Lacy

It's been a scorcher of a weekend, and humid, undermining my Great Plans to have a tidy house and some design work by the end of the weekend. I did get one item finished and blocked though, a scarf:

This is some Blackberry Ridge wool and silk laceweight which is really beautiful to knit with - feels more like a cotton blend - came from Wisconsin and took less than four days to get here! It was the natural cream colour until it came into contact with some grape and strawberry Kool-Aid. There was still too much variegation in it, when I came to knitting it up, so I gave it another bath of grape Kool-Aid once I'd finished the knitting. I'm still astounded you're meant to drink this stuff... The pattern is the Trellis-Framed Leaf pattern from the first Barbara Walker treasury which is a nice one to memorise but not too boring in the knitting of it.

I also re-started the Diamond Fantasy Shawl for the KAL at Sivia Harding's Yahoo group - this will be the third yarn choice, but I think I've found a winner in the Kaalund mohair in Tropical Berries I got for Christmas. Here's the beginning of it:

Purple lace, what a surprise...

The timing of the third attempt isn't coincidental - yesterday morning, a sheep arrived. (No, not that sheep, actually a Folkmanis lamb puppet). I won him in the draw attached to the KAL, which was both exciting and mortifying - exciting because I don't win things in prize draws, and mortifying because I still had the previous unsuccessful swatch on the needles... Anyway, here's the lamb - Blogger won't let me upload the image for some reason... He looks a stubborn little chap (I'm calling him Stackhouse), and has made a home for himself on the flyer of my spinning wheel. Thanks very much to Melissa, who donated him. And, to even things up slightly on the scales of cosmic postal justice, he arrived from the US in five days despite the package being clearly marked SURFACE. It's good to know it happens the other way round occasionally...