Lemon Difficult Done!

I ran out of the lighter, green yarn on the Lemon Difficult shawl while at a knitting get-together at Jen's today. There was about 10" of yarn left after finishing the last light coloured row.

As luck would have it, I had enough to do the last row before the bindoff with the darker yarn. It still needs a light blocking.

My handspun isn't the most consistent yarn but I like the colours.

New columns were created on one side by a brioche version of k1, yo, k1 into the same stitch.

It was fairly easy to keep track of when the next increase row would take place.

This is the look of one side with the fabric slightly stretched out.

And the other side.

It's reversible and would be excellent for a nice, cozy, squishy cowl.

Which is exactly what I've started as my second project - the Ring of Fire cowl by Nancy Marchant. Mine doesn't look very fiery as I'm using KnitPicks Chroma fingering yarn in the Lollipop colourway with black KnitPicks Stroll fingering.

It took me a long time to get the 156 stitches cast on properly using the two-colour Italian tubular cast on and I misread the pattern for the first 6 rounds but I was damned if I was going to frog or tink back so I just kept going. It looks pretty good (except for the odd mistake) but is definitely NOT social knitting.

Here's one side thus far.

 And the other.

It doesn't quite look like the picture in the book but it's good enough for me.

In stitching news, The Pastoral is progressing.

Because I'm using 2 strands of floss instead of 1, I'll run out of MOSS before finishing all the greenery. One local stitchery shop doesn't carry that brand it and the other doesn't have it in stock. However, tomorrow Skip and I are heading to NY state and I found a stitchery shop near Syracuse that carries this brand of floss. I emailed them on Friday to see if they had it in stock but haven't had a reply. I will stop by there anyway and hopefully they can help me out.