rest of my day after work at the competition, which was local; the show choir performed in the early afternoon, finalists were announced at dinnertime, the choir performed again in the finals in the early evening, and then the results weren’t announced till after my bedtime.  (Their choir did well overall, placing fourth among 16 or so (I forget exactly).  Plus one of their vocalists was selected ‘best female vocalist in show’.)  Long day for everyone.  But I hung in there…. aided by knitting.

I worked on my Aestlight Shawl, my third iteration of the border, trying for smaller borders taking up less and less yarn since I am running short.  This border, I ‘unvented’, in the words of Elizabeth Zimmermann, though I am sure it’s published somewhere.

This is as small as I think I can get the edging and still have it balance the body of the shawl.

And I really like knitted-on edgings, which is what the shawl calls for in any case.

So do you think I’m going to make it?

Nah.  Me neither.

More yarn is coming from the dyer!

Aestlight on the Edge

My Aestlight shawl is all done except the edging!

It sounds as though it’s almost done, then, doesn’t it?  Except that a knitted-on edging takes a surprising amount of time.

Also, more yarn than you’d think.  So now begins the exciting time of the shawl:

Will I have enough yarn??

I have weighed the yarn remaining before I started the first repeat of the edging, and I will do so again after the repeat is done.  The small scale I have is good to within 0.1 g, so works well for situations like this.  I should be able to estimate soon whether my yarn will hold out.

If worse comes to worst, I have the same yarn base dyed by Astrid in a deeper color that I could use as a contrasting rather than matching edging, I suppose.  It should be enough, by all rights, but we will see!

By the way, I am agreeing with Kat that this blue is unquestionably Caribbean.  Or at least tropical.  (Hey, Kat, here’s your white sand beach!  Right?!) Despite the fact that I started it at dawn by ‘the lake’, no Northern lake was ever this shade of turquoise.  I think I need a new name for the shawl!

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Speaking of tropical, as I took these photographs on the new-fallen snow, I heard honking and looked up to see these somewhat belated travelers:

I don’t know why they waited so long, but at least they were heading south.

Give my regards to those turquoise waters, geese!

Flurries

Flurries on my blog, courtesy of WordPress (I love it when they do this!).

And flurries outside.  (Hmm.  I may not love those so much.  Still, it IS December now, so I need to suck it up, I guess.)

The rain and open water of a few days ago are a memory, courtesy of a 20 degree F drop in temperature.  Winter coats are retrieved from storage, as are all the accoutrements.  (Though the RockStar — teen daughter — and the Gothlet are strenuously resisting frostbite-inducing reality, in the way of adolescents.  What is up with that?  It’s almost universal at their age, though.)

I went outside to photograph a shawl which actually didn’t make it into the Shawl-apalooza blog post (so that should have been SIX shawls and two socks! — silly me).  I had put this aside temporarily for other projects that needed to be finished, and now am happily working on it again, so needed to document progress: for my project page on Ravelry and for you!

This is the Aestlight Shawl designed by Gudrun Johnston, a Shetland-style garter stitch shawl.  I am knitting it from gorgeous Damselfly Yarns‘ Sterling Sheep yarn (a blend of superwash merino, silk, nylon and silver).  The colorway is called ‘Prospero’s Sea’, which is so very apt.   After seeing the yarn sparkle in the summer sun, back in warmer times when I began the shawl (and being a long long way from Prospero’s or any other sea), I dubbed my version of the shawl “Dawn at the Lake”.

And in taking the first two photos above, I found little bits of sparkles, besides those silver sparkles in the shawl; even though the sun is hiding at the moment.

It’s very pretty, fluffy and snowflake-y snow.  Though cold.

The hackberry above and mystery plant below are remembering warmer days of yore, I think.

Maybe it’s just my memory, or maybe it’s that winter is so long here, but it seems to me that all the deaths in my family happen in the winter.

Today, very shortly, I leave for a quick back and forth trip to the Twin Cities for my uncle’s funeral.

Our lives are as ephemeral as snowflakes, aren’t they? in the bigger picture.

Do you remember the Little Prince learning the word ‘ephemeral’?  Right now, that scene makes me pretty misty.  (Not that “The Little Prince” doesn’t do that all by itself.)  A quote from the author of “Le Petit Prince”,  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, therefore seems especially appropriate:

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.