I last blogged about the Election Shawl in September – I started it in May last year, and finished it in November 2015, but for some reason it managed to escape the list of projects to talk about! So here it is in all of its glory, adding to my gradually growing collection of shawls.
Election Shawl
The Election Shawl is so called because I started knitting it on the night of the UK General Election in 2015. The pattern is Pretty Basic by Janina Kallio, although I didn’t follow it exactly as I randomly chose when to add the rows of eyelets.
When John was in New York in 2014, he bought me two skeins of sock yarn from Knitty City, and the yarn I used for the Election Shawl was Nooch Fibre. Hand-painted, this was inspired by Jasper John’s painting “Flag”, and in gorgeous red, blue and white colours as a result. I thought it handy that the British flag has the same colours as the American (perhaps this isn’t a coincidence??) and it seemed the right choice for a shawl started on the night where the results of our democratic rights were counted.
There were roughly 463 yards in the yarn, so the shawl is rather small and I haven’t worn it much as I’ve been favouring my larger shawls during the winter. It’s coming into its own now that the weather is warming up, and I wore it on a recent walk up to Dartmoor with John.
The yarn was really lovely to work with. Because it is a sock blend, it has nylon in it, but I didn’t want to wear it too heavily as I wasn’t sure how well it would stand up to the rigours of being a sock. When I blocked it there was absolutely no bleeding, and I think I’ll probably knit a pair of socks out of the other skein that John gave me as I am happy with the quality of the fibre and the dye to risk a pair of socks out of the other one.
I am having a love affair with shawls, and wish I had been more prolific in the past so I had more to wear now! This is why I’m currently working on the rainbow shawl I talked about last week – although I’m only allowing myself around 10 minutes of knitting per day because my hands are still suffering from RSI.
RSI is also the reason I’ve been quieter on social media and the blog recently. It hurts to type, and by spending time on the computer I’m too tempted to spend all my time on Ravelry, Twitter and the blog, which all involve loads of typing! I’m hoping that things will ease up, but I’ve also got plans to go back to the doctor. I’ll update you on how things are, but if you missed my discussion on treating it, you can find that post here.
Much love,
Corrie xx
