Blocking, Lightning and Teaching

My knitting/spinning friend, Mo, recently finished Frankie Brown's 10 Stitch Blanket using several balls of Noro Silk Garden yarn. I blocked it for her and it turned out beautifully!
It blocked out to 41" x 41". She was going to give it away but since she saw how nicely it turned out after blocking, she doesn't want to part with it. I love blocking stuff!

One of Frankie Brown's patterns that I really want to do is the Lightning Shawl. It requires 250g of fingering weight yarn. It would be awesome in the Zauberball yarn but I've already knit a scarf from the colourway I like the best so I think I'll do it in the new KnitPicks Chroma fingering yarn. Now my dilemma is trying to decide on the colourway I want to use.

Yesterday I taught a class on Lucy Neatby's "Sea Lettuce".
In spite of the falling snow, 3 out of the 5 who intended to come actually made it to the class.

Lucy's patterns are very detailed but a lot of people like to have someone actually show them new techniques so I demonstrated her crocheted provisional cast-on and her modified conventional bind-off and got my students started on the short row wedges which form the first part of the scarf.
Any provisional cast-on will do for this project. It allows the cast-on stitches to be picked up and knit in the opposite direction. However, to me, the crocheted cast-on Lucy recommends is more efficient and easier to execute than the one where one crochets a chain with waste yarn and then starts knitting into the bumps in the back of the crocheted stitches. With that technique, it is very easy to split the waste yarn which makes it really hard to 'unzip' the waste yarn later.