Happy Mother's Day!

Mother's Day seems to be a day for finishing in my house. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, just commenting. Last year, my Mother's Day gift was enough peace and quite for me to finish the tubular bind-off on my Spring Thaw Socks:

This year, my Mother's Day finish was my Salsa Picante Shawl, based on the Multnomah pattern:

I absolutely love how this shawl turned out! I'd been wanting to use this yarn -- a skein of Dashing Dachs Sox in the Matuey the Cat colorway -- for a long time, and at first, I thought a Multnomah would be the perfect pattern for it.

I was wrong.

The garter stitch of the Multnomah just didn't work with the wildly variegated colorway, and everything wound up looking muddy and unattractive.

So, I ripped the whole thing out and started over, this time working the body of the shawl in knit one below stitch instead of garter. I followed the directions in the Knit One Below book, making sure never to work a knit one below immediately before or after a yarn over, and I also kept the center 5 stitches in plain stockinette. I worked the body on size 3s, then switched to size 8s to work the feather and fan border in stockinette. I worked 18 rows of f&f and bound off with a picot bind off on three stitches.

I just love how the knit one below stitch produced vertical "rays" of color radiating out from the center band of stockinette stitch. I think it makes a striking and lovely contrast to the horizontal bands of color in the feather and fan border. I'm a little burned out on this pattern right now, but I would definitely make this again in another wildly variegated yarn. I'm also going to remember the knit one below trick for working with wild colorways to help avoid unattractive pooling and flashing.

Now, I need another project. I'm debating between working some quick colorwork mittens for the girls using some Knitpicks Bare that I dyed myself using our leftover Easter egg dyes or doing a Green Gable for myself. For tonight, though, I think I'll just spin. I have some Crown Mountain Farms superwash in the Oh, Pretty Woman colorway on the Journey Wheel that I need to finish up. I'm taking the JW into Big Girl's nursery school in a few days to do a spinning demo, and I need my bobbins free.

Off now to spin and listen to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls on my iPod. Jane Austen meets the undead. It just doesn't get better than this.