Happy Halloween everyone. I thought I was getting out of trick or treating this year, after all, my kid is 13 and I am kind of over it now. I thought I’d let her father take that on. But, he has to work late, and she’s already arranged to meet up with friends from the old neighborhood. So, I guess I get to do the job. I’ll bring sock knitting but with the weather hovering around freezing, I suspect glove wearing will be more important than sock knitting.

Last night was very cold, and we saw the first snowflakes of the season. Nothing that reached/covered the ground by any means but they were there, flying around! I had plenty of time to look at them since the evening commute was absolutely miserable. Much stopping and sitting. Wish I’d had my knitting then! When I got home, I immediately took the dog for a walk to get that over with, it was so cold. Then put on warm, comfy pajamas and got started on the loads of laundry. It was a tiring evening but a good evening, all cozy in a warm home with my family all there. I worked on the bottom of the in progress sweater. I am not completely done yet, but I am pretty close. Then we’ll see if I can manage the sleeves.

Let’s discuss another upcoming project. I follow “theshitiknit” on instagram, and she’s running a knit along for a shawl called Rikaart Shawl. The pattern is released in weekly installments, on instagram, for free. However, it can also be purchased inexpensively on Ravelry if one prefers a proper pdf, which I do. The shawl asks for 3 colors of yarn, so I chose these out of stash:

The orange is handspun from Miss Marja, the other two are my own handspun yarns. There’s enough orange tones in the brown to make it a very good pairing, I think. And the off white is something I’d never find use for. A 2 ply yarn that is wool/silk/hemp/cotton blend. It’s got bits of brown cotton in it, and it’s quite interesting but not so well spun to be honest, because cotton is a learning curve. Anyhow, I have way more yardage of each than the pattern calls for, so I am not too worried about running out of yarn. But, I did want to see what my stitches would look like, and was eager to pair the yarn together. So I knit a swatch.

I like my chosen needle size and I think that’s what I’ll stick with. It’s such a nice harvesty color combo, it’ll be a great November knit! So, that project is lined up and ready to go.

I’ve got one other new project on the needles, which made it to work as a work project. It’s the venemous tentacula out of some of my handspun yarn. I am not doing a triangle shaped shawl, rather I quit increasing around 10 increases and will do a nice long scarf shaped thing before decreasing again. This one has been great fun! And I adore the colors of the handspun.

I am keeping this project at work because it’s a bit of a pain in the butt to work. There’s some type of casting off or casting on or knitting into backwards loop cast on stitches to do almost every row, and it grates on the nerves after awhile. So, about 1 hour per day during the week is about all I can handle. Plus, I want to keep working on that sweater!

One more thing for today, and then I am kind of out of blog photos for the time being. A few weeks ago during the most insane of my October work, I ended up arranging a yarn trade with Kathy over at Compassionknit.  When I’d remarked on the blog that I was proud of getting my sock yarn stash under control, down to 10 skeins, she offered to send me sock yarn! Which a little bit defeats the purpose and yet I am also quite grateful, as new yarn in stash is so exciting. So I agreed to this, only if I could send some handspun her way, keeping with the yarn in, yarn out of stash rules. It was agreed! And I received some lovely sock yarn in the mail, at the right time for a needed pick me up during a tough few weeks.

So there you have it. I think I am now all caught up on photos and news for this week. All of these were taken over the weekend, so now I can catch up on photos for this week, if there are any.