After a really crappy summer with mostly no sun or only in combination with miserly high humidity, we are positively basking in a golden Indian summer. Yesterday for example we had ourself a nice barbecue with a bunch of friends and ette, who is visiting. The whole summer we never got to barbecuing except for once in spring, but yesterday it was really beautiful. It got dark rather fast, but we lighted tea candles and a torch and later it got cold rather fast but we came prepared with sweaters and blankets.
In other — that is knitting — news I asked my big sis (that is a rather bad qualifier, since all my sisters are older than me. I'm talking about my oldest sis) what I can knit for her or my soon-to-be born nephew. I have knitted everything I could not stop myself from knitting and now it is time to knit something that will be really useful. She hasn't gone through the boxes of newborn clothes, so she didn't come up with actual newborn stuff, but she asked me for a wrap. She will be nursing all through winter and needs something to ward off the cold, when she goes partially naked. So I started two wraps.
I had two beautiful skeins of Crystal Palaces Mini Mochi in the gorgeous colourway Lake Trail in my stash. The colour shifts from brown through green to a brilliant turquoise and back. Sadly two skeins with a total meterage of 356 is a bit too little for a full blown wrap, so I chose Summit and hope that its special construction with rather big holes makes for a big enough shawl. I wanted to try that pattern since I first saw it. Due to the long colour change of the yarn it has a peculiar look that differs a lot from the pattern. As soon as osti is done playing with optics, a cd, a glass of water and his new lens, I'm going to badger him into taking pictures of all my knitting stuff.
For the second shawl I found a pattern I had to try: Ginko Shoulderette Shawl. It has the added virtue of being mindless knitting for the most part, which was perfect for yesterday night. So I dyed white sock yarn to a rich yellow with turmeric and cast on. I had to overcome a few obstacles, since the pattern has you cast on provisionally with a crochet cast on and I had not read the pattern that closely before and then had to perform a crochet cast on without a crochet hook, just a little piece of scrap yarn (naturally I also didn't bring extra yarn and had to make due with the pieces that had held together the skein) and in the half-dark. Surprisingly it wasn't a bad morning after and the cast on doesn't look botched up :) .