Knitting Dotted Rays

I started this shawl when I went to the 2018 Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival. You can find the pattern in Stephen West's book WESTKNITS BESTKNITS NUMBER 1 - SHAWLS. I picked up my copy of the book at a local yarn shop and it included a code to receive all the patterns in digital format on Ravelry. You can also find it as a single pattern on Ravelry. I love Dotted Rays. Let me tell you a a knitting story (with pictures).

I knit at breakfast.

I knit in the afternoon.

I knit in the car.

I knit in the car some more.

I knit at breakfast again.

I knit in the car. I also knit in the evening but those photos never look good.

I knit until I ran out of yarn and had to dye more to match. This is totally true and one of the best reasons to dye your own yarn. This assumes you can remember how you got that amazing color.

I knit until I had finished the darn thing. This is pre-blocking. Because you can't see the magic of blocking if you don't compare the pre-blocked shawl to the blocked shawl.

I love pulling out the last set of eyelets to make little points on this shawl. It is so much easier than trying to get a gentle curve and I think the shawl has more impact.

Blocking opens up those double yarn-overs.

Each wedge has its own color story.

I used a little over 250 grams of yarn for this shawl. I think it is a great size for a shawl. 

Loads of fabric to wrap up in. I really like the impact of this as a finished shawl. Now, I have to decide what to knit next.

Pattern: Dotted Rays by Stephen West

Carpenter's Star

This Carpenter's Star quilt was a great stash busting project.

I put this under Sew My Stash 2018 because Other than the backing fabric, I didn't buy anything to finish this project.

I pulled out all the quilting books (links at the bottom of the post) to try to figure out what to do with the quilting.

In the end it didn't end up being fancy quilting, but I think it is effective. Swirls are my favorite!

This is the back of the quilt so you can see the details of the quilting on the center star.

I finished the binding by machine (you can find my instructions on how I machine-finish binding in the side bar and on this page) because it is just so much faster. It is also getting warmer here in Maryland and I have no intention of sitting under a quilt for 4-6 hours to hand-finish binding.

Labeled, quilted, and bound.

Quilting books I have in my library and use as a reference (affiliate links to Amazon):
Free-Motion Quilting with Angela Walters
Free-Motion Quilting Idea Book by Amanda Murphy
Shape by Shape Free-Motion Quilting with Angela Walters
Shape by Shape, Collection 2: Free-Motion Quilting with Angela Walters
Free-Motion Meandering: A Beginners Guide to Machine Quilting by Angela Walters

I also love to look through Quilted Textures from A to Zen by Bethanne Nemesh. Bethanne has so many great designs that really get my my creativity moving. Her work is absolutely beautiful and recommend you check out her work.

All the Yarn!

Last week I shared about a yarn party I had at my house with a friend. Now that the yarn has dried I figured I should show you what I ended up with. All the yarn we dyed was from Knit Picks.

First up is this amazingly bright and fun yarn. This is Bare Stroll Glimmer. I haven't decided on what I'm going to do with this yarn, but I'm excited about this colorway. If I had to give it a name, it would be Poison Ivy. These were made using Jacquard dye.

These candy-colored hanks were mostly made to test colors before coloring a full hank of fingering. These are Bare Stroll Sport. I used food coloring for most of these colors. The black speckle effect was done with black food coloring. I think I'll make up small hanks (about 20 grams each) for color testing next time.

This is the first set of knitted blanks I colored. This one was done with all food color dyes. This is 200 grams of Stroll Fingering.

This was my experiment with the PAAS egg coloring kits. Two kits got me these vibrant colors.  This is 200 grams of Stroll Fingering.

The second set of knitted blanks was 300 grams of Stroll Fingering. I varied the length of the colors from one end of the set to the other. I can't wait to see how this one works up. I might make a simple half-circle shawl to show this off. 

Here is my full stack of fresh yarn. This will keep me busy for a long time. (There is a single hank of purple in there that I dyed to finish another project.)

I still have more than 10 more hanks of fingering to dye.

Shards

Last month I shared my Geodes quilt.

I had some leftovers from that quilt. I'm not a fan of leaving oddly shaped units around so I put them up on the design wall and decided I had enough leftover bits to make a crib-size quilt.

I quilted this one with a swirl-flower motif because I figured it needed something to soften up those angles.

This will be my contribution to the Baltimore Maryland Quilt Guild for our charity quit project. I just need to add the binding and it will be ready to go.

I've made some great progress on getting things finished up this year. I hope to keep the trend going.

2018 Charity Quilt Count: 29