ICE has finally thawed and finished and while I initially wasn’t convinced (I’ll be honest!) I have found myself wearing it a lot the last few days.  It’s a lovely wearable shape, and the colour I’ve chosen goes with a lot of things!

I think the pattern as written has the sleeve a little short – but that could me having a *much* tighter gauge than the designer (though my swatch came out right).

Of course it was also a good opportunity to practice my continental style knitting.  I like the knit stitch and will use that again, but I’m really not a fan of Norwegian purl.  It might make more sense if doing rib stitches, but for doing stockingette it makes no sense at all!

I also picked up and finished two (yes TWO!) little crochet projects.  After procrastinating for a long time (as regular readers will know I have ideas and then they have to ‘simmer’ for a while) I finally opened my copy of Mary Korinor’s Crochet Lace and did two projects.

One is a baby blanket for a work colleague and the other is a stash busting shawl using up 5 balls of kid silk haze “acquired” at a swap meet.

baby blanket and haze shawl

Mary has a very interesting approach to her work – including the all important “how much to leave for the border” calculations.  Of course Mary was English, and I have made several “design features” out of the fact that I frequently forgot this and mixed up which stitch I was supposed to be doing.  I find Mary fascinating in that often she will describe in words the stitches for the centre and inner borders and then give just a chart for the outer/edging border.  I found this approach very interesting as charts for the middle section would be very useful, and if you can’t read charts then you can’t finish the project.

I’m really pleased with how both projects have turned out, and am tempted to just go ahead and do the other shawls in the book out of curiosity – in particular the two ‘granny square’ based shawls as mine are both over 20 years old and starting to look a little tired.

I really enjoyed the kid silk project, and am now playing with some stitch variations to work out how to make a capelet shape that hugs the shoulders with a beaded edge.  I might even be able to make it a one skein (or two at most) project.  I need to dig through my stash and find my fyberspates faerywings as I think it would be particularly gorgeous in that.

I’m about to come  to the end of my current contract and have a few weeks while I job hunt.  During that time I plan to write up some of my patterns and publish them –  so watch this space!