Oh, Great

I've been a new mother-in-law for less than a week, and while the happy couple is on their honeymoon, I am pet-sitting. The cats are fine, but I managed to kill all the tropical fish. I talked to the SonIL's sister, and she thinks I overfed them. If you overfeed cats or dogs, they just get fat, but fish won't overeat and the leftover fish food contaminates the water. Wish I had known that before I killed them all. *sigh* Not off to an auspicious start, are we? I wonder if this gaff offsets the socks or hat I made him.

I am having better luck with knitting than with fish, and finished the more-than-one-skein shawl. It turned out kind of smallish, but I was tired of knitting an acre of stockinette. I used two skeins of Cascade 220, plus about 25% of a third for the border.

Here it is, awaiting blocking...



... and here it is pinned out ...



... and the finished product.



I'm going to add a button or a pin or something, to keep it from sliding off my shoulders.

In the interest of stash-busting, I pulled out an old UFO and started unraveling the yarn for a new project (with a little help from Hip Hop.)



While four hanks await dekinking, I went ahead and started a rectangular shawl with one of the other balls. Feeling brave, I decided to wing it by using a lace stitch pattern from The Knitting Stitch Bible, "Falling Leaves". The tentative plan is to knit the rectangle, then maybe add a border in a different lace stitch.



(I tried to take a close-up of the stitch pattern, stetching out the fabric with my fingers, but then you would have seen a close-up of my wrinkly gardener hands. Not a pretty picture!)

I was afraid using Plymouth Yarn Encore Worsted for a lace shawl might be a mistake because, with its high acrylic content, it may not block nicely. But since I am using US7 circulars, the knitting feels relaxed enough that blocking might not make that big a difference anyway. We shall see!