This is a mood shot of the studio, with my latest shawl on the blocking board.  This is hand spun Shetland (breed of sheep) from a sheep of my acquaintance who lives with my friend Beatrice Gilbert.  This moody gray is the actual color of the sheep, the wool has been washed, carded, spun and knit but not otherwise interfered with.  I will be posting the pattern in the next couple of weeks.  But the studio looked so nice this morning after I pinned it out that I wanted to show you.  See the spinning wheel, with the blue wool/alpaca blend that I am spinning up for the next project.  You can glimpse a Hawaiian pillow in the seat beside the spinning wheel, which provoked me to add the orchid on top of the shawl.  It seemed unbalanced to have only one Hawaiian touch in the frame and this orchid reminds me of the wild ones that grew beside the roads in Orchidland where we once had our little homestead on the Big Island.

I love that my work spans influences from Hawaii's orchids to Maine's wool and that both ends of this spectrum are anchored in the natural world that surrounded me in each place.  

This is a detail shot of the lace on the corner of the shawl, which is a  Shetland Hap Shawl.  These were everyday shawls that Shetland women actually wore, not the fancy delicate ones that they sold.  I thought about doing a cable pattern with this yarn, but it seemed to want to be a shawl, so I went with it.  I now have seven shawls, which may seem excessive to anyone who is not me.  That is one for every day of the week.  A friend suggested that I should stop now, since one for every day of the month might seem like overdoing it.  But one for every month of the year perhaps???

Sometimes I throw practicality to the winds and just make something for fun.  This is most apt to happen in the summer months because I have fewer knitting students.  They're all in the garden in Maine -- summers are really short here.  And it is months before the Christmas rush so I have time to be self indulgent.  This is the Crown Prince Square Shawl from Nancy Bush's book Knitted Lace of Estonia.  I did not spin or dye the yarn.  I did not personally develop the design.  This project is made from Alpaca Cloud lace yarn from Knitpicks and you can order either by just clicking on the highlighted titles, although it looks like this particular red is a discontinued color.

I am showing you the glam shots first.  I have been waiting to find the chance to get a picture on a person but Devan is away at college and it is just too ridiculous to try to take a picture of myself in the mirror.  So these shots are intended to give you the feeling that you would love to pick up this lovely bit of russet loveliness and wrap yourself in its soft lacey alpaca layers.  It has been a very warm early fall here and I am waiting for it to chill up a bit so that I can toss this across my shoulders and channel my inner French Lieutenant's Woman.  Do get your hands on Nancy Bush's book if you want to try a piece of knitting that is a bit of a challenge.  This is definitely what I call Thinking Woman's Knitting.  And get yourself some Addi lace circulars before you begin.  You really need the sharp points for doing the nupps and this project is nupp intensive.

Here is a close up of the nupps with the shawl on the blocking board.  Note the blocking wires, also available through Knitpicks.  This particular shawl you could pin out a point at a time, but the blocking wires were extremely useful for really stretching this project.  Lace in general is really enhanced by stretching, but a lace shawl in particular really needs to have the bejeesus stretched out of it in order to come into its own.  So here is this summer's project of indulgence.  I made it for me, it took all summer, I had to ignore my family while I was working on it (although you can see in the picture below that I didn't always manage that...there are "inconsistencies" in the pattern repeats).  I really, really love it.

I just finished binding off this shawl this morning and, after running it through the hand wash cycle on my front loader, I have stretched and pinned it out to dry on my blocking board.  I have had people tell me, "I never block anything" and my response is a sort of internal WOW.  Blocking raises the halo effect of wool or any animal fiber, stretches and displays the stitches, evens out the edges and any tension anomalies and can, with lace knitting especially, literally double the size of your knitting.  

This shawl was made with 3 skeins of assorted artisan yarns that were not quite matching in fiber content, color, yardage or weight.  The stitch pattern favors garter stitch heavily and I wanted to practice the Portuguese style of knitting so I cast on 10 stitches and began, increasing in the center and at the edges and changing the yarn every 6 rows or so utilizing the Russian Spit Join so I wouldn't have to work in ends.  I used the third skein to make the lacy ruffled edging and I used up every last inch of all the yarns except the edging yarn where I had about 4 yards left.  I counted on my trusty blocking board to even out all differences and as you can see in the close up here the magic worked as I had known it would.  The wires and pins can be picked up on line at KnitPicks for around $20 and the blocking board we made ourselves.  We used an 8 foot piece of 3 inch thick pink insulation board from Home Depot cut in half and joined together using the tongue and groove at the edge.  Duct tape was involved.  Then I wrapped the top surface in quilt batting, wrapped it again with some heavy weight linen (use a dark color -- mine is light colored and shows water marks) and sewed it on, folding at the corners like you would with a Christmas package.  I can stab the pins straight into it without worry and then take it off the table and lean it against the wall until the knitting has dried.  In between blocking parties I use it to pin idea swatches onto, iron big flat pieces of linen on, or block the sunlight when it is blaring into the studio.  It is extremely light weight and rigid which makes it very easy to move around.