Silky Waves

At every knitting festival I've attended over the past 2 years I've drooled over the hand dyed silk and silk chenille yarn at the Sweaterkits booth. I've admired a silk and chenille shawl many times but am not really a shawl person (the shawls I've been knitting have been more scarf size) but this time I happened upon the Silk Waves Scarf . It was quite expensive considering the kit only contained two 50g balls of yarn - one silk and one silk chenille - and a 4-row pattern. However, I'm not getting any younger and I have been wearing the scarf-sized shawls I've been making lately. I really liked the more pastel-y colourway but they only had the jewel-toned ones left so I went for it.
















Basically it's the feather and fan pattern knit the length of the scarf alternating the silk yarn with the silk chenille yarn. I'm going to knit until I run out of yarn. And I'll take it with me tonight when Skip and I go to the public library to hear Linwood Barclay read from his new suburban thriller "Too Close To Home". We heard him read from his first thriller, "No Time for Goodbye" last year at a branch of the Oshawa Public Library and very much enjoyed the event. NTFG was a best seller in Germany before it was released in North America - second only to the 7th Harry Potter book.

We are long-time readers and fans of Linwood's columns from the Toronto Star from which he has took a leave-of-absence last year to write and promote his novels. He has since retired from The Star as the book thing worked out very well for him and Neetha took an early retirement from teaching last June. We particularly became endeared to Linwood during the provincial teacher's strike in 1998 when he wrote about it sympathetically in his columns. His wife, Neetha, is also a teacher so he was living with the results of the tyranny of the Mike Harris (I almost hate to befoul my blog with his name - ugh) government. I even sent him an e-mail thanking him for his writings. I was thrilled when he sent me back a reply. Then last year when my friend Suzanne got me hooked on Facebook, she dared me to ask Linwood to be my friend. So I sent him an invite and sure enough he accepted my offer. HA! He has lots of friends now on Facebook (but not as many as I do) but I was his friend way back when he only had a couple of dozen friends - I think I was number 19. I sent him a Facebook message when I heard he'd be in town so I plan to introduce myself tonight and ask him to autograph my copy of "No Time for Goodbye". I sure miss his columns.