During the past two weeks I’ve been knitting quite a lot. After finishing the blanket, I decided to participate in the Ocean Breeze Mystery KAL that Boo Knits was organizing. You would get a new clue every 3-4 days for two weeks, and after five clues, voilà, you would have a finished lace shawl!
Mysteries are usually a bit… well… mysterious, obviously, which makes them a bit scary, too. You have no idea what the end result will be like, and whether you will even like it. This KAL had another thing going that made it a bit more scary: you needed two yarns in the same colour but with a different texture. Several dyers were offering special kits to use for this KAL, but I didn’t want to purchase new yarn for it. I decided to dig into my stash, and look for a nice combination there. Anyway, hairy yarns are way too itchy for me, so a mohair or angora was out of the question.
I found some nice combinations, but didn’t know which to choose.
So I asked some Ravelry friends what they thought. They liked the first one on the first row and the second one on the second row most. I agreed. The first one would be great because the colours are so close together. The left one is Krokus (Dutch Knitting Design) with lots of silk in it, and the right one is Black Sheep Dyeworks, mostly merino. Two different textures. The second combination consists of Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock on the left and Tausendschön Merino Extrafein on the right. Their textures are more similar (although the Tausendschön is more loosely plied), but their colours are more different.
I decided to take the risk and go for the second combination. If it didn’t work, I could always frog it and start again with different yarns, right? I chose some clear round beads with silver lining to accompany the yarns. Quite a tender and fragile combination.
After the first and second clues, I had used a lot of the darker yarn already, and a little bit of the lighter. I didn’t know if I liked it. It was not fine enough for me. The lighter yarn looked a bit creamy, and I thought that it would look better if the lighter yarn also had some sparkle in it, like stellina or angelina.
On the other hand, the design really reminded me of the beach, when the sea leaves pebbles and shells on the sand, and the edge of the water is like foam. That’s when I decided that the name of my shawl was going to be Aphrodite, the goddess that was born out of the foam of the sea…
Clue three added more waves and foam, and so did clue 4. Clue 5 was basically three more rows and the bind off, a nice short clue to finish with. The combination of yarns was also growing on me.
After finishing the final clue, I spent some time blocking the shawl in a nice way. I came up with the idea to block the points in the shape of sea stars. That would add another nice shape and texture to the shawl, of which the edging otherwise might be a bit predictable in shape.
I blocked the shawl last night, but today it was already dry! It’s really hot, so that makes sense. I took it off the blocking mats and took some more pictures. I’m very, very happy with the result!
